This swim is different. At 33, Catherine Breed has won championships, shattered speed records and gained acclaim as an open-water ultramarathoner. Now she is doing what no one ever has: swimming the entire 900-mile California coast, from Oregon to Mexico.
More than a third of the way through her months-long odyssey, Catherine told a crowd of well-wishers in Bodega Bay that her body is holding up “really, really well.” What surprises her more is what she is discovering about the ocean with every swim.
“From the land, you look at the fog and the dark water, and you think, ‘There’s nothing out there.’ But it is so the opposite. Every quarter mile or so, the ocean changes.”
Murky brown turns crystalline blue. Whales glide beneath her. Dolphins play around her. A giant mola mola sunfish, “three times as big as me,” rises from the depths. Then suddenly, she goes from gliding through an aquarium to churning in a mammoth washing machine.
In the frigid waters off Cape Mendocino, Catherine found herself powering up, over and down seven-foot waves. As she bucked the current, her pace slowed from more than two miles an hour to about one. “I felt like I was swimming backwards.”
Eventually, rather than fighting the current, Catherine worked with it—sometimes swimming a section from south to north and linking it with the next. It was a lesson she had learned on an earlier marathon swim:
“You cannot take hubris into the ocean. You have to surrender and find a way to work with Mother Nature.”
For all the punishment her body absorbs, Catherine considers the mental challenge harder. On social-media videos she has described “croggling”–crying while wearing goggles–in exhaustion or frustration.
“A bad moment doesn’t have to be a bad day,” she reminds herself, “and a bad day doesn’t have to be a bad week.” After one particularly grueling swim, she reset “with loved ones, my team—and a pint of ice cream.”
Every morning the crew wakes before dawn and motors to the exact point where the previous swim ended. Catherine pulls on a wetsuit customized for maximum mobility and slips into the unpredictable ocean.
“I’m not certain how the water will feel or how much chop will be hitting me.” She concentrates instead on what she does know: she can take one stroke, and another, and another.
At an intense sixty-six strokes a minute, Catherine has averaged about eight miles a day. Every thirty minutes, her crew tosses her a carbohydrate drink. To maintain strength and stamina, she aims to consume five to six thousand calories a day.
What worries her most? Not the great white sharks of California’s infamous Red Triangle. After hundreds of miles swimming in their territory, she has seen only two. Her greatest fear is failure.
“I committed to doing this, and I’m going to do it.” Catherine is determined not to let down the people who have invested their time, money and faith in her. And her Swim California expedition carries a purpose greater than setting another record.
“I so love this coast. I grew up in these waters. I surf these beaches. I spearfish. I sail. I wanted to tell the stories of its people, places and problems.” At stops along the route, Catherine highlights conservation groups such as the Greater Farallones Association, Mission Blue and the Surfrider Foundation.
“I want people to know what’s happening in the amazing ecosystem in their own backyard and to learn what they can do locally to protect it.”
And so, day after day, Catherine plunges into the Pacific to continue what she calls her “love letter to the coast”—one stroke, one swim at a time.
