A TAMESIDE woman has put in the miles to raise funds in the name of a teenage family friend by swimming the ‘English Channel.’
Jo Priest has completed 1,352 lengths of two local swimming pools, which is the same 21-mile distance as the stretch between the UK and France.
And she has raised almost £2,500 – much more than her initial target – for the charity Maisie Moo’s Missions with her seven-day effort.
Jo, who comes from Hyde, did the swim in memory of 14-year-old Maisie Almond, who died on October 2 when an organ transplant could not be found just 17 days after sudden acute liver failure.
Heartbroken parents, Kathryn and Stuart, from Stalybridge, have since founded Maise Moo’s Missions to make the life-saving process of donating blood and organs more accessible and to ensure ‘Maisie’s light continues to shine through helping others.’
After setting a target of £500, Jo, completed 220 lengths of Active Tameside’s Denton pool within two-and-a-half hours each day for six days, completing the challenge with 32 lengths of Active Tameside’s Hyde pool.
She then finished the feat with a two-and-a-half-minute artistic swimming routine to ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ by The Smiths – one of Maisie’s all-time favourites – cheered on by daughter Hannah, who edited the music to fit the routine.
“I was very emotional at the end,” said mum-of-two Jo. “I said to Kathryn, ‘I’m pleased that I’ve done it, but I would much rather not have to do it – that we just had our Maisie back with us.’
“I’d like to say a big thank you for everybody’s generosity. It’s just such an amazing thing that Kathryn and Stuart are trying to do out of something so awful.
“We need people to support this as much as they can. Maisie was everything good in the world – we should all be a little bit more Maisie.”
Jo, a teacher at Hyde’s Dowson Primary Academy, first struck up her friendship with Kathryn, when she was on work experience at a bank in Manchester 30 years ago.
Over the years the pair met their respective husbands, and both had children around the same time – Jo and husband Steven welcoming Thomas and Hannah, while Kathryn and Stuart had George and Maisie.
“Steven and Stuart have become really close friends too,” Jo added. “We’ve been on holiday together, we’ve all been skiing together.
“We spend a lot of time together, so the impact it’s had at our house as well as on Kathryn, Stuart and George is immense.
“Maisie and Hannah were best friends. In fact, they were more than that, they saw each other as family. They had all sorts of future plans together and Hannah feels some of that’s been taken away from her.
“I wanted to show her that something good needed to come out of something so tragic and that’s what inspired me to do the swim.”
Jo, a synchronised swimmer until she was 17, started training for her marathon in February, signing up for an Active Tameside swimming membership and taking to the water before and after work, joined on occasions by mum Lynne and several friends.
Now it has led to her competing again at a high level.
She recalled: “The hardest part of all of this physically, was when I first started training, because I knew I wouldn’t have an infinite amount of time to do this
“When I first got in the pool, I was managing only to do a mile and it was taking me 50 minutes, so I had to get my speed up.
“It was also hard when I did those first 220 lengths. I got out of the pool and thought, ‘Yikes, I’ve got another six days of this.’ It seemed a really, really long way.
“I thought to myself, I know why I took up synchronised swimming, because lane swimming for that distance can be mind-numbingly boring, but I had a very good audio book and waterproof headphones that helped to kept me going.
“I had 23 years off synchronised swimming. I got back in pool when I was 40, when I competed with the Denton Artistic Swimming Club’s masters squad – then Covid stopped play.
“But now, after all this, I’ve ended up competing again and I’m doing the nationals at Ponds Forge in Sheffield in July.”
If you would like to sponsor Jo, visit her JustGiving page: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/joanne-priest?utm_medium=CR&utm_source=CL