Lou Swartz pushed through Adelaide, Australia, a week or so ago and has her sights set on Perth.
She will eventually get there one stroke, one lap at a time. With her flippers and fortitude, the 86-year-old is swimming around the world — well, sort of.
“When I got to 10,000 miles, one of my friends gave me a map,” Lou says. “And I’ve been charting on it how far my swimming has taken me since I started back in 1985.”
She was at 11,290 miles last week when she pulled herself out of the pool at the South Bend Kroc Center. She swims a mile a day, six days a week, and smells like chlorine 365 days of the year.
What are her goals? Maybe a tidy 15,000 miles? “I may not live that long,” she says with a smile.
Ironically, when Lou was growing up, she could only dog-paddle. She did finally take swim lessons in college. But she didn’t start swimming — and counting her miles — until 1985 at the South Bend YMCA. “When I first started, I was only swimming about a half mile a week,” she recalls. “Up to that point, I really didn’t exercise that much.”
When she retired from the South Bend Medical Foundation in 2002, she picked up her pace. The Swimming Swartz or Lap Happy Lou would have been appropriate nicknames.
After the YMCA closed a few years ago, she joined the Kroc and has continued to lengthen the line on her map. “The Y used to have 50-mile cards, part of the Red Cross Swim for Life program,” she says. “When it closed, I had just started a new card and made copies of it so I could still use them.”
Lou admits she never learned how to breaststroke, let alone butterfly, and the freestyle is getting tougher and tougher as she ages. Most of her laps now are either on her back or behind a kickboard.
But she moves smoothly and still pretty quickly throughout the water — almost as fast as she moves on land. She had to take some time off for a hip replacement and is still using a cane. She also says her one knee isn’t what it should be.
“My last 1,000 miles took a little longer than those before it,” she adds,“ partly because of Covid restrictions and then a couple of operations.”
Lou knows the number of swimmers in the pool will increase when the New Year’s Resolutions are made in the next couple of weeks. But by the spring, it will be back to just the dedicated swimmers like herself. “When I hit 11,000 miles, I was the only one in the pool,” she laughs.
Swimming is in her blood.
And speaking of blood, Lou has given blood 236 times over the years and is only four donations away from making it to 30 gallons.
“Thirty gallons of blood and 11,000 miles of swimming — I guess those are pretty good numbers,” she says.
Add another impressive number — her 86 years (87 in March) — and it all adds up to a pretty impressive life.
Contact Bill at [email protected]