By Larry Henry
Herald Writer
Don’t just call her a great woman athlete.
Call her a great athlete.
Period.
The number of people who have done what Regan Stacey Scheiber has achieved is minuscule.
She swam the English Channel on her first attempt.
Think that’s impressive?
There’s more. She was 11 weeks pregnant at the time.
“What’s going to be really funny is when my daughter goes to show-and-tell someday and relates this story,” the Mukilteo resident said. “The kids are going to say, ‘You’re so full of it.’ “
They can look it up in the record book. Scheiber had the fastest time of any swimmer – male or female – crossing the Channel last year.
Think about it. She was in the water for just over nine hours. Cold water. And she was doing the work for two people.
“I wasn’t concerned about swimming the distance,” she said. “I was concerned about being cold.”
Back on dry land, fatigue overtook her. “For the whole week after the Channel swim, I slept,” she said. “It was three weeks until I felt I was rested.”
Other than that, mother and baby were fine. A daughter is expected March 23. And then a new phase of Regan Scheiber’s life begins.
She’s a book in progress. And each chapter is interesting.
The current chapter is about motherhood. Oh, and photography, which she’s studying at Everett Community College.
The chapter before that was about long-distance swimming, which she excelled in for three years after moving from Pennsylvania to the Northwest. She competed in a number of national and international open-water meets as a member of the United States national team, winning the women’s division four times. In the 2000 World Championships in Honolulu, a 25-kilometer event, she was sixth, the highest finish by an American.
We could go on and on about her swimming achievements, but suffice it to say, she’s one of the best in the world.
Swimming took up much of her time in high school, where she was Pennsylvania state champion in the 500 freestyle in 1991 and the Most Valuable Female Athlete in her graduating class at Henderson High in West Chester, Pa.
To call her competitive would be an understatement. Her mother, Karen Lewis, recalled a time when young Regan injured her arm trying to do a backflip in gymnastics. That evening, she went to swim practice.
“She came home from practice and her arm still hurt,” her mother said. “She went to the doctor and had the arm examined and found out it was broken.”
Did that stop her from swimming? Nooooooo. They put a cast on it and back into the pool she went. “She was not going to be denied,” Karen Lewis said.
When she was still too young to drive, Regan complained one time about practice. “Do I have to go?” she asked. “No, you can quit, that would suit me just fine,” said Lewis, who supplied the transportation. “Get in the car,” Regan said.
She never complained again.
Even back then, Scheiber was giving hints of the diversified person she would become. Though she scheduled her life around school and swimming, she still found time to learn to play the guitar. “Then she decided she could sing a little and she did that for awhile,” Lewis said.
In subsequent chapters of her life, Scheiber was a standout student/athlete at Penn State, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and dabbled in sculpture; she became a master pastry chef; she served as an assistant coach for the South Snohomish County Dolphins swim team, and now she’s immersed herself in photography.
She seems to be squeezing everything she can out of life.
“It’s true, I don’t like to have idle time,” she admitted. “My brain is so busy. Unless I’m productive in some way, I feel as if I’m not using my life well.”
She says there was a creative side that had to be put on hold for much of her life because she was so involved in swimming. “It took me awhile to be where I am,” she said. “After college I started to ask myself the hard questions about who I am and what qualities I have that I need to express in my life.”
With parenthood about to begin, does this mean she’s merely putting her athletic career on hold for a while?
“I’m pretty much retired,” she said. “That (the Channel) was my last hurrah.”
And what a hurrah it was.
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