CHARITY SWIMS SWIM FOR GOOD
Every issue we share the stories of just some of the people who use their passion for swimming to benefi t good causes…
PANCREQUATICS CONQUER THE CHANNEL For someone who only learned to swim front crawl four years ago, swimming the Channel might seem a lit le over- ambitious, even as part of a relay team. But 41-year-old mother of two Anna Gomori, set herself just this challenge to raise money for research into the disease that claimed the life of her mother and in memory of her close friend Susan Hobbs who also died of cancer. In September, she and her team conquered the Channel. Anna, from Coton in Cambridge, has fundraised tirelessly
Dave Young's family were thrilled when he reached his target
MIND OVER MATTER As is so oſt en the case, it was personal tragedy that prompted Dave Young to take on a swimming challenge. In Young’s case, it was the suicide of a close work colleague, Davey Mac, in 2006 that inspired what he calls his 300-Mile Swim. “When Mac died, I spent months feeling angry and very low, until I decided to look at positive ways to approach mending what I felt was lost,” he remembers. Open water swimming wasn’t the obvious choice – Young could barely swim 100m when he started training in 2009; his last memory of outdoor swimming was jumping off a boat when he was fi ve – but it somehow seemed fi t ing. “It was my son Jack who fi rst came up with the idea,” he says. “I mentioned to the family I was considering taking part in an open water swim at Ullswater. Jack calculated that the distance there and back from our home was approximately 300 miles.” From this, the 43-year-old’s plan was born, the aim was to clock up 299 miles in training and complete the 300th mile in last year’s Great North Swim. He trained hard and made good progress, however the planned 300th mile nearly didn’t happen, when blue- green algae cancelled the 2010 Great North Swim. Determined not to be thwarted, Young went to an unaff ected part of the lake and swam the mile alone, just watched by his family and that of Davey Mac. “It was a very emotional moment,” says Young. Since then Young has carried on swimming, fi nding it a great stress reliever, and has plans to take on greater challenges. Meanwhile, his friend Tor Bruce is making a documentary about Young’s swimming, his fundraising activities for the mental-health charity, MIND, and bipolar disorder, which caused Mac to take his own life. The documentary will be available on DVD in 2012 and proceeds from its sale will go to MIND. For more on the work of MIND, visit
mind.org.uk
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for the Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund (PCRF) over the past few months, raising more than £10,000 to date. She aims to raise £50,000 to help support vital research projects around the UK to fi nd new treatments for this cancer, which has the worst survival statistics of all common cancers. Just three in every 100 people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer will be alive aſt er fi ve years – and this fi gure hasn’t improved for four decades. For her relay, Anna pulled together a team of fi ve friends and strangers – dubbed the Pancrequatics – to take on the famous 21-mile swim. Zoggs provided the team with hats and goggles, and they started training.
“I got into swimming while pregnant with my second baby and I loved it, and would regularly swim around three miles a week. Then when my older son was having swimming lessons, I found out that his coach, Ed Williams, swam the Channel when he was just 18, and this sparked the idea.” “Pancreatic cancer is in the top fi ve cancer killers, yet there’s just not enough research being done and survival is so low,” says Anna. “I’m aiming high. I want to make a diff erence.” To give money to Anna’s appeal visit
justgiving.com/Anna- Gomori-Woodcock or for more information visit
pcrf.org.uk
The Pancrequatics pose before their successful relay
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