March 8th is International Women’s Day and an opportunity for us to celebrate the many inspiring women who propel our sport of ocean swimming forward...
Since 1926, when Gertrude Ederle coated herself in grease and braved the Atlantic cold and blooms of jellyfish for 14 hours to cross the English Channel, women have challenged the best seabound men and carved their own wakes as pioneers in open water. That day, Ederle even beat the fastest time for men by almost two hours.
Over time, the public learned that a proclivity for extreme endurance has nothing to do with gender. This fact has been reinforced by countless women over the years. Their stories are all entangled as they drove each other forward, churning global waters with the spirit of friendly competition. The year after Ederle made her Channel crossing, Mercedes Gleitze became the first British woman to make it across, helping to popularise the heroic feats of female marathon swimmers. Then, in the ‘50s, Florence Chadwick set out and swam the English Channel in both directions – she also held records for crossings of California’s Catalina Channel.
Over the decades, generations of women donned goggles and marched seaward, motivated by early pioneers who broke barriers and records, swimming defiantly before seas of furrow-browed men. Together, they are champions of gender equality, and the transformative power ocean swimming can have on society. Some competed before the world's media and were toasted by presidents. Others battled less publicly, ploughing through seemingly impossible feats after years of brutal training, with little fanfare.
“Words are sometimes too small, too confining, to convey the depth of thought and strength of emotions."
To celebrate all our ocean swimming women around the world, we’ve collected quotes from some of our favourite interviews these past few years - most with women who routinely swim long distances and are no strangers to breaking records in open water.
Their stories are often moving and electrifying, filled with visceral descriptions of terrifying obstacles, like shark encounters and rolling ocean swells. Yet we will never know the depth of what they felt out there in the grips of open water. As the great Lynne Cox (who famously swam the freezing Bering Strait as an act of diplomacy during the Cold War) wrote: “Words are sometimes too small, too confining, to convey the depth of thought and strength of emotions."
Maya Merhige
Her high school classmates called her the 'Girl Who Does Those Crazy Swims' after Maya Merhige made it her ambition to swim the Oceans Seven as a senior. In July 2024, she swam a 33-kilometre crossing of the English Channel. Before that she also crossed the Catalina Channel (in 2021), as well as completing a 45.9-kilometre circumnavigation around Manhattan Island (in 2023). All the while, since the age of 9, Merhige has been raising funds for Swim Across America - in fact, she has raised over $100,000 for paediatric cancer research in her community:
"Training is completely different for each swim, and it has become even more unique as I’ve gotten older and other time commitments have appeared in my life. I swim in the pool with my high school eight times a week through the spring and spend each Saturday morning doing a long swim in the SF Bay. I usually start at 30 minutes to acclimate to the water temperature and then add 30 minutes each week until I get to my biggest training swim, usually somewhere around six hours."
"Because I swim year-round, and I had done a major swim a few months beforehand, my training stuck, and I was able to do Manhattan with minimal training..."
"Training for Manhattan and the English Channel was unique for me because I was simultaneously dealing with serious health issues. I underwent major emergency surgery three months before I swam Manhattan, so my training basically consisted of a couple 3-hour swims. Because I swim year-round, and I had done a major swim a few months beforehand, my training stuck, and I was able to do Manhattan with minimal training. I’ve continued to have health issues this year, and I was hospitalized twice in May, preventing me from swimming for the entire month. I basically had to do the same training progression twice, but I was able to stick with my pool/open water split and train sufficiently."
Anna-Carin Nordin
After the birth of her son, Anna-Carin Nordin began her swimming migration to open water. She took part in a World Championship race in Copenhagen and then travelled to Dover and started her Oceans Seven journey. Between 2010 and 2013, Anna took on the ultimate challenge in marathon swimming and became the first female to finish the Oceans Seven and the second person in the world to do it, after Stephen Redmond. In 2018, Anna was nominated to be included in the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame.
At the time of our interview, Anna had just finished wrestling the Baltic Sea, fresh from a circumnavigation swim of 333 cumulative kilometres around the Swedish island of Öland - the second largest island in the country:
"The best day was when I was getting to a lighthouse where there was a former swimming club friend of mine – he is running the lighthouse. So, when I was arriving, he was up in the lighthouse with a Swedish flag. It was so great. And it was the same when I was going to leave – he was out there, saying: 'bye, bye!'."
