Time to travel...

Kaylynn and I are meeting in BC later this week. Exciting stuff! I’m flying home from Ontario on Tuesday, and Kaylynn is driving from Calgary to BC on Wednesday. I’m looking forward to getting in the ocean water later this week, although it’s going to be mighty chilly. Still looking for a wetsuit… hopefully I will have one in hand soon. Kaylynn has done her first open water swim session… let’s just say it’s going to be an adventure trying to stay in the water for over 8 hours in July! We have time to get adjusted to the open water, but it’s going to be a chilly swim!

Thank-you to everyone who has donated so far to the cause through the Canadian Cancer Society and through Indiegogo! We really appreciate it. We’re still trying to come up with more fundraising ideas. I’m hoping to have a booth set up in one of the malls in Victoria for when we’re not swimming or eating or sleeping. Hopefully we can get t-shirts or something, and who knows… There may even be free food!

Free food = best

Next time we blog it will be from Victoria – can’t wait!

Caryn

June Update!

Wow, I can’t believe its June already. Time is flying by! My training is ramping up leading to when Kaylynn and I are going to meet in Victoria to start training in open water. My search for a good wet suit continues. I’ve found a few good ones, I’m just nervous to commit to one….

E-bay does have some decent deals... still can't commit to it.

They’re just so expensive

Oh, student budgets....

Kaylynn and I both arrive in Victoria June 24^th, so we’ll hopefully be able to get into open water swimming right away. Kaylynn flies back to Canada on June 10th I believe. Safe travels!!

I’ve been trying to set up our Indiegogo account, finally got it up and running yesterday! For anyone who doesn’t know what Indiegogo is (I didn’t): it’s a sort of crowdsourcing fundraising website where you can help raise money for your fundraiser. In our case, we obviously want people to donate to the cause through the Canadian Cancer Society. However, we need funds for the actual event itself. We need money for fuel, wetsuits and lifesaving equipment. All of these things are expensive and although we have a lot of people willing to donate their time like our lovely yacht Captain and our Lifeguards/paramedic friends, we can’t ask them to pay out of pocket for all of the equipment they need to help us. Indiegogo should be able to help us with these expenses.

The catch to this Indiegogo business is that you need a bank account to put it into, so I went to TD to open a non-profit business account. TD was wonderful and very helpful, but it took about 5 days to activate the account. I felt really important after I set up the account though - I'm the Chairperson. Probably the first and last time I will ever get to say those words! After that, you need to register for either credit card payments or paypal payments (or both). In order to open a paypal account, you need the bank account. In order to set up the paypal account with the Indiegogo page, the paypal account needs to be verified. I thought this process would take a week, maybe 7 business days. Unfortunately I was wrong a vastly underestimated the complexity of this process. I'm happy to report that I managed to get it up and running with minimal blood, sweat, and tears! Hopefully we can start getting some funds to help with our expenses.

Speaking of next week, it’s my convocation! Hurray!

Although hopefully I'm not like Sean Bean, because he dies in everything.

Looking forward to it. Going to be tricky balancing hours of swimming and weight training with family time, eating, sleeping and celebrating. Unfortunately I don’t think I can rely on my usual strategy

Not ALWAYS how I roll... but sometimes. My time-management strategy is a work in progress.

Until next time,

Caryn

Indiegogo!

Just launched our Indiegogo page, check it out! Funds raised through this campaign will help with the costs of the event, and anything left over will be donated directly to the Canadian Cancer Society.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/waves-for-women/

May!

Oh hey!

Kaylynn left on May 8 for Tanzania – so exciting!

Super jealous!

Hopefully she’ll have access to internet… but most likely won’t have time to blog, so it will just be me for the next while. I’m still doing biology things….

It's sad how close to the truth this is...

…. And swimming a lot!

Let's be serious, what I actually do is eat everything.... after swimming.... for hours....

Pretty sure all of the guards know who I am. Most of the stuff is in order for the swim- I just need to find a wet suit. And we’re still working on a launch site, which hopefully we will figure out soon enough.

After Tanzania Kaylynn and I will meet in Victoria around late June to start training on the open water together before the swim in July.

I realized last night when I was going through my various email accounts that we didn’t thank some of our donors! Thanks to Jacky, Keith and Renée Rogers for your generous donation. We really appreciate it and I apologize for how long it took to post our thanks.

On the topic of donations: Does anyone want t-shirts? I have a design in mind and if we get enough interest I am happy to put in an order. If you want to know what it looks like beforehand I can post more info, but if you are interested, please send us an email! waves4women@gmail.com

Til next time,

Caryn

Things are Starting to Fall into Place

Hello everyone!

We had to take a long hiatus from blogging because both of our semesters got a bit hectic. 

