Robin Mayall arrived in England last month feeling prepared.
She had been training for two years to swim across the English Channel, the turbulent 21-mile waterway between southern England and northern France. The 60-year-old city of Eugene employee, serial skydiver and Ironman finisher estimated the crossing would take her about 15 hours. Her husband and daughter, her crew on the boat trailing her, had taught themselves a flag code to communicate with her on the water.
But Mayall couldn’t control the weather, and choppy conditions pushed back her swim for days. The rise and fall of anticipation before a crossing is a phenomenon known by channel swimmers as the “Dover Coaster,” and Mayall was riding it…