He beat cancer twice. Now he wants to swim across Lake Winnipeg

CTV’s Danton Unger has the story of a man who has survived cancer twice and the big swim he hopes will help save lives.

An Alberta man plans to swim across Lake Winnipeg to raise funds for cancer research—research he says has saved his life twice.

Jonathon Fenton, 61, is planning to swim from Grand Beach to Gimli—a 26-kilometre swim expected to take him about 10 hours. It’s all part of a fundraiser he is calling ‘Jonny’s Big Swim’.

“I’m doing it to celebrate five and a half years after my stem cell transplant, the second time I had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma,” Fenton told CTV News.

It was 1999 when Fenton’s doctor discovered a tumour the size of a football.

“My only experience with cancer up until then was my mom dying of it when I was 10 years old. So the immediate thought is, ‘Oh, you have cancer. Okay, I’m out,’” he said. “You think you’re done, but you’re not.”

After chemotherapy, Fenton lived cancer-free for 20 years. Then in 2019, Fenton discovered another tumour, launching him into another battle for his life.

He won that battle too.

“It wouldn’t have happened without the research. So I think you just got to keep going. Go for the next breakthrough,” he said.

So far Fenton, who was born and raised in Manitoba, has raised about $22,000 for CancerCare Manitoba, the Health Sciences Centre Foundation and the Alberta Cancer Foundation.

“They all played a part in the double cancer journey,” he said.

But why swim across Lake Winnipeg? Fenton said he got the idea while watching a movie on Diana Nyad, a woman who at the age of 64 successfully swam 180 kilometres from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida.

“It just sort of hit me like a bolt. I could do that across Lake Winnipeg. It’s only 26 (kilometres). There’s no sharks, there’s no jellyfish, no man-o’war, no shipping channel or a shipping lane. How hard could that be?”

After a year of training, Fenton plans to begin his swim on Saturday as long as the weather cooperates. He hopes his story will encourage others who are going through the same fight he did.

“I just want to show them, if an old geezer can get into the lake—I don’t know if I’m going to make it, but at least I’ll try—after two bouts of it, you know, for someone in their 20s, 30s, younger than me, maybe I’ll be okay.”

More details about Fenton’s swim and fundraiser can be found on the Jonny’s Big Swim website.