A 33-year-old ultra-endurance athlete completed an unprecedented swim along the entire California coast, completing the 900-mile journey in less than four months.
Catherine Breed will celebrate the end of her swim at San Diego’s Coronado Beach on Monday afternoon, 111 days after her trip began July 1 at California’s northern border.
“For months, I measured my world over the next few miles,” Breed, a Bay Area native, told the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, describing how she moved through the ocean with “whales beneath me, plastic beside me.”
The record-breaking American open water swimmer previously swam the English Channel in 2018 and completed the Northern Canal crossing from Northern Ireland to Scotland in 2019 – widely considered one of the toughest endurance races in the world. But those famous 21-mile deep-sea crossings were just a dip in the pool compared to the 900-mile wild swim along the California coast that Breed and his team began planning three years ago.
“It’s like doing a 50k trail run or half an Ironman every day for about 110 days,” Breed said in a social media post.
Breed said she planned the coastal swim to test her own personal endurance, celebrate her love of the California coast, highlight environmental conservation efforts and encourage more women and girls to spend time in and on the ocean.
Breed swam the coast in stages, covering about 16 miles a day, with a support team on board who are also officially documenting the effort for the World Open Water Swimming Association. Breed slept aboard the ship and made stops along the coast to host events with ocean conservation groups. She also streamed much of her race on YouTube, including Monday’s “historic finish.”
One of the biggest challenges came at the very end of the swim, Breed said, navigating the polluted waters of Imperial Beach on the U.S.-Mexico border, which she called “some of the dirtiest waters in the United States, if not the world,” and it felt like “swimming in sewage.”
“Everyone is so obsessed with sharks,” Breed said in a video posted to his Instagram on Sunday. “We are so afraid of these animals that live in the ocean and don’t care about us, and we are more afraid of that than the damage and destruction we cause to our own home. »
The swimmer’s journey took place during what is expected to be an unprecedented Super El Niño season in the Pacific Ocean, with multiple tropical storms, dangerous waves hitting the California coast and a huge surge of warm coastal water called the “Kelvin wave” that moved north as Breed swam south. Breed told local media that the extreme weather was the hardest part of the challenge, telling KPBS San Diego that because of Super El Niño, “the current is literally going against us the whole way.”
As part of her trip, Breed reportedly navigated waves up to 7 feet, which she described as feeling like swimming “in a washing machine.”
Breed, a former distance swimmer at the University of California, Berkeley and member of the U.S. national team, transitioned to open water swimming after graduating from the Dolphin Club of San Francisco. She grew up in, on and around the water of coastal California, telling local radio station KQED: “At one point in my life, I think I had swum and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge more times than I had driven over it. »
In 2017, she set the record for the fastest person to swim Lake Tahoe in California in just under 9 hours. In 2022, at age 29, Breed became the first person to swim from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to Half Moon Bay, a 25-mile swim. Last year, she swam 30 miles through shark-filled waters, from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge.
“You can’t bring hubris or expectations into the ocean – whether you’re surfing, spearfishing, sailing or swimming. You can’t,” Breed told KQED earlier this year. “When I step into the ocean, it’s total surrender. You are completely present. Your only job is to put one arm in front of the other and be at peace with whatever the ocean gives you that day.”
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