Turns out 4th year of university is busy! Who would have thought.

This is how we have both felt this semester, and now we are!

The training plan is ramping up and Kaylynn and I have been spending many hours in the pool 

each week. I’m still working on finding a wetsuit to help me bear the chilly waters of the straight. We’re working on finding launching and landing sites. As of now it looks like we’ll be landing in Pipers Lagoon in Nanaimo, but as for a launch site we’re not 100% sure where we want to start from. 

We have a few more people we would like to thank as they’re going to be donating their time 

and money to help us out. Trevor Vestad is our lovely lifeguard/paramedic/safety-man-extraordinaire who is going to follow us all day, swim a bit with us, and hopefully rescue us if we get into trouble. He  has all of this fancy equipment to help save us – here’s to hoping he doesn’t need to use it! 

Seeing as it’s a bit far to swim unaccompanied across the Strait of Georgia, we need a boat! 

Instead of finding a boat, we found a lovely man named Hugh McGillivray who has a yacht he is going to captain for us. Thank-you so much for helping us gentlemen! Your help is invaluable.

Kaylynn and I have also discussed the training plan and weather conditions a bit more. We are 

still going to train as if we are swimming the full distance side by side (so we would both train to swim 35km), barring any serious conditions arising. We both have struggled at times keeping up with the training plan, and Kaylynn has an amazing opportunity to go to Tanzania for a month which means she won’t have any specific training facilities. Lack of training makes completing the swim difficult, however we are both confident we will be able to complete it. The bigger concern is weather, which unfortunately we have no control over. If there are serious weather conditions on July 19th swim date), then we may switch to a relay style. We would both launch from the beach together and swim the first 5km, along with Trevor if he feels like getting his feet wet (get it? Hehe), and then we will alternate swimming 5km each, and then we will swim into the landing beach together as well. Optimistically we should be able to swim the entire thing but weather is incredibly unpredictable and uncontrollable. Hopefully the conditions will be favourable that day!

Until next time,

Caryn

The YMCA

Last week, as Caryn mentioned, I had a medical school interview at Virginia Common Wealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Because I was there for two days I got to do some site seeing in this beautiful and historic city, and I also got swim at "the Y" for the first time in my life. Up until last week, I had never swam at a YMCA before, so it was a unique experience, especially because this YMCA was particularly old and located on historic Franklin St. It was also the smallest pool and most ghetto prison shower that I have ever experienced. On the upside, they had water zumba while I was swimming, so at least I had some good jams.

Other than being behind in school (like every 4th year) I am enjoying the time in the pool. I am also eating a lot (maybe not 6 dinners like Caryn), but that is what comes with training.

I though you might like to see some photos of Richmond, VA instead of reading a rambling post for a change (also because I need to head to the pool soon and I don't have time to write anymore).

Statue of George Washington outside the State Capitol

Virginia State Capitol, originally built in 1778 By Thomas Jefferson

Original House of Delegates

The YMCA I swam in twice while I was there

The hotel I stayed in called the Linden Row Inn. Doesn't look like it could be affordable on a student budget does it? Well, it was! I also found out while reading a guest book that the room I stayed in was haunted...probably why it was affordable. 

The historic Jefferson Hotel. This was not student budget friendly.

Just an average street in Richmond

'Merica Y'all

Good advice from the bottom a fence post. 

For all my Canadian friends in the throws of -20 weather, Virginia has green grass.

Until next time,

Kaylynn

First Full Week!

Hello!!!!

 

Apologies for the late post. I usually aim for Monday but this week has been a tad hectic. Over a full week on Ali’s training plan and I am ready to eat as much as a small village and I feel like my shoulder muscles are going to rip all of my nice shirts. On one hand I feel kind of awesome and like I could take on the world, but on the other hand… I’d be too tired L Kaylynn and I area finally back to full training (or as close as my fitness will allow, as some of the workouts are definitely putting me through my paces!) and Kaylynn had her first med school interview this week – hurray! Sorry to spoil the news. Exciting stuff! I finalized my grant and scholarship applications for grad school…. After I ate all 6 of my dinners on Thursday night. Thanks again to Ali – this training plan is really above and beyond what I could have hoped, and on top of being invaluable it was a huge personal contribution and I really appreciate it as this cause is very near and dear to my heart. I also want to say thank-you to Cheyney, for our fantastic logo!! Looks awesome! I feel like we're even more official now J

I’m excited for what’s ahead, although it does seem like a daunting task. I was re-assured this morning when one of the guys I see at the pool every morning told me I had an ‘efficient’ stroke. Speed might have made me feel better but I’ll take anything I can get, especially because he seemed genuinely nice and wasn’t creepy about giving me a compliment J Thank-you kind stranger!

So. Much. Food.

Until next time,

Caryn