Joe McWilliams
Lakeside Leader

Darcy Garratt turns 46 this year and is still a member of the Slave Lake Sharks, still competing and winning medals at provincials. He’s been doing it since he was nine years old.

That adds up to a lot of swimming, but Darcy hasn’t always done it competitively. His return to competitive swimming as the senior member of the Sharks came with his return home to Slave Lake about 10 years ago.

“I had gone to the city for a job,” Darcy says.

He never stopped swimming, but just did it recreationally and for fitness.

Nowadays, Darcy says he prefers the longer swims, testing his endurance against the younger guys he inevitably ends up swimming against. And there simply aren’t many of them.

“I swim against 18-year-olds,” if anybody, he says. “Once in a while there’s a 40-year-old that (briefly) shows up. I don’t know where they go.”

Parents of swimmers at swim meets often tell him he’s inspiring and that they wish they could do what he’s doing.

“I say, ‘you can! Train with your kid!’”

I’m not super-human, Darcy says. I just jump in the water and swim.

Darcy joined the Sharks program in 1986. He remembers being “the young guy” on a lot of relay teams, which was a good experience for him. By the time he got into high school, he was involved in another sport – motocross racing. Something had to give, and it was the swimming. So for a few years he was out of the club scene.

Nowadays he works as a utility operator with the M.D. of Lesser Slave River.

“He’s a workaholic,” his dad Denny Garratt says. “All he does is work and swim.”

Darcy and his brother Matthew learned how to keep their heads above water in the Canyon Creek marina, Denny says. In the lake too, because Darcy remembers swimming out to a pile of rocks offshore that used to stick out of the water when the lake was low.

It was the start of a love affair that continues.

At the provincial summer swimming championships in Edmonton last month, Garratt won bronze in the 800m freestyle event.

As to his plans for the future, he says, “I hope to do it as long as I can. The health benefits are amazing.”