Open-water swimming hero Kate Wills, who competed with stage 4 bowel cancer, has passed away. Now her daughter continues her legacy in the NZ Ocean Swim Series, wearing her mum's number.
Through three brain surgeries and 70 chemotherapy sessions, Kate Wills kept jumping out of planes and racing in long-distance ocean swims.
The avid swimmer and sky diver from Taupō was featured in LockerRoom back in January 2021, after she’d been diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer. She was determined to stay alive and active for her daughter, and two years later, she was still swimming competitively.
Sadly, Wills passed away last month, aged 61.
Now her daughter, Kelly, is carrying on her legacy – swimming in the New Zealand Ocean Swim Series under her mum’s race number.
Kate Wills had been a well-known competitor in the Ocean Swim Series for the past 15 summers. She clocked up 54 long ocean swims in her career, making the series’ Oceans of Fame honours list.
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It was the daily 5am training swims and the thrill of racing that Wills reckoned kept her going during her cancer treatment. Even during chemo to combat a multitude of tumours in her lungs and brain, Wills was still making the top five in her age group.
“It’s terminal but I refuse to even think about a use-by date. I have a 20-year plan and I’m focused on that,” she told LockerRoom.
Her last swim in the series was the Beach to Bay swim in Russell last October. But she was still competing until January this year, swimming her leg of the 4 x 1km relay at the Epic Swim Taupō.
Wills loved swimming alongside her daughter – their last event together was the Taupō Masters Spring Fling in September.
Now Kelly, who does shorter ocean swims, is competing in her mum’s memory – most recently last weekend in Swim the Mount, which was Kate’s favourite Ocean Swim race.
Wills was New Zealand’s first female tandem sky diving instructor, and a front-line ambulance officer with St John.
At her funeral in Taupō, her family was joined by the swimming, sky diving and St John communities. “They gave her an excellent send-off,” says her brother, Simon Dickinson. “A highlight was a final call from the St John communications centre, broadcast across their network.”
The following is an excerpt from our original profile of Kate Wills, a remarkable woman.
“People keep saying I’m amazing, but I don’t feel like what I’m doing is amazing. It sucks. But you just do what you have to do.”
Wills is a woman who’s always been driven by her passions, and never been stopped by the word 'can't'. She’s been a professional sky diver for over 25 years – she was New Zealand’s first female tandem instructor (only the sixth woman in the world) and was the country’s first female parachute technician.
Then she started swimming seriously at 47: “I thought it would be a neat thing to swim across Auckland’s harbour,” she says. “I hated it; it was rough and I thought I was going to die.”
But she was motivated to get better and swim faster. So she started training for other events in the NZ Ocean Swim Series, and for the last five years, she's been coached by World Cup champion triathlete and Ironman winner, Samantha Warriner.
“One of the reasons I love doing the Ocean Swim Series is when I started in 2008, I said: ‘I’m doing this so I can stay fit and healthy in case anything goes wrong. I don’t want to be a burden on my daughter’. And boy, that was prophetic,” Wills says.
Daughter Kelly is a make-up artist, but has spent the summer working as a lifeguard and swim instructor at the Masterton Pools.
She completes the shorter 1km ocean distances. Mother and daughter support each other.
“After I had brain surgery, my daughter was saying ‘Mum you can’t do that!’ But I said to her ‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do; tell me what I can do’,” Wills says.
“Now she’s had a turnaround and she’s really encouraging. She’s proud of me – even if I’m a bit outside the norm. Staying alive for her is my goal.”
Every so often, Wills will wear a purple cap to her early morning trainings at the AC Baths in Taupō.
It’s a cap she was given in the Ocean Swim Series two years ago, when she feeling a little disoriented in the water. “I didn’t know then I had a 4.3cm tumour on my brain; nine weeks later I had surgery,” Wills says.
She kept the purple cap and wears it to let other swimmers in her Swim Smooth squad know she’s feeling a bit off-colour and she’ll probably be swimming slower. “They understand if I’m having a purple cap day,” Wills says.
Wills undergoes chemotherapy every fortnight – “for the rest of my life”. She has a permanent port where an infuser bottle is attached for three days, keeping her out of the water.
“By day five the chemo really hits hard. But I will drag myself out of bed on day five and swim,” she says. “You can’t help but come away feeling much better than when you’re lying in bed and want to die.
“The treatment is constant and it’s brutal. So I just can’t train like a normal woman trains anymore.
“I can get two to three days good training out of a 14-day period. Over the last four months whatever I can do on the bad days, I’ve got so much better. I’m not at the back of the lane on purple cap days anymore. I’m in the middle.”
