When Claire de Boer '84 was growing up in Ithaca, one of her family's favorite activities was swimming. But it wasn't about heading down to Cass Park and hopping in the pool. No, this athletic clan had bigger ideas.
Like ducklings, she and her siblings would swim 2 to 3 miles across Cayuga Lake, following parents Tobias and Joan and family friends. De Boer balked at first, declaring the lake "gross" and preferring a pristine pool instead, but over time she grew to love the lake.
She also grew stronger, and swam not only its width, but eventually its 38-mile length. In August 1984, during her senior year at Cornell, de Boer stepped into the water at the lake's north end, and swam south until she reached Allen H. Treman State Marine Park in Ithaca. Her time of 20 hours, 30 minutes is still the record.
Claire de Boer, front, swims with Bridgette Hobart in Cayuga Lake.
On Aug. 8-9, de Boer, 65, will swim the full length of the lake again - but with a slight twist. She'll do it as part of a two-person relay with her friend and distance swimmer Bridgette Hobart, 62, who duplicated de Boer's feat - almost to the minute - in 2015. They will swim to benefit for The Sophie Fund, an Ithaca-based organization that supports mental health initiatives aiding young people in Ithaca and Tompkins County.
For de Boer - whose father taught at Cornell Engineering for more than 40 years, and whose brother Maarten '81 and Yvette '87 are also alums - this swim represents one of the bookends in her life. "I had a bit of life behind me in '84, and I've got a bit of life ahead of me now," she said with a laugh. "This is probably the time to do it."
The 10-year friendship between de Boer and Hobart began, fittingly enough, in the waters of Cayuga Lake.
In the summer of 2015, Hobart, whose accomplishments include conquering the English Channel, reached out to de Boer, saying she was planning to swim the length of the lake. That summer, Hobart, a New Jersey resident who owns her family's stone business in Binghamton, New York, would swim nine of the 11 Finger Lakes.
She wasn't the first to seek out de Boer for advice.
"A few people have contacted me over the years, saying 'Hey, I'm swimming the lake,' and I've always been supportive," de Boer said. "But it's hard. It's long, there are cramps, there is weather. It's easy to not be successful at the entire length."
On the evening of Aug. 9, 2015, Hobart entered Cayuga's waters near the village of Cayuga, as de Boer did 31 years earlier. Hobart was wearing a GPS tracker on her back, allowing de Boer to follow her progress, and after 10 or 11 hours, de Boer realized "she was holding a great pace … and I think she's going to do it." So she dropped everything and rushed to Treman Marina to see her new friend finish.
Never mind that de Boer was in Maine at the time.
"What is that, an eight-hour drive?" she said. "But hey, it's a long swim."
When de Boer reached the marina, she asked a boater to take her out on the lake to meet Hobart. When they reached her, approximately an hour's swim from the marina, the swimsuit-clad de Boer jumped in the water, introduced herself and swam with Hobart for a short time.
Hobart would go on to finish in 20 hours, 33 minutes, within a few minutes of de Boer's record swim, which was recounted in a 30th anniversary story in The Ithaca Journal in 2014. Two others have swum Cayuga's length - David Barra of High Falls, New York, in 2015 (on the same day as Hobart; finished in 23:26) and Caroline Block of Ithaca in 2018 (swam from Ithaca to Cayuga; finished in 21:28).
More motivation
The cause for which the pair will swim this August is personal for de Boer and Hobart, who both lost nephews to suicide within the last seven years.
The Sophie Fund was founded in 2016 in memory of Sophie Hack MacLeod '14, who died by suicide in March 2016 while on medical leave from Cornell. She was a student in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.
"We're very grateful to Claire and Bridget for reaching out to us to propose this fundraiser," said Scott MacLeod, Sophie's father. He and wife Susan Hack, both veteran journalists, established The Sophie Fund to support programs and projects, raise awareness and combat the stigma around mental illness and treatment.
"We can always use funds," MacLeod said. "The two things we primarily provide funding for are training clinicians in suicide care and programming for mental health awareness."
Among the fund's recent projects: training Cornell Health's entire Counseling and Psychological Services team in suicide prevention.
"It adds an invaluable layer for me, to be doing it for The Sophie Fund," said de Boer, whose nephew, Rowan de Boer, died at age 21 in 2023. Hobart's nephew, Corey Hobart, died in 2018; he was 28.
"It gives us so much more motivation," de Boer said, "but also, to me, it feels like this is the right thing to do. It's the breaking down of the stigma. I also just want young people to know, in whatever way we can, that we support you.
"We know it's hard, and I know it feels insurmountable," she said, "but people care a lot about you. And if this is a way we can say it, then I want to say that, loud and clear."
A tremendous amount of grit
De Boer and Hobart will begin their relay swim on the evening of Aug. 8, at the same spot they both started their solo swims, and go one hour at a time, with the "handoff" occurring in the water. The next person in the relay will enter the water a short distance ahead and raise their hand; the swimmer will touch the second swimmer on the foot and commence the next hour.
They're hoping for good weather and, if there's any wind that it comes from the north.
de Boer prepares to swim.
"We have to consider the weather - like thunder, lightning and wind," de Boer said. "I'm pretty prone to nausea now when it's really windy, and the cold is hard for me so getting out of the water, you get cold. But I've got all kinds of mechanisms to counter this.
"There's a lot that's going to have to fall into place for us to be successful," she said. "But what we both have a tremendous amount of is grit, and grit helps."
Hobart said the similarities between her and de Boer are striking.
"We've done a lot of swims together since 2015," she said. "And when we train, it's like I'm swimming in the mirror. We have the same pace, the same stroke count, so it's been a great experience."
Since the legs are only 60 minutes each, the swimmers won't have to eat while in the water. For de Boer's 1984 swim, sister Yvette extended a hockey stick rigged with a basket from the support vessel so Claire could reach it and take sustenance; per international distance-swimming rules, swimmers cannot be touched while the event is ongoing.
In 1984, de Boer's support crew also included her father and her high school swim coach, Roy Staley. This time around, there will be a pontoon boat on which the swimmers can recover between legs. And de Boer's husband, Jeff Spangler, and Hobart's husband, Bob Janeczko, will escort the duo south in kayaks. "I say we married well," de Boer said.
Now a mother of two and grandmother of four, de Boer says her record swim of 41 years ago - and the fact that she's attempting it again, albeit with a teammate - are both sources of wonder.
"I kind of marvel at it, like, 'Isn't it amazing that I did that then, and now I'm thinking about doing it again?'" said de Boer, a self-employed arts consultant at CdB Arts in Health in Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania. "Granted, I'll be swimming only half of it, but it makes it a full-circle thing. I think, how am I the same person, and how have I become a different person?"
Her training offers her "hours and hours" in the water to reflect.
"I'll feel better once I'm in the lake, and I think there'll be more of those full-circle reflections," she said. "But overall, I feel incredibly fortunate to have the health at this point to be able to do this again."
