Every lengthy undertaking, be it a marathon, a cross-country drive, or something much more extreme, has a point at which the halfway point ceases to feel like progress and begins to feel like a reckoning.
After spending more than 55 days in the Pacific Ocean swimming five to eight hours a day while negotiating frigid water and strong currents along one of the most difficult sections of North America’s coastline, Catherine Breed reached that moment somewhere off the Monterey Bay shoreline.
Breed 33, is trying to make history by being the first person to swim the entire 900 miles of California’s coast, from the Oregon border to Mexico. She began in July and had traveled precisely 450 miles as of midweek. “450 miles down, 450 to go” was the tone her team used on Instagram to commemorate the occasion in a way that was both joyous and sobering.
The ocean’s physical indifference to that milestone is what makes it feel especially remarkable. The water is devoid of banners. The kelp doesn’t split. There is no decrease in the currents. Breed just continued swimming while the GPS recorded a number that the humans observing from the surface found meaningful.
Growing up in Pleasanton, she competed for UC Berkeley and Amador Valley High School, won an NCAA title went on to set the world record for the fastest female swim across Lake Tahoe. These credentials are impressive, but they also highlight the fact that this swim is truly untested, even for an athlete of this caliber. It has never been done before. That’s not language used in marketing. She might be motivated in part by the blank space where there isn’t yet a record.
Big Sur, a stretch of coastline that is stunning from Highway 1 and difficult to navigate from sea level, will be her next obstacle. There are fewer opportunities for crew support due to the remote location the cliffs there aren’t decorative; instead, they create their own wind patterns and chop. Knowing that the second half of this journey starts with what may be its most challenging part makes it difficult not to feel some silent tension on her part.
Breed has been visiting coastal communities along the way to raise awareness of marine mammal rescue operations, ocean conservation kelp restoration initiatives the larger work of her nonprofit organization, Sea Dreamers, which aims to encourage women and girls to swim in open waters.
The swim itself seems to take a backseat to what she’s constructing around it. Perhaps inextricably linked to it. In ways that a traditional fundraising campaign couldn’t, the two things appear to support one another.”
Swim California is more than just a swim”, she stated. “It’s an invitation for people to reconnect with the ocean” . That might sound like a quote from a press release taken out of context, but since she has 55 days and 450 miles to prove it, it has more weight than it might otherwise.
It’s still unclear if she will finish in three months as planned or closer to four. That could be stretched by Big Sur. Over this length of time, fatigue compounds in peculiar ways. There’s something genuinely hard to ignore as you watch this happen from the shore: someone doing something that has never been done before not because the technology didn’t exist before, but because hardly anyone has ever tried.