She also developed a sense to protect others early on, and could often be found with her arm around her friends at school, literally and figuratively, Sue said. “In elementary school, teachers remarked, ‘She works 110 percent on everything she does, I wish I had a classroom full of her,’ and ‘Your Emily is such a hard worker,’” Sue said. That’s how her teachers described her, Sue said, as well as her coaches. Her mother, Sue von Jentzen, remembers Emily naturally taking to swimming but working hard to get it right. It’s been like that since she was a child herself, growing up in Washington with four siblings. And in the meantime she’s training for this swim.” Emily is now one of five attorneys in the state who work in the Department of Justice’s Child Protection Unit, handling cases of child neglect and other family issues for Flathead, Sanders, Lincoln and Lake counties, as well as traveling to other locations in western Montana as needed. She recently competed in the USMS nationals in Las Vegas, taking second place in her age group for the 10K race.Īs a sounding board for Emily’s myriad goals, Katie eventually helped create Enduring Waves after both she and Emily moved on from the county attorney’s office to work with the Montana Attorney General’s Office. While it was obvious that Emily was very capable in the professional sense, Katie said, it was soon apparent that her drive and determination colored everything she did, including swimming.įor instance, there wasn’t an adult swimming program in Kalispell when she moved here, so Emily started a U.S. Katie Schulz trained Emily at the county attorney’s office and bonded with her over their shared love of helping children and raising black labs. After graduation, Emily moved up to Kalispell to work at the Flathead County Attorney’s Office, specializing in child welfare cases. “I could do something other people couldn’t do and it didn’t wreck me.”Īfter swimming in college at Central Washington University, Emily went on to participate on the University of Montana’s triathlon team during law school. “(A mile) is a 50th of what I found was my niche of distance,” Emily said. She said she never won distance events like the mile, but now realizes that she was only just discovering her real talent. “People just assume that because I can swim a long ways that I’m fast,” Emily said. Still, she doesn’t remember placing first in many events. It’s the evolution of an idea that began with a very simple premise: if she’s going to be logging the miles anyway, she might as well help kids as she does it.Ī swimmer and competitor since she was a kid, Emily didn’t hit her stride in the water until she found distance events in high school in Washington. The swim will help raise funds for a 2-year-old boy who needs a service dog.Įmily also has a new nonprofit for her fundraising efforts, called Enduring Waves. She’s been training and regrouping, and she’s got a new goal in her sights: a record-breaking 70-mile swim in Canyon Ferry Lake near Helena planned for August. That swim took a serious physical toll on Emily, resulting in acute kidney failure and a promise to her parents that she’d take at least a year off from the ultra-endurance swims.Įven though 2012 passed without such an event, Emily wasn’t sedentary. The 2011 Chelan swim was for Kalispell’s Katelyn Roker, who was fighting Stage-4 neuroblastoma. While swimming Flathead Lake, Emily raised nearly $10,000 for Karmyn Flanagan, a 3-year-old girl from Missoula battling acute lymphoblastic leukemia. In 2011, Emily was the first person to swim Lake Chelan.īoth swims served as personal goals for Emily in terms of long-distance, open-water trials, but they also each held greater meaning. In 2010, Emily, now 30, became the first woman and just third person ever to swim the 30-mile length of Flathead Lake. She kept the rhythmic pattern she’d grown up with, her arms pacing in and out of the water, pushing, kicking, fighting. When the water turned against her in the pitch dark, and all she had was the mental image of the little girl she was swimming for, Emily kept moving. There aren’t many who would stick it out for the 36 hours required to swim so far in water so cold – about 55 degrees. There came a time during Emily von Jentzen’s swim of Lake Chelan in northern Washington when the waves started to blur between friend and foe buoying her weight for the 55-mile swim, then dragging her tired body back, holding her in place.Įmily could have quit at that point.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |