English Channel (June 21-30, 2026) | COMPLETED
Catalina Channel (September 11th, 2026) | COMPLETED
I started endurance sports after a life-changing illness and hospitalization in 2023. I was not fearless after that experience. If anything, I became more aware of how fragile life and the body can be. But I also realized I had come very close to dying without ever truly going after the things I had always wanted.
Swimming has always been the thing I came back to.
As a kid, I read Swimming to Antarctica, and I loved the way Lynne Cox talked about swimming. It felt like she understood something about it that I understood too, even before I had the words for it. That book became a comfort to me.
When I stopped college swimming, I knew I wasn’t done being a swimmer. I wanted more from the sport, but for years I let fear convince me I wasn’t strong enough, brave enough, or capable enough to chase the bigger dreams that stayed quietly in the back of my mind.
Getting sick changed the way I understood those limits.
At first, endurance sports were a way to rebuild my health and learn to trust my body again. Then they became a way to stop waiting.
I ran my first marathon. I moved into triathlon. I found my way back to swimming. And eventually, I let myself say the thing out loud:
The English Channel was my Everest.
On June 21, 2026, I swam it.
It took me 14 hours and 23 minutes.
The last several hours were extraordinarily hard. There were moments when the finish felt impossibly far away, and I had to keep finding reasons to take another stroke without knowing exactly how much longer I would need to do it.
But eventually, France appeared in front of me.
I climbed out of the water having accomplished something that had lived at the far edge of my imagination since I was sixteen years old.
I thought an experience like that might teach me that I was fearless.
Instead, it taught me something much more useful.
You can be afraid. You can hurt. You can doubt yourself. You can reach the part where you start bargaining with yourself and looking for a way out.
And you can keep going.
That lesson has followed me through the eleven weeks between the English Channel and my next challenge: the Catalina Channel.
Recovery from the English Channel was not perfectly linear. Neither was training for Catalina. I dealt with illness, fatigue, tendon problems, a shoulder that needed rest, and the strange physical and emotional highs and lows that can follow an enormous endurance effort.
There were moments when I wondered whether my body was telling me Catalina needed to wait.
But this time, preparation looked different.
Instead of trying to control every variable, I learned to adapt. I rested when my body needed rest. I changed training when circumstances changed. I listened to people who have spent years in this sport. And slowly, I realized that being prepared does not always mean everything went according to plan.
Sometimes it means knowing what to do when it doesn’t.
On September 10th, I’ll board another boat, this time headed toward Catalina Island. Sometime that night, I’ll jump off that boat in the dark and try to swim back to the California mainland.
If I make it, Catalina will complete my Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming: 20 Bridges around Manhattan, the English Channel, and the Catalina Channel.
But somewhere along the way, this became about much more than collecting three swims.
One of the moments that changed my perspective happened during my first intentional night swim before the English Channel.
It was Memorial Day weekend in Connecticut. I wanted to experience swimming in darkness before the Channel so the first time wouldn’t be during the actual crossing.
I was nervous all day.
Once the sun disappeared and the water turned black, my brain immediately started finding things to worry about.
My shoulder still hurt.
What if it doesn’t recover in time?
What was that shadow?
I’m a mile from shore.
Why do I do this to myself?
At one point, I stopped to clear my goggles, and one of my kayakers told me to look up.
I thought I was in trouble.
Instead, she said:
“Look at the sky. Not everyone gets to do this.”
That sentence has stayed with me.
Because she was right.
I get to do this.
And one of the people who helped me understand what that really means is my sister.
My sister lives with ankylosing spondylitis (AS), a chronic inflammatory disease that causes pain, fatigue, inflammation, and progressive damage to the spine and joints.
Her symptoms began with severe swelling in her lower extremities, pain, and mobility limitations that made walking difficult during flare-ups. After months of unsuccessful treatment attempts, including physical therapy, she was referred to the only in-network rheumatologist available to her in Alaska. Because of specialist wait times, it took several more months before she was finally seen and diagnosed with AS.
Since then, she has undergone multiple immunosuppressive and biologic treatments, several of which failed to control the progression of her disease. She is currently on her fifth medication while continuing to manage chronic pain, mobility limitations caused by fusion in her spine and hips, and vision complications from recurrent iritis.
Just days before that night swim, she joined me for a training swim in Alaska. Getting to the lake required a long drive and a hike over uneven footing, steep stairs, and muskeg.
What I remember most wasn’t the hike.
It was seeing her happy.
She had energy. She was smiling. She looked like herself.
After years of watching AS take things from her, what I felt wasn’t pride.
It was relief.
Relief that she felt well enough to be there.
Relief that she wanted to be there.
Relief that, for that moment, AS wasn’t winning.
And that night, floating in the dark water, something clicked.
I was worried about a challenge I had chosen.
One of the people supporting me had spent years facing a challenge she never chose.
That changed the way I thought about what I was doing.
Over the past few years, swimming has taken me around the world. It has introduced me to people I never would have known otherwise. People have shared their experience with me, challenged me, taught me, encouraged me, and gotten on boats and kayaks in the middle of the night to help me reach another shore.
I have found something that makes me feel incredibly alive.
That is a privilege.
And I want to use it for something beyond myself.
This fundraiser is for the people who keep going when nobody sees how much effort it takes.
People living with chronic illness.
People living with invisible illness.
People adapting to bodies and circumstances they did not choose.
People finding ways to keep participating in their lives and holding on to the pieces of themselves that illness has tried to take away.
I’ve learned that strength doesn’t always look like pushing harder.
Sometimes strength is adapting.
Sometimes it is accepting help.
Sometimes it is starting again.
Sometimes it is simply continuing when the thing in front of you is hard and there is no applause for doing it.
On September 10th, I get to swim.
And I am overwhelmingly grateful for that.
If telling this story helps one more person learn what ankylosing spondylitis is, helps someone living with AS feel seen, or raises money that supports education, advocacy, research, and resources for people living with this disease, then these swims get to mean something beyond the shore I eventually reach.
Some of the strongest people I know are not swimming across channels.
They’re the people who keep going.
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