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| Man To Swim Lake Michigan's Perimeter |
 While most people are busy abandoning their New Year's resolutions or forgetting they ever made them, 41-year-old Chicago Police Officer Nial Funchion, a diver with the Police Department's Marine Unit, is hard at work training for his - a 1,000 mile swim around the perimeter of Lake Michigan this summer.
Funchion, who has already swum the English Channel and from Evanston to Hammond, has been training since this summer. He started each day with a three mile swim to the pumping stations outside of Chicago and back, starting a 4 a.m., stopping for an energy bar upon reaching the station, and swimming back to make roll call at the police station by 7 a.m.
"I want to inspire anybody who wants to take on something knew," Funchion told the Chicago Sun-Times. "We'll go through it together."
After his 27-mile Evanston to Hammon swim, the 6-foot, 180-pound Funchion began receiving calls and letters from the public. "People who were dealing with obstacles in their lives," he says, including a woman dealing with Multiple Sclerosis. "They live their lives trying to keep moving forward. I was humbled."
In the course of his training, Funchion learned he had shoulder weakness. He sees a therapist at Rush University Medical Center and uses light weights to build strength in it. Funchion says he swam about 500 miles last year in both Lake Michigan and area pools in preparation and swims six to ten miles a day.
Lake swimming, he says, is far different than pool swimming. "Your mind wanders like crazy. You have a conversation with yourself while you're swimming. Everything is so much bigger and scarier," Funchion said.
The swim will start on June 1st if all goes according to plan. Funchion will head south from North Avenue Beach wearing an insulated wet suit. Swimming for three hours in the morning and two in the afternoon for six out of every seven days, he hopes to return to Chicago by mid-September.
Updates on the swim will be posted daily on Funchion's web site, ConnectToTheJourney.com, where he will encourage others to post their progress on their own efforts.
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