Jef Mallett’s Marathon Swim Story
I just loved my conversation today with endurance athlete and cartoonist, Jef Mallet, the creator of Frazz. Have you ever called yourself and your proclivity to signing up for long swims, “crazy” or “stupid”? The tendency to be self deprecating is common. But, Jef and I maintain that we are curious people who are trying to find out what we’re made of.
We traverse all of the important topics, finding grit, facing your demons, doubling down instead of giving up. As well as the quality of the open water marathon swimming community.
You don’t want to miss it!
In his own words: Jef Mallett is a writer who has to come up with 365 short stories a year while making up as few as possible. More specifically, Mallett is a cartoonist, creator of the comic strip “Frazz,” which runs in 200 newspapers across the United States through Andrews McMeel Syndicate. He doesn’t believe staying home waiting for inspiration is much of a strategy; rather, he’s an advocate of living the most interesting life possible and shamelessly stealing from it.
He learned early that endurance sports were terrific fodder. Each event, even each training session, could be a life all its own, with a beginning, an end, a middle and, done right, some kind of conflict or challenge or crisis or surprise. He tried triathlon first, when he was just out of high school in the early days of the sport (Mallett is 59). One triathlon in, he looked at his splits and went into bicycle racing. After marriage and career fought for attention with the sport, he switched back and forth between bike racing and triathlon until starting Frazz in 2001, which for a few years left time for neither. Once he had things under control, triathlon made more sense. A move from the middle of Michigan to metropolitan Detroit in 2010 made cycling less fun, and running and swimming came more to the fore. In 2015, he decided to take a break from triathlon and focus on some new running competence. It didn’t go quite as planned.
Mallett had become close friends with Elaine Howley, who suggested he enter the lottery for a Boston Light Swim entry that year. He got in, realized immediately what he’d gotten himself into, and that was it for running. All training time would be focused on swimming. It didn’t quite work. He became hypothermic early in the swim and had to withdraw. It was a long boat ride back, long enough for some thinking. Was open-water swimming not for him? Or would he double down and get a more accurate answer the hard way?
Spoiler: Here we are.
https://www.gocomics.com/frazz