"...when I was arriving, he was up in the lighthouse with a Swedish flag. It was so great."
Beth French
Beth French was wheelchair-bound as a teenager due to chronic fatigue syndrome (ME). In adulthood, she became a world record-holding marathon swimmer, who discovered an innate love of open water in her early 20s, in Hawaii. She was the first person to swim from Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly and also had a well-reported encounter with a tiger shark during her attempt to swim the Oceans Seven:
"So, what happened was – I was in the Moloka’i channel [at night] and the Pacific water moves so much, the pilot boat can't stay right alongside you for safety reasons. I have a kayaker alongside me, but the boat kind of leapfrogs ahead. The pilot boat is lit up like a Christmas tree. I've got a light on the back of my head, so the pilot can see me. And I lifted my head to take my hourly drink and literally within 30 seconds of the boat having pulled ahead, the kayaker says: ‘please don't panic but there's a shark behind you’. And so, we were in an 8-foot swell. So, the pilot boat didn't have a hundred percent visibility of the kayaker. They could only see him every minute or so. And so, the kayaker was signalling and flashing his head torch to the boat to say there was a shark. The shark sloped down and came and literally swam underneath me and around and rested his nose against the front of the kayak. Only I didn't know at the time because I was obviously level with him in the water."
"The kayaker, he turned his head torch on main beam and was shining it down so we could watch, you know, and see where the shark was. And yeah, so I lifted my feet because I could see [the shark] looming underneath me..."
"Obviously you don't want a light shining in the water normally in the dark because light attracts little things and little things attract bigger things, and bigger things, you know, bite you sometimes. But you really need to know what's going on in that moment. So the kayaker, he turned his head torch on main beam and was shining it down so we could watch, you know, and see where the shark was. And yeah, so I lifted my feet because I could see it looming underneath me, but it went round to the side of the kayaker. He knew where it was. Mostly I couldn't see and it was less than two meters from me for about six or seven minutes, before the pilot arrived. They circled back around to find out what was going on. Well, you know, we were just very still and very calm. And it was very surreal."
Kirsten Callaghan
Back in 2021, we heard about an exciting independent film project, 'Vindication Swim', and reached out to lead actress and native Brightonian Kirsten Callaghan. The film tells the story of Mercedes Gleitze, who is best known for being the first British woman to swim across the English Channel. She was also the first person to swim the slightly warmer Straits of Gibraltar.
In our interview, we learned more about Callaghan's training and experience as she to learned to embody this inspiring endurance swimmer:
"One of my favourite quotes by Mercedes is 'I passionately love the sea; nothing else moves me as it does. I love and understand its every mood; and I sometimes fancy that the sea knows and understands me, too.' Mercedes had such a deep connection to the sea and when I read about her and her diary extracts it feels as if she was born to swim. Mercedes had equal levels of respect and fearlessness of the water. The sea was a place she could be free and excel. As well as her embedded desire to be recognised as a swimmer, another big motivation for Mercedes was that the prize money from her swims would enable her to help the homeless. Mercedes had developed a deep empathy for the poverty-stricken after being exposed to the extreme levels in London when she was working as a typist. Mercedes virtually gave everything she owned away, using her funds to build and run a homeless shelter in Leicester."
"One of my favourite quotes by Mercedes is 'I passionately love the sea; nothing else moves me as it does...'"
"I trained for three months before we started shooting Vindication Swim and have spent the last two years open water swimming. Whilst filming in the English Channel I have encountered sea-life, extreme weather conditions and icy temperatures. For me, there is nothing that connects you so deeply to nature as open-water swimming. I feel present in myself and in the world when I am swimming out in the sea. I plunge into escapism and survival-mode at the same time. Having had a teeny tiny taste of what Mercedes experienced out in those deep waters - it reinforces how remarkable she really was."
