Masters’ swimmer has overcome hurdles to set world records

By Louise Rachlis
Many in Ottawa know Lynn Marshall from her long experience as head coach at the Carleton University Masters Swimming club, and from her presence on the pool deck at the Early Bird Triathlon giving the 10 second signal to “go” into the water.
Others admire the six-foot-tall blonde swimmer as a masters’ record holder recently inducted into the International Masters Swimming Hall of Fame. She has been among the world’s top 10 masters swimmers every year and she has set 11 long course and 30 short course world records from 1986 to 2011.
But behind those records the Carleton computer engineering professor’s tale is one of adversity overcome, of discipline and perseverance.
On July 25th, 1993, in her third season as a triathlete, Lynn was doing the Kingston Triathlon. She was the first out of the water, and heading out on her bike behind the lead police car when a driver unexpectedly pulled out and stopped in front of her, causing her to crash into him.
Her bike was in pieces, and accompanied by fellow triathlete Rudy Hollywood, she was taken to hospital, where to her dismay she overhead a resident say, “She used to be a swimmer.”
She was x-rayed through her mouth and elsewhere, the x-rays were misread, and she was released and just told she’d be sore for a few days.
With only a bathing suit to wear, she put on some hospital scrubs borrowed by Rudy, and found someone to drive her car most of the way home. Then she stopped at the pharmacy for painkillers, with her hair still full of blood, and made what turned out to be an erroneous call to her parents to say that she was okay.
On the following Monday she didn’t go to work because she was picking up a new car. She arrived back home to a ringing telephone: The hospital in Kingston had re-read the x-rays, and she’d wrongly been sent home with a broken neck. She was advised to go straight to the hospital in Ottawa.
It was summer, and the hospital was on half-staff; it took six hours to admit her and finally do more tests. A CAT scan and x-rays revealed a Jefferson fracture of the C1, the same area of fracture that happened to Christopher Reeve the following year.
She called her parents back and told them she wasn’t okay after all. They drove to Ottawa from Winnipeg to see her during her week in the hospital.
Because her ligament was in good shape, she was able to wear a lighter aluminum neck brace instead of a halo, but she had to wear it for three months. “Sleeping was the worst.”
Nevertheless, after her accident, she went right back to her regular routine, at the same time of day. She couldn’t swim, but still did water running and poolside stretches and the stationary bike. “Not to do it would have been harder. My goal was always to get back to swimming. It never occurred to me not to try.”
There was still a long way to go. “I felt as if the brace were still on when I finally got it off,” she says. ““I’ll never have the same mobility I had before, but things could have turned out much worse so I’m grateful.”
The year before her accident she’d had a spectacular swim at the 1992 Master’s Worlds in Indianapolis. Less than a year afterward, she was in Montreal swimming for the Worlds again. “I was glad to be there swimming, but it was upsetting to hear comments that I wasn’t swimming very well, when they didn’t know what had happened.”
She still sees a chiropractor ever month or so. “The first six months the mobility was coming back, and then I reached a plateau. Now it’s not perfect, but it’s not too bad. I can swim. I get tight, but everyone gets tight.”

The part-time professor in Carleton University’s department of systems and computer engineering swims herself with the Ravens of Carleton Swimming triathlon group and the Carleton University swim team.
With a doctorate in formal methods of software engineering, she teaches one or two programming courses a term. Her students call her Dr. Marshall or Prof. Her swimmers call her Lynn.
She usually swims in the morning before she coaches her first class at 7:30 a.m. “It works out nicely, because it’s one trip to the pool.”
Over the years she has also found time for other pastimes such as trapeze and judo.
The interest in trapeze began when in 2003 six women from the Carleton Masters team went on holiday together to the Dominican Republic. There was a flying trapeze at the resort, and Lynn was entranced.
For a year afterward she took the bus to and from Montreal on Friday nights once a month to attend the closest trapeze school to Ottawa.
She also has a black belt in judo, an interest which began in England in grad school, and ended quite a few years later after it became exhausting to do the judo after a long swim workout.
In 1999 she had another set-back, with a pinched nerve called Brachial Neuritis and couldn’t move her arm for a week. It took months to get her swimming back to normal and she had to build the muscle back up. One bicep is still smaller.
This summer she was away from swimming for three weeks with cataract surgery, and it took her six weeks to feel better in the water again.
Most of the time she loves swimming, “and other days you feel you’re flogging a dead horse.” Because she trains with younger swimmers, she is aware that at age 50 it takes her longer to recover for a tough workout session.
For her 50th birthday she joined her sister in Las Vegas. “We did so much walking that I felt a lot older than 50,” she laughs. “But with any age group competition, milestone birthdays are less traumatic. I set higher expectations for myself when I enter a new age category.”
Her own experience gives her insight into the varied motivations of the swimmers she coaches. The coaching training she learned the most from was a segment called “why different people do sports.”
Some want the team atmosphere; others need goal setting such as attendance milestones, she says. “Decide what your goals are – social, cross-training, competition in master’s swimming. People know what motivates them. I try to make it so everyone has something they can aim for. As a coach, you want your people to have stress relief and some exercise.”


A large part of sport success is scheduling, she says. “Some people are there in class all the time, some are there so rarely that I forget their names. The more regular you are with your training, the more satisfying it is. Whatever sport you’re in, find something that fits into your schedule well. If it doesn’t fit, it’s not going to happen. You have to find a way to go.”