“My lungs are full of minor tumours. They were asking me: ‘How you could still be swimming?’" - Kate Wills
Warriner coaches Wills twice a week, and is in awe of her attitude. The 2008 ITU World Cup overall champion and Commonwealth Games silver medallist has retired from competition and is now devoted to coaching through the Swim Smooth system.
“Everyone knows the challenges and the hardships Kate's facing, but she just gets on with it,” Warriner says. “If she’s not feeling well, she lets you know but she still gives her best effort.
“She’s very competitive in her age group and she thrives on the competition - age or illness are not barriers to her.
“She enjoys the freedom of being in the water, and she appreciates she's still here. The water is her happy place, and it’s what she needs.”
Wills is adamant she needs to keep swimming to stay ahead of the cancer. “Keeping my fitness up is so important. I’ve got a much better response to the treatment and fewer side effects than if I didn’t have my fitness. My blood tests have come back better than normal,” she says.
She continues to impress medical experts. “When I was having surgery to get the port put in, the surgeon told me the survival rate for stage four bowel cancer is about seven percent at five years. But he said: ‘because you’re so incredibly fit for your age, that’s increased your chances of getting into that seven percent survival rate has increased by 45 percent’,” Wills says.
“You take everything as a win. If you get up the morning and you don’t feel sick from the chemo, it’s a win.”
She’s been fortunate, she says, the tumours haven’t really affected her. When she was first diagnosed in May 2019, after her daughter took her to hospital with a headache and vomiting, Wills had been feeling fatigued - but she put it down to working long shifts in her job as an EMT (emergency medical technician) with St John Ambulance and studying for a degree in paramedicine.
“About 40 percent of people with bowel cancer won’t be diagnosed until they are stage four – when it has spread to other organs of your body,” Wills explains.
Bowel cancer cells had made their way to both of her lungs – the longest growth measuring 10cm. “My lungs are full of minor tumours. They were asking me: ‘How you could still be swimming?’” Wills says.
“I was swimming in squads doing 25m underwater with those in my lungs. But I didn’t get shortness of breath because they’re on the outer edges.”
Rather than have a large area of both lungs removed, Wills chose “a lifetime of chemotherapy to try to keep a lid on it”. The 10cm tumour has shrunk to 3cm.
“I’m having such a good response because I keep going. I can still swim 25m underwater and I can still swim in ocean races.” Competitively too.
Wills spent her first eight years in a small fishing village in England. Even though her mother was terrified of the water, Wills would toddle into the sea at any chance she got. At five, her brother dared her to leap off a high breakwater into the harbour, which she did with no fear.
She moved with her hotel manager parents, first to the Bahamas and then to New Zealand when she was 12. She trained with a swimming club in Gisborne for two years, but wouldn’t get serious about swimming again for another three decades.
Wills did her first ocean swim, the 2008 Auckland Harbour Crossing, in 59m 27s, which put her 30th in her women’s 40-49 age group. Even though she didn’t enjoy it, she challenged herself to do better.
And that’s how she’s continued. “It took me six years to work my up to get a bronze medal, but I did it,” she says.
Warriner says Wills has the attitude of a true athlete. “She tries to get better every year, but she’s very realistic as well – she wants to do better, but she also accepts that she’s in this chapter in her life where she may not always be able to do that. But she still gives it her all,” Warriner says.
Wills has rarely missed an event in the NZ Ocean Swim Series, and in the 2016-17 series she was third overall for the season in her age division. But her 2019 brain surgery took her out of the water for three months and she took time to regain fitness.
She did the 3.8km Swim the Shore in Auckland before Christmas (of 2020), even after telling daughter Kelly she thought it may be too far. “When I was healthy, I would have baulked at the distance. But I finished it without having to be rescued,” she laughs.
She finished fifth in her 50-59 age group: “That’s my aim now – to do my best to finish in the top five.”
Wills lost her fulltime job as an EMT – having had a cerebral tumour, she’s no longer able to drive an ambulance. But she’s hoping to work for St John at major events.
That’s why swimming has become her “job” now. Other veteran swimmers continue to motivate her – like 60-year-old Taupō local Carol Prop, and 79-year-old Derek Eaton, who's the former Anglican Bishop of Nelson (“We text back and forth writing ‘Eat my splash!’ Wills laughs).
And of course, there’s Kelly. “When all you’re doing is struggling to get through those chemotherapy days, you tend to lose your purpose. But she’s my purpose – I need to get up and do my job for her.”
