What better way to celebrate a birthday than to swim a mile for every candle on the cake?
Santa Maria resident Lance Wallace didn’t want cake or presents for his birthday this year. Wallace turned 65 in January, and his one birthday wish was to swim a total of 65 miles before the end of the month—a goal he surpassed by 3 miles.
Wallace accomplished this feat at the Santa Maria Valley YMCA where he spends almost every afternoon swimming laps, he told the Sun.
But Wallace isn’t limited to swimming pools exclusively. All large bodies of water—lakes, oceans, whirlpool bathtubs—are equally swimmable in his book, he said.
Although the majority of Wallace’s swimming experiences have been for recreational purposes, there have been a few rare exceptions, he said.
“I once went out on Torch Lake in Michigan with my cousin on a sailboat and 3 miles out from the shore, the mast snapped,” Wallace said. “I had to swim the 3 miles back to shore towing the boat.”
And to make the story sound even more like that of a superhero origin, Wallace’s cousin stayed on the boat the entire time while he towed it back to shore, he said.
Wallace currently only swims for fun, but he entered various swimming competitions throughout his youth, he said. He calls his passion for the sport hereditary and has loved being in the water as long as he can remember.
“My mother taught me how to swim,” Wallace said. “When I was little, she used to put me on her back and swim like a dolphin. She gave me a love for the water.”
Wallace grew up in Michigan and didn’t move to California until after high school to attend college at the Brooks Institute of Photography.
In the decades that followed, he worked as an artist in various capacities—from his beginnings as an animator for various television commercials to later owning his own art gallery and picture framing business.
Throughout his career, Wallace never let swimming go and managed to always fit it in his schedule one way or another. Now retired, he finds it much easier to free up time to swim, he said.
In 2014, Wallace made one of his favorite memories—swimming across the San Francisco Bay. Wallace swam from the coast of San Francisco to Alcatraz Island and back that day—2.5 miles total, he said.
“It was a frenetic experience,” Wallace said. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘You just have to jump in the water and swim like hell!’” μ
This article appears in Mar 9-16, 2017.