Barrington men to swim English Channel for charity

Barrington friends Doug McConnell and Don Macdonald are training to swim the grueling 21+ miles of the English Channel in August to raise money for a couple of local charities.

McConnell, 53, is swimming in support of the Les Turner ALS Research Laboratory at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. His father, David, died from ALS in 2006.

Macdonald, 49, will be raising funds for social emotional learning programs in Barrington Unit District 220. All donations to his “One Stroke at a Time” charity will go to the programs via the Barrington 220 Educational Foundation.

The English Channel, one of the busiest commercial waterways in the world, is often considered the Mount Everest for swimmers. Though approximately 200 people attempt to swim the Channel each year, only about half succeed.

Both men are hardly starting from scratch, though. McConnell began swimming competitively at age 7 and Macdonald was a high school state finalist in Indiana, where he set multiple records that stood for more than 10 years.

Macdonald has had more than just the passage of time to adjust to in his swimming, though. Progressive neck skeletal damage has required him to learn to swim differently to compensate for near constant radiating pain. He has a blog chronicling his preparations for the Channel swim at one-stroke-at-a-time.blogspot.com.

McConnell, owner of the investment banking firm Halyard Capital Advisers, lives with his wife, Susan, and their four children.

Macdonald, whose career is in environmental and energy engineering, has a wife, Jennifer, and daughter, Rachel.