Two-time cancer survivor plans fundraising swim from Grand Beach to Gimli

Jon Fenton remembers being at Victoria Beach as a child, thinking it would be impossible to swim from one side of Lake Winnipeg to the other.

Decades later, the 61-year-old will attempt to prove he was wrong by tackling the waves to raise money for medical research.

Fenton successfully battled cancer twice and now wants to use the 26-kilometre swim across the lake to give patients hope.

“If they see an old geezer getting into the water to attempt to cross a lake, maybe they’ll think, ‘If he can go through it twice, maybe I’ll be all right,’” he told the Free Press Thursday.

Fenton hopes to raise $75,000 and donate $25,000 apiece to the CancerCare Manitoba Foundation, Health Sciences Centre Foundation and the Alberta Cancer Foundation.

While living in Japan with his wife Laura and three children in 1999, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma a type of cancer that targets white blood cells and the body’s immune system. The family decided to return to Manitoba, where he was treated at Health Sciences Centre.

After undergoing treatment, he was cancer-free for 20 years, but it returned in 2020 when he was living in Diamond Valley, 40 kilometres south of Calgary.

“I thought ‘Well, I’ve had a nice 20-year run, but definitely this has got to be game over,’” he said.

But he qualified for a stem-cell transplant in Calgary that eliminated all signs of the disease.

When he celebrated his fifth-year anniversary last year for kicking his second bout, he wanted to do something to give back so research can continue discovering new treatments.

“We’re far from done. Let’s keep it going. Let’s get the next big breakthrough, and the next one, and the next one. We can’t really give up,” he said.

Fenton got the idea for the fundraiser when he and his wife watched a 2023 film Nyad, which told the story of Diana Nyad’s multiple attempts — the fifth, in 2013 at the age of 64, taking 53 hours was ultimately successful — to swim from Cuba to Florida.

While he’s previously competed in triathlons and swam up to four kilometres in races, getting across Lake Winnipeg from Grand Beach to Gimli will be a far bigger challenge, he said, adding he started training for the swim in January 2024 and has since racked up 176 kilometres in total.

He said there are parallels to be drawn between the challenge to come and the health journeys he’s travelled: when someone begins cancer treatment, it’s difficult to stay positive because of the toll it takes both physically and mentally.

Taking the process week by week has helped him — then and now; if he tried to think about the treatment or the 26-kilometre swim in their entirety, he couldn’t “wrap his mind around it,” he said.

“It’s easy to say, hard to do, but it helps. Just bite off little chunks and then you’re through your cancer treatment, and hopefully I’m on the other side of the lake,” he said. “It’s a long game, hang tough and take it week by week.”

Fenton is hoping to jump in the lake between Aug. 2 and 12, but it will depend on how much wildfire smoke is lingering in the air, weather conditions on the lake and the severity of blue-green algae blooms, which have caused significant environmental damage and produce toxins that pose severe health risks.

If conditions don’t allow him to attempt the feat, he said he’ll take another crack next year.

“I don’t want to be a new verse in an Alanis Morissette song: ‘isn’t it ironic/don’t you think?/a two-time cancer survivor/expires in the drink,’” Fenton sang with a laugh.

“I don’t want that verse coming out.”

Others have successfully made it across Lake Winnipeg. Friends Jacques Marcoux and Patrick Peacock were the last to successfully try it, completing a 31-kilometre swim from Victoria Beach to Gimli in about 14 hours in August 2011.

In August 1955, 20-year-old Kathie McIntosh became the first to swim across, making her way from Grand Marais to Winnipeg Beach in a little more than 16½ hours.

matthew.frank@freepress.mb.ca