Michelle puts her troubles aside with English Channel swim

Crossing the English Channel wasn’t really on champion SA swimmer’s Michelle Weber’s bucket list.

Friday is almost two months to the day that she rose up from the chilly waters off the French coast, emerging with a national women’s record of 10hr 21 min.

But looking back after her 32km swim between the two nations and it’s almost as if SA’s own version of fictional character Aquagirl had been channelling her own angst for these past two years.

The entire planet has had a rough time of recent things in this period, and Weber’s woes were particularly difficult, describing it as “a crazy couple of years”.

“I’m not going to lie ... the last few years have been rough,” the softly spoken 24-year-old said this week. “It started with the loss of my mom, Magdalena, in early 2020 and then we dived straight into the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I was training hard for the 2020 Olympics, then they were postponed a year, so I had to adjust everything for that as well. I was also coaching myself so pressure just kept building up.”

She eventually got to 2021’s delayed Olympics in Tokyo, where she struggled in the unfamiliarly high sea temperature and personally things reached a boiling point.

“After Tokyo I just hit a huge low point ... I was still motivated but had absolutely zero energy and could barely get out of bed each day ... it was incredibly hard. So I just took a huge break while I started a little side-business for myself.”

Already having gone through the trauma of being operated on for tachycardia, a heart condition in 2014, Weber dealt with life incrementally. “I just forced myself to deal with things bit by bit, telling myself to rise above things, whether it was a ‘centimetre’ higher than the previous day. It almost became part of my training.”

Late 2022 though finds Weber rising above life’s troubled waters. “If I look back now, I’m 50 times stronger than the person I was a year ago.”

Looking back at the Channel swim and she says it was never really on her to-do list. “I just met a bunch of people planning on doing it. It’s not an impulsive thing and the waiting list can be more than two years but a slot suddenly came up and I started training for it.”

The hours of training helped her head immensely as she immersed herself in as many as 10 swims of 8km each per week.

“Leading up to the swim from England I was just a bundle of nerves but strangely, once I got on to the boat, the nerves just seemed to drain away and were replaced by excitement. Suddenly I felt like I could have swum for three days if need be... even the guys on the pilot boat said I swam the first half with a smile on my face.”

The second half saw more grimaces than grins and she started putting her newfound fortitude to good use. “I’d just think about previous rough patches in my life and how I had got through them. I prayed a lot, and thought about my mom and dad.

“I’d gone into the swim with thoughts about getting the SA record but ended up stoked at still getting the women’s record, though it was close — by about eight minutes after more than 10 hrs of swimming.”

Open-water swimming comes with many fears but Weber is always well aware of what she’s getting into — literally. “Of course, huge waves are scary, so we have to take weather into account and I’m not going to get into really rough water.

“Jellyfish don’t bother me as you’re usually able to push them away from you and you know if you get stung it’s usually only once and then the pain goes away quickly. Sharks are always there or thereabout and I’ll steer clear of areas known to have dangerous sharks and always swim with a pilot boat and shark shield.”

Now back in her Boland base of Franschhoek, Weber puts her spare time into building her Wave Works open-water training app and heads into the Mother City once a week for her Share-A-Lane project where she helps up-and-coming swimmers of all ages and abilities.

Still on that bucket list are the 2024 Paris Olympics which will be her third iteration of the Games. “It’s going to be tough again in terms of keeping up with my international counterparts. Unless it’s close to the Olympics we get just a trickle of national funding and have to pay our own way to world championships but I’m up for it.”

Open-water swimming is by and large a solo, lonely sport but even on terra firma, Weber opts for solo and tranquil timeouts. “I still like to be in quiet spaces and am perfectly happy to sit at home watching TV, or reading a book, or lying on the beach.

“But lately my older sister, Melissa, and I have been doing a bit of hunting for good cafes around Cape Town — and more specifically cake-hunting — in our spare time,” she laughs.

Less than two years out from Paris, and Weber will be hoping she hits her own sweet-spot in the waters of the Seine River as the Olympics feature their first point-to-point open-water swim in 124 years.