Raising money for Canuck Place Hospice by swimming more than 60 hours

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Jill Yoneda’s mother wanted her to be a figure skater, but Jill always preferred her water in liquid form, not ice.

“I thought that figure skating was super boring,” Yoneda said from her home in Victoria. “My mom didn’t understand why swimming laps wasn’t boring, but I was a competitive swimmer by the age of seven.”

On Aug. 9, the ultramarathon swimmer and former record-breaking member of the Canadian freediving team will embark on a swim route across the Salish Sea that no one has previously attempted, as far as she knows.

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The 109-kilometre route from Brentwood Bay, through Sampson Narrows and Porlier Pass, and ending at Jericho Beach, will take more than 50 hours. It is Yoneda’s second charity swim to raise money for Canuck Place Children’s Hospice, after she swam 76 kilometres in 2018.

Her mother had almost drowned as a child and made sure her three children took swimming lessons early.

“I was swimming before I could walk,” Yoneda said. “I’m 50 years old, so I thought I would double my age and swim at least 100 kilometres this time.”

That Yoneda today is embarking on this ultra-distance swim is remarkable given what she has been through.

She has had at least 22 surgeries, has degenerative disc disease, foot drop syndrome in her left leg, compartment syndrome, popliteal artery entrapment, and, most recently, slipping rib — a condition in which her ribs can pop out of place during heavy exertion.

The irony of being the daughter of an orthopedic surgeon hasn’t escaped her.

“You know how they say the cobbler’s kids go without shoes?” Yoneda said. “I’ve had every orthopedic problem in the book.”

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It all started in her early 20s with foot drop that required six surgeries, when doctors told her she would never walk without a cane, which made her determined to overcome it. Today, she hikes without a cane, not to mention swimming across channels.

She quit competitive swimming and became a master scuba diver until she suffered the bends, after which doctors found a small hole in her heart.

Freediving, however, does not rely on compressed air, so she began a six-year stint with the national team, with personal bests of 5:35 without breathing in a “dead-man” float, descending to 200 feet without oxygen tanks, and swimming 150 metres before coming up for a gulp of air.

Then in 2011, she began suffering neck pain. Her father looked at an X-ray and said her spine resembled that of an 80-year-old.

Unwilling to have her discs fused, she convinced Victoria surgeon Dr. John Sun to perform what at the time was almost experimental surgery to install two titanium discs in her upper spine.

As soon as she awoke from surgery the pain was gone, and she was back competing three months later — only to have another disc deteriorate.

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That was the end of freediving, and she became depressed.

But she remembers one day standing at the park off Dallas Road in Victoria, looking across at Port Angeles, and thinking it didn’t actually look too far away.

“So I kind of swam it without any real training or coaching,” she said.

It took her 10-1/2 hours.

“And it was terrible. I mean, I literally crawled out and looked like a monster coming out of the sea.”

She wound up in hospital with hypothermia.

“It was really hard, but once I recovered from that I was piqued and wanted to explore (ultra-distance swimming) more.”

Well, more was to come. Her ribs had always made clicking noises since she was little, and they began to slip over each other on her left side during the heavy exertion of long swims.

Victoria’s Dr. John Samphire removed two. But her right-side ribs began popping out, too, and Samphire said it would expose too many organs to remove a third rib.

So she puts up with the searing pain when it happens, using her right elbow to push her ribs back in place during downstrokes.

Why does she do it?

Other than a love of being in the ocean, to keep alive the memory of her cousin Joshua Yoneda, who died in May, 2022, of a rare form of cancer called DIPG, which attacks the brain stem, during his final year of medicine at UBC.

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And for Canuck Place, where she worked as a nursing student when she was younger.

“I did a practicum with them when I was younger, and I’m overwhelmed by the services they provide to children and their families in B.C. and the Yukon,” Yoneda said.

She didn’t realize it at the time, but the hospice relies on fundraisers to cover a majority of its costs.

“I wasn’t lucky enough in my lifetime to have children of my own, so this is kind of my way of giving back to children and their families.”

To donate to her fundraising swim for Canuck Place, go to https://my.canuckplace.org/fundraiser/2198984.

gordmcintyre@postmedia.com

twitter.com/gordmcintyre

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