Catherine McKenna
We learned a lot from our talk with Catherine McKenna – Canadian lawyer and former politician in the Liberal Party (who served as a Cabinet minister from 2015-2021). Catherine was the minister of environment and climate change from 2015-19. Then the minister of infrastructure and communities from 2019-21. During our interview, she told us about one of her most memorable moments in the water during an Arctic trip to the Canadian Torngat Mountains:
"So, I went with our Inuit leader, Natan Obed – who’s this really awesome guy – and we went to the Torngat Mountains in Canada. It's in the Arctic in Labrador, although the Inuit called this area: Nunatsiavut. There they have this glacial lake. And I just went and put my bathing suit on. I mean, people thought that I was bonkers, but I just went in and it was freezing cold. It was just so beautiful."
"There were these massive cliffs around us and someone took a picture under the water and it had these layers of colour. I can't describe it. It was so magical..."
"There were these massive cliffs around us and someone took a picture under the water and it had these layers of colour. I can't describe it. It was so magical, and even though it's really cold, like in a way that was kind of the point – it was shocking. And you go in and and actually different water temperatures have a different impact on your body, but you're like acutely aware of it, right? Swimming isn’t just the water. It’s not just the swim. It’s like the journey. It’s the experience. It’s the surroundings. That's what's very different from a pool. It's the air. It was just the fact I was in such a special place where not a lot of people really get to. I was also with someone from the community and it meant so much for him to show me this place. He was so proud. That was just one of those moments. It's funny though, some of the folk were like: ‘What is she doing?’' But I just swim… I just swim."
Rebecca Ajulu-Bushell
In 2024, we talked to debut author, double British champion, and the first Black woman ever to swim for Great Britain: Rebecca Ajulu-Bushell. She shared her experiences of feeling like an outsider on the competitive stage, overcoming fears of open water, and the intensity of training at the highest level of pool swimming. Her career spanned 10 years and during that time she became a world number one and British champion - she won the 50m and 100m breaststroke in 2010:
"I'm from East Africa, Kenya, and my father is 'Luo', which means that we're from a tribe that's around the shores of Lake Victoria. That lake is the biggest body of water in Africa, possibly in the world. I'm not sure if it's bigger than the Great Lakes in Canada. Anyway, it's this huge lake, and my first memory of being in water was there. I was really scared of water when I was younger."
"I don't know why that is. There are a lot of cultural implications: water fear, and the black and brown community. My mum's white, my dad's black, and so I would go into the water, but I'd have to wear a rubber ring, and armbands, and a floaty vest. My mum would have to hold me, and I'd be like: "You can't [let me go]!" You know, I was just terrified. Then I think we were in Uganda, I think it was my third birthday, and I swam in Lake Victoria, and that's kind of my first real memory of actually feeling in communion with the water."
"After that I took all of my armbands and floaty vests off, and that was it - I never got out of the water. I loved it forever!"
"After that I took all of my armbands and floaty vests off, and that was it - I never got out of the water. I loved it forever!"
Sarah Thomas
Finally, we wanted to share this from our chat with Sarah Thomas, who has completed some of the world's longest swims. In 2017, Thomas set the current world record for the longest continuous swim (unassisted and without a wetsuit) in current-neutral conditions - a total distance of 104.6 miles over 67 hours in Lake Champlain. After completing cancer treatments, Sarah also became the first swimmer to complete a four-way crossing of the English Channel in 54 hours and 10 minutes, as well as a two-way crossing of the North Channel in 21 hours and 46 minutes:
"I will say probably the lowest moment of that swim was the halfway point. So, I had already swum from England, from England to France and then I was back in England, and I was pretty sick, it was the middle of the night, and I just was not into it. I was like, 'I've been in the English Channel for 24 hours now and that's plenty long.' I'm vomiting. I don't need to be here anymore, and it really took quite a lot of encouragement from my boat crew to get me through probably about a solid six hours of some pretty serious whining and whinging about how I wasn't that tough. I was ready to get out and I was cold. I was being a little kiddie."
"I was like, 'I've been in the English Channel for 24 hours now andthat's plenty long...'"
"Probably one of the highest moments was when I did make the triple and we kind of pushed off again and I was like, no one's ever done this before. This is amazing. So, that was a really special moment to know that I was the first person who even tried a four-way. No matter what happened after that moment, at least I was on my way back and doing something that had never even been tried before."
