Overcoming The Odds
Perhaps she was just too determined. Halli Reid looks back on what motivated her to become the first woman to swim across Lake Erie on that August day in 1993. She was 21, and her college swim coach was just one of many people telling her she couldn’t do it.
“He said I was too young, that women don’t reach their optimum endurance fitness level until they’re in their 30s.” she recalls. “I cried over that meeting.”
There were others. The guys she worked with that summer in her father’s lumber yard scoffed at her ambition. When she contacted the man who prepared Bob North and Harvey Snell for their swim across Lake Erie, he took one look at her 5 foot 2 inch frame and abruptly said, “I thought you’d be bigger.”
“He said he couldn’t help me,” says Halli, recalling the rejection.
Ironically, North and Snell were part of what motivated her to make the historic swim. She remembers sitting on the beach with her sister, Sarah, in 1989 waiting for the two men to swim in from Canada.
“I was really caught up in the emotion and excitement of it,” Halli explains. “The suspense was awesome, and then, finally, we saw these tiny little specks on the horizon. They made it, and they were so intense, proud, exhausted,” says Halli. “I was inspired.”
At breakfast later that morning, she looked at her sister and said, “I could do that.” It wasn’t the first time her sister would become an accomplice to Halli’s strong will and determination.
The tiny blonde Reid girls were still in preschool when they would take their little wooden rowboat straight out into the lake. While the family lived in North East, Pennsylvania, a mere mile from the shore, they spent every summer living in a two-room cottage on the beach.
“All the fishermen knew us,” Halli says, “and as we passed them they’d wave, then radio my dad and tell him where we were. When we’d gone far enough, my dad would have one of the guys tell us it was time to turn around and row home.”
Halli remembers rowing that boat until they could no longer see the shoreline. Then she’d say to her sister, “Let’s row to Canada!” Of course, the fishermen sent them home before they could make it to Canada, but the thought of such an adventure was firmly planted in Halli’s mind.
When she was 11, Halli’s dad bought a 16-foot Boston Whaler and she spent hours on the craft, sometimes alone, in love with the lake and with the peace it brought her. As she grew older she spent summers swimming competitively, coaching younger kids, and lifeguarding at Freeport Beach. She graduated from Penn State in 1991 and, despite the naysayers, began immediately training to swim across Lake Erie.
During the next year Halli got up at 4:30 a.m. six days a week to swim. She swam every night for another three hours. No amount of training, however, could overcome the facts.
“I trained to make the swim in 1992,” Halli explains, “but the lake was too cold that year. Plus, my doctor told me that I’d have to gain a lot more weight if I wanted to make it. I was disappointed, but I had no choice.”
The postponement meant another year of grueling training. It also meant gaining 20 pounds, which wasn’t easy for the petite swimmer. By the summer of 1993, Halli was ready, and so was Lake Erie. But the window of opportunity to swim across Lake Erie would be small—from late July through August 10, when the lake temperatures and winds would be optimal.
“We started observing lake conditions about mid-July,” Halli says. “My team had to be on 24-hour notice, in case the weather looked right. It was nervewracking watching and waiting.”
Finally, on the afternoon of August 8, 1993, Halli and her team got into their boats and headed across the lake to Long Point, Ontario. She was about to make the 26-mile swim back home. “The swim started out great,” Halli remembers, “then about midnight I got really cold. I was feeling miserable, but my brother told me I was already half way, so I thought since I had already made it that far, I could keep going.”
Her brother had lied to her, but it worked. Halli continued. About 4 a.m. her shoulder started to hurt. At 5 a.m. the winds picked up and kept pushing her off course. “The end of the swim was the hardest,” recalls Halli. “I don’t even remember swimming the last mile.”
Those who watched her walk onto Freeport Beach at 10:30 a.m. on August 9, however, vividly remember it. Her parents and the kids she coached in swim club were there, along with dozens of spectators. She had lost 19 pounds in the 17 hours it took her to make the swim.
“I don’t remember anything that happened on the beach,” Halli says. “I do remember being home and trying unsuccessfully to eat a sub. Then I went to sleep for two days.” She was so sore she couldn’t dress herself for two weeks.
Walking along Freeport Beach today, Halli lists those after her who swam across Lake Erie. She would rather talk about their accomplishments than her own, but there’s no ignoring the plaque declaring the area as “ Halli Reid Park,” or the fact that August 9 was designated “Halli Reid Day” by the mayor of North East.
Now 39, the gracious local hero lives with her two sons and her mother in a new home on the same site where the old family cottage once stood. She is the aquatics director for the North East School District, and she still monitors the lifeguards and grounds at nearby Freeport Beach.
“I could never live away from Lake Erie,” Halli says. “It’s second nature to me. It’s my life.” Does she ever think about the historic swim she made all those years ago?
“Sometimes,” she says, “when I’m driving on I-90 and I look all the way across the lake to Canada, I get a pit in my stomach and I think, ‘Man, how did I do that’?”