Three decades ago, Welsh swimming great Martyn Woodroffe made a prophetic observation about Lynn Marshall. Marshall was swimming in Manchester and Woodroffe, silver medallist at the 1968 Olympics, was her coach. While driving Marshall to a swim meet, Woodroffe passed through Shepton Mallet, where his father was born. Marshall was named after King’s Lynn in Norfolk, her father’s birthplace, and the two speculated on what Marshall would have been called if she’d been born elsewhere. “Martyn said he thought the name ‘Mallet Marshall’ would suit me quite well,” Marshall recalls.
The nickname didn’t stick, but would have been apt handle for a swimmer who went on to crush her competitors in pool and open-water races all over the world, and who had to summon up extraordinary inner strength to recover from a potentially life-changing injury.
According to Christian Berger, a Montreal swim official who maintains swim statistics for Canada, Lynn Marshall, now 52 years old, has kept her ranking among the world’s top 10 masters swimmers every year since 1986, has set over 40 world records, and is one of the youngest swimmers in the International Masters Swimming Hall of Fame – not bad for someone whose swimming career was written off two decades ago by the emergency room doctors attending her after she broke her neck.
Marshall was born in England. When she was six, her family moved to Canada, where she swam competitively. She went back to England in 1983 at age 24 to do a PhD at the University of Manchester and while there, set her first masters world record at a swim meet in Leeds and won gold at the national swim championships. At the Sandwell sports festival in the West Midlands, she competed in her first ever open-water swim competition. “There was a kids’ race before ours, and I arrived in time to see a very small girl doing breaststroke finish third overall. This left a big impression on me,” she says. Marshall won this race and every other open-water race she entered while in the UK, including one overnight relay race in southern England where she swam on a team with Alison Streeter, later dubbed the Queen of the Channel.
Marshall trained with Peter Nield, who later also swam the Channel and who currently coaches swimming at Warwick School. He says, “It amazed me how Lynn was always able to swim even when she wasn’t feeling well. She encouraged others and added key training tips to help all those around her.”
After two years of post-doctoral studies in Belgium, Marshall moved to Canada’s capital, Ottawa, took a job in the high-tech sector, and kept on swimming – and winning.
In 1993, at a summer triathlon, she was first out of the water and was in the lead on the bike when a car strayed on to the race course and slammed into her. Among the injuries she sustained was a broken C-1 neck vertebra. She was released from hospital with a poor prognosis for returning to swimming and wore a neck brace for months. “Competitive swimmers tend to learn quite good time management and to be disciplined, so I made a recovery plan and went to the pool and gym at the usual time each day as if I were still training. I did water running and a limited amount of weight training. I just tried to stay active and be patient.”
Bryan Findlay, an official at the Ontario provincial open-water championship Marshall won for 18 straight years until the event folded in 2008, recalls that the swim community was devastated by Marshall’s accident. “Folks were apprehensive Lynn would not regain her form after her bike accident, but she refused a spinal fusion and came back as fast as ever,” he says.
Despite swimming with a choppy, asymmetrical freestyle as a result of her injury, Marshall has set hundreds of national masters records in every stroke but breaststroke and currently holds 10 world records and 63 Canadian records. Her life is currently centred around Carleton University in Ottawa, where she teaches in the systems and computer engineering department but also spends up to 20 hours a week coaching the masters swim club and another 10 hours in the pool.
Marshall hasn’t competed in the UK, where she discovered masters and open-water swimming, since she won the 1996 world 5K open-water championships in Sheffield, and although she’s a member of the University of Manchester XXI Club of elite athletes, she has yet to find the time to attend any of their get-togethers. Shel says she’d love to get back to Manchester for a visit, perhaps when she stops competing. But there’s no sign that Lynn Marshall, who has held her speed over the decades and become the runaway best Canadian masters swimmer of all time, will be retiring anytime soon.
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