Time out with T.O. – Getting along swimmingly

Dealing with cancer is a grueling physical and psychological battle.

Tom O’Connor

So is the annual 12 ½ mile marathon swim around Key West, Fla., that Hal Clarendon annually completed between 1999 and 2008.

Two years ago he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and his cancer treatments at UNMC made it impossible for him to do the swim in 2009.

“I couldn’t make it to the airport, let alone swim,” said Clarendon, who worked as a publisher of a magazine on healthy living before moving to Nebraska three years ago from Gainesville, Fla., when his wife, Claudia Garcia, accepted a faculty position at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Clarendon wasn’t about to let his fight with cancer keep him out of the water for long.

Hal Clarendon

Once he made it through his first round of treatments, Clarendon got back in the water.

Using the UNO pool as his training site, the 65-year-old soon found that he was able to resume his long distance swimming.

It got him to thinking that maybe he should head back down to Florida and try the Key West swim again.

Sure enough, Clarendon went to Key West in June and successfully completed the swim. Took him a little more than eight hours. That’s like swimming for an entire work day.

“It shows the incredible human spirit,” said Phil Bierman, M.D., Clarendon’s oncologist at UNMC. “I tell my cancer patients to keep doing everything they can do. No restrictions.”

For Hal Clarendon, those are words to swim by.