Jo swims the equivalent of the English Channel in memory of cherished teenage family friend

Active Tameside member Jo Priest has swum 1,352 lengths of two of our swimming pools – the equivalent of swimming the 21 miles of the English Channel – in memory of a cherished teenage family friend.

Jo, from Hyde, undertook the seven-day marathon swim in memory of 14-year-old Maisie Almond, who died when an organ transplant could not be found just 17 days after sudden acute liver failure.

Maisie’s heartbroken parents, Kathryn and Stuart, from Stalybridge, have since founded Maise Moo’s Missions in their daughter’s name to make the life-saving process of donating blood and organs more accessible and to ensure ‘Maisie’s light continues to shine through helping others’.

After setting a target of £500, Jo, an experienced artistic swimmer, has so far raised £2,366 for Maisie’s charity after swimming 220 lengths of Active Tameside’s Denton pool within two-and-a-half hours each day for six days, completing the challenge with 32 lengths of Active Tameside’s Hyde pool.

She then finished the feat with a two-and-a-half-minute artistic swimming routine to ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ by The Smiths – one of Maisie’s all-time favourites – cheered on by daughter Hannah, who edited the music to fit the routine.

“I was very emotional at the end,” says mum-of-two Jo. “I said to Kathryn, I’m pleased that I’ve done it, but I would much rather not have to do it; that we just had our Maisie back with us.

“I’d like to say a big thank you for everybody’s generosity. It’s just such an amazing thing that Kathryn and Stuart are trying to do out of something so awful. We need people to support this as much as they can. Maisie was everything good in the world – we should all be a little bit more Maisie.”

Jo, who’s now a teacher at Dowson Primary Academy in Hyde, first struck up her friendship with Maisie’s mum, Kathryn, when Jo was on work experience at a bank in Manchester 30 years ago.

Over the years the pair met their respective husbands, and both had children around the same time – Jo and husband Steven welcoming Thomas and Hannah, while Kathryn and Stuart had George and Maisie.

“Steven and Stuart have become really close friends too,” says Jo. “We’ve been on holiday together; we’ve all been skiing together. We spend a lot of time together, so the impact it’s had at our house as well as on Kathryn, Stuart and George is immense.

“Maisie and Hannah were best friends. In fact, they were more than that, they saw each other as family. They had all sorts of future plans together and Hannah feels some of that’s been taken away from her.

“I wanted to show her that something good needed to come out of something so tragic and that’s what inspired me to do the swim.”

If you would like to sponsor Jo, visit her JustGiving page

Jo started training for her marathon in February, signing up for an Active Tameside swimming membership and taking to the water before and after work, joined on occasions by mum Lynne and several friends.

She says: “The hardest part of all of this physically, was when I first started training, because I knew I wouldn’t have an infinite amount of time to do this. When I first got in the pool, I was managing only to do a mile, and it was taking me 50 minutes, so I had to get my speed up.

“It was also hard when I did those first 220 lengths. I got out of the pool and thought, yikes, I’ve got another six days of this. It seemed a really, really long way. I thought to myself, I know why I took up synchronised swimming, because lane swimming for that distance can be mind-numbingly boring, but I had a very good audio book and waterproof headphones that helped to kept me going.”

And all the training, finishing the marathon swim and performing the artistic routine has had an unintended consequence for Jo, who has taken up synchronised swimming again.

She says: “I did synchronised swimming up to being 17, and then I had 23 years off. I got back in pool when I was 40, when I competed with the Denton Artistic Swimming Club’s masters squad. Then Covid stopped play, but now, after all this, I’ve ended up competing again. I’ve got the regionals at the Manchester Aquatic Centre this month, and I’m doing the nationals at Ponds Forge in Sheffield in July.”