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Trying to touch the void

Fresno physician meets the challenge of the English Channel

by Melanie Zuercher

Jeryl (Jerry) Wiens ’73 follows his own path, even when it leads across the English Channel.

Wiens – who grew up in Fresno, Calif., from age 6 and now lives in Clovis, Calif. – began swimming in high school and has kept it up over the years as part of his regular exercise routine.

In 2000, the youth pastor at Wiens’ church, Mennonite Community Church in Fresno, wanted to do the Shark Fest-Alcatraz Swim, about a mile and a half from the island in the middle of San Francisco Bay to the marina on the mainland, so Wiens agreed to join him. It took Wiens about 35 minutes to make the swim, and afterward he began to think more seriously about an idea he’d been kicking around for years – swimming the English Channel.

It was a serious commitment, he says, and only in 2005 did he finally decide that he could devote at least the next two years to training for the Channel – 21 miles straight across but, because of the currents, almost never that short a swimming distance.

Wiens came to Bethel in 1969, a member of a family devoted to the college. His parents, the late Betty L. (Neufeld) ’49 and Ervin J. Wiens ’49, are alumni who have a scholarship named in their honor, and his siblings, Cheryl Wiens Willems ’72, Martin ’81 (a current Bethel board member) and Marlene Wiens Wenger ’83, also studied at Bethel.

But young Jerry wasn’t ready to go to college, and after one year at Bethel, he spent the next four “trying to figure out who I was and what I was supposed to be doing.” He worked for the Santa Fe Railroad, volunteered at a boys’ and girls’ club in Pinedale, a low-income neighborhood outside Fresno, and mowed lawns. Finally, his natural interest in the sciences asserted itself and he went to California State University-Fresno and then to the University of California-Davis School of Medicine, finishing a residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation in 1985.

Wiens’ sub-specialty during his residency was sports medicine, and at some point he attended a conference where he heard a team physician for the San Francisco 49ers speak. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s where I want to go,’” he remembers. So upon graduation, he went into private practice in Stanford and also obtained a position with the Bay Area medical group that worked with the 49ers.

“I thought it would take me at least 10 years to get to work with the team,” Wiens says, “but I was asked to do it after only after a couple of years.” Wiens was with the team from 1987 to 1990, which just happened to be those magical years when the 49ers won back-to-back Super Bowls, in 1989 and 1990. He still speaks of that period with a sense of wonder and belief in “some kind of divine intervention” that allowed him the experience.

In 1990, Wiens moved back to Fresno. He and his wife Patti were now the parents of three young children, and private practice plus working with the 49ers on weekends added up to missing too many activities, Wiens says.

Five years ago, in 2002, Wiens and five other physicians founded Sierra Pacific Orthopaedic and Spine Center in Fresno. “We have now grown to 16 partners,” he says. The practice includes medical offices, physical therapy and X-ray services and outpatient surgery. Wiens is team physician for the Fresno Falcons professional hockey team and a consulting physician for the athletic departments at Cal State-Fresno and Fresno Pacific University.

“I feel very, very blessed with a great practice,” Wiens says. “This is a great group of Christian doctors. We’ve worked hard and we share similar values of commitment to the church and the community.”

Through all of this – including medical school and residency – Wiens kept swimming. For years, he has maintained a rigorous exercise routine: get up in the morning and jog two miles before swimming about a half mile (“half an hour, about 120 flip turns”) in his backyard pool. “It’s partly my responsibility as a physician,” he says, “to maintain a level of fitness as an example to my patients.”

In 2000, his interest in distance swimming started growing. He began keeping records of his distances, sometimes repeating his exercise routine in the evening and swimming more on weekends.

In 2005, he took the figurative plunge, sending the $2,500 fee to the Channel Swimming Association in England and reserving, for July 2007, one of the boats and pilots certified to escort Channel swims.

“There are three organizations that will ratify ‘fun swims’ of the English Channel,” Wiens says. “Those might be done as relays or by people wearing wet suits or fins or using snorkels. But the Channel Swimming Association [organized in 1927] is the more formal one. You aren’t allowed anything buoyant or insulating.” The swim is supposed to replicate as closely as possible the conditions that Matthew Webb, the first person to successfully swim the Channel, faced in 1875.

Wiens wanted to meet this challenge by himself – both in terms of preparation and training and in making the swim solo. He didn’t tell anyone outside his family about his plans. “I’m a low-key kind of guy,” he says.

For the first year or so, he swam about 30 miles a week and did cross-training, including running and free weights. Ten months before the July 9, 2007, target date, he pretty much dropped off his friends’ map. A typical day went like this: Get up, jog two miles, swim one or two miles, do 15 minutes of free weights. See patients until 6 or 6:30 p.m. Go to one of two local gyms with a 25-yard pool and swim until 10 p.m.

He did have one partner in training – Patti, his wife. “She was a great partner,” he says. “She would have food ready for me when I got home at 10. We bought a tandem kayak and she and our daughter Jeriann or a friend would come with me for safety when I would swim in lakes on weekends.”

The two lakes he frequented were Shaver Lake, at 5,000 feet above sea level, and Huntington Lake, at 7,000 feet, where he worked on distance and on adapting to the cold water temperature. He did his qualifying swim in Shaver Lake – six hours in water at 60 degrees F, in only a Speedo, cap and goggles.

Wiens walked into the Strait of Dover on the English side at 6:20 a.m. on July 9 and climbed out onto the rocks on the French shore 14 hours and 56 minutes later. Because of the currents, he swam an S-shaped path of about 32.5 miles. The water temperature was 59 degrees F.

“I felt relief. I was excited and happy about having accomplished this,” Wiens says. “I didn’t want to fail. My goal, besides touching the French shore, was to find out how my body would respond to ‘the void’ – the place where there is no more physical, mental or emotional energy left.”

He was somewhat disappointed in that goal, he says. “I felt good – I had another three or four hours of swimming in me.”

There were “some intense times” in the water, however, particularly about 10 hours into the swim, when the escort boat’s GPS showed that Wiens had been swimming for nearly two hours without making any progress because of the strong currents. Patti told him later, Wiens said, that “she prayed for a window – a change in the current, some way to allow me to get past the tide,” and it came.

“I wasn’t having any kind of mid-life crisis or death wish,” Wiens says. “I wanted to challenge myself. And it was a spiritual journey, which is hard to say without it sounding goofy. When you’re doing something so solitary, spending so many hours alone, it calls for a lot of self-examination.”

There will be another challenge later on, Wiens says. He’s still looking to “touch the void.” But, in true low-key fashion, he is not ready to say just what the challenge will be.