SANDPOINT - It's one thing to rack up a couple of miles swimming laps in a pool, altogether another matter to cover more than five miles across the murky depths of open water.

This week, Donna Gaudet - who could barely make it down the length of a pool when she started training in 2008 - will slip into Lake Pend Oreille at Kilroy Bay and attempt a distance swim to Garfield Bay. She will tackle this often-choppy stretch of water alongside her friend Kate Helms-Tillery, who, like Gaudet, has been training for the lake crossing as a member of the U.S. Masters Swim Program.

"We think it's 5.3 miles," said Gaudet. "If it's farther than that, we really don't want to know."

The distance swim has required physical and logistical preparation, as both women will have a kayak paddling alongside as a support crew. In addition, the sheriff's department had to be notified so an event plan could be filed in advance.

"They just want to know what's going on in case someone calls and says, 'There's two crazy people trying to swim across the lake,'" Gaudet explained.

In her case, training for the bay-to-bay excursion has included working with ultra-marathoner Mike Ehredt, who has completed the 250-mile Trans-Himalaya Run in Nepal, Eco-Challenge expedition races in Borneo and Fiji, finished the 160-mile, six-day Marathon des Sables across the Sahara Desert twice and became the 34th person ever to cross the finish line of all four 100-mile ultra-marathon races that make up the Rocky Mountain Slam in a single season.

Last year, Ehredt completed a mission he called Project America Run, in which he ran and walked more than 4,300 miles from Astoria, Ore., to Rockland, Maine, placing personalized American flags at every mile along his route to honor service members who died in the Iraq War.

His regimen for Gaudet - whose sister-in-law, Peggy Gaudet, is also a veteran of ultra-marathon races and is Ehredt's girlfriend - focused on core body strength and 2-mile swimming workouts. Two weeks ago, she completed a 3-mile swim in Hope, followed by a 4-mile trial run last week.

Gaudet first was inspired to go the distance when she was hooked by watching the Long Bridge Swim - an event that takes place about the time she leaves North Idaho each year to return to her position as a math professor at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona. After a few years of "watching and wishing," she decided to participate in the 1.76-mile swim from the north end of the Long Bridge to Dog Beach in 2008.

"I never swam as a kid, except for learning how not to drown," the swimmer said. "When I first started working out, I couldn't swim from one end of the pool to the other without gasping for air. I have (Long Bridge Swim founder) Eric Ridgeway to thank, because it's his baby. The creation of that event got me to where I am now."

In both the Sandpoint event and the Steve Omi Swim in Coeur d'Alene, Gaudet has consistently improved her times from one year to the next. Now she is ready to try for a goal that is more than three times the distance of the Long Bridge. In that attempt, she will use one critical skill that was gained along the way - an ability to swim through open water and face the challenges it presents. The women will wear wetsuits to stave off the effects of water temperature and have worked on strategies to look up and site on landmarks every few strokes in order to stay on course.

But Lake Pend Oreille places other demands on anyone who dares to take on its deeper regions and, according to Gaudet, its size alone can play games with the mind.

"Mentally, it's very difficult, because in this lake you can't see anything," she said. "You can't look down and see the bottom of the pool and you can't stand up whenever you want to.

"This lake is so vast and you've got so much water underneath you," she added. "We're going to be swimming into the mouth of a bay that is 800 feet deep."

Gaudet, who has had a summer home in Garfield Bay since 2000, gazed across to Kilroy Bay for some time before what started as an idle thought became the target of her ambition.

"For the last eight years, we'd sit out on our dock and say, 'We could do that - we could swim over there,'" she said. "Finally, a couple of years ago, we decided we'd better do something about it, because there's a lot of training required for a 5-mile swim."

Depending on weather and water conditions, Gaudet and Helms-Tillery will reach for what they expect to be about a 4-hour passage sometime this week. Her gazes across the water take on a different aspect these days, partly informed by athletic experience, but also colored by the knowledge of how much work it will take to go the distance.

"With training, your perspective changes on how long something is," Gaudet said. "And there's a point where you go from surviving and fighting the water to moving through it and gliding - that's where you really start to see progress.

"I'm not completely there yet," she continued, "but I'm touching the edge of it."

Gaudet has labeled her distance swim "Five for Five" after her goal to swim five miles and raise $5,000 for a group called the Aogaah Foundation, an amount that would help cover operational expenses for the organization's children's school in Cambodia for one year. As of last week, the swimmer, who sits on the foundation's board, was nearing the $3,500 mark in pledges and donations for the event.

To learn more about the school and to view a video link about the swim, visit: www.aogaah.org