É«É«À²

“I absolutely put the pedal to the metal for the last four hours, because if I didn’t, I wasn’t going to make it before sunrise — I had to struggle to get out of the current,” he said.

The É«É«À² swimmer made history early Wednesday as the first openly trans person to successfully swim across Lake Ontario. 

As he emerged from the lake he was greeted by a group of supporters bearing vegan pizza.

Delirious from fatigue, he could hear them urging him to touch the wall to officially mark his arrival to É«É«À²’s shores.

The total crossing spans a distance of at least 51 kilometres, equal to swimming the length of the CN Tower more than 92 times.

Dubbed the 51-kilometre Trans Visibility swim, Goldberg, 29, started swimming from Niagara-on-the-Lake at 2 a.m. Tuesday morning and finished at Marilyn Bell Park just past 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, after more than 24 hours of constant swimming and no sleep.

“I hit extreme currents from the Humber River,” which Goldberg said he expected. “That’s part of the challenge of the swim,” he said. “The last four hours is when I went the slowest, yet I was actually fighting with the hardest effort after those first 20 hours of sustainable, steady swimming,” he said.

He could hear shouts of encouragement from his coach, Tai Hollingbery, as he fought his way though. “Power, power, power,” Goldberg recalls hearing, giving him a boost to use all his strength to kick and to swim front crawl to get loose of the strong current.

“I just thought about powering my arms and a fast stroke rate,” he said.

Once he started, he swam quicker than anticipated. In less than 14 hours, Goldberg was already more than halfway across the lake en route to É«É«À². “The river flow current helps at the start of the swim,” his team said in a post on Instagram while he swam.

To limit the time he was exposed to sun, Goldberg started his swim at night, meaning he experienced a sunrise and sunset while crossing the lake. A video posted by his team on his Instagram account shows Goldberg swimming a steady pace towards an orange streak in the sky; sunrise.

During the swim, the temperature of the lake hovered around 20 C.

“I was kinda psyched to be swimming in freezing cold water,” said Goldberg, adding he trained to be prepared to do so, and even discovered he is a fan of swimming in colder temperatures.

Initially expecting to feel the burn, Goldberg said he was pleasantly surprised to find he did not feel pain or extreme fatigue during the journey. 

“I thought that I would be in like a pain-fest,” said Goldberg, “I thought my shoulders might start hurting at the five or seven hour mark, and that my shoulders would hurt for like 18 hours, but I didn’t experience that,” he said.

Goldberg is actively raising funds for the LGBT Youthline, and so far he has collected nearly $4,000 for the organization that provides anonymous support to queer and trans youth. He has extended the fundraiser he started while training, in hopes of raising more.

According to Solo Swims Ontario, other than three recent crossings, still to be ratified by the organization, only 63 people have successfully swum the route from Niagara-on-the-Lake to É«É«À² across Lake Ontario.

Goldberg said he will now focus on giving his body some well earned rest — he now has one of the Great Lake swim crossings under his belt — and is one step closer to his ultimate goal; to swim all of the five Great Lakes. He also plans to get his boating license so next year he can join a safety crew and support other swimmers in their crossings, with plans to jump in as a pacer for others, too.

When asked if he was stickler for fresh water lakes or could see himself training in salt water, he said with a laugh, “I’ve been a lake guy so far, but I would love to try swimming in the ocean.”