Queen of Ache – Cal Alumni Association

Long earlier than she made the olympic trials, or helped cal to 2 ncaa swimming titles, or launched into all the remainder of it—rehab from the 4 ACL tears, the record-breaking marathon swims, the 11-hour slog throughout the North Channel in 52-degree water, and now the unprecedented try to swim the whole lot of the California shoreline—Catherine Breed was only a child who noticed the ocean not as a menace however a sanctuary.

Back in these days, when her household went crusing off Jack London Square Marina, or took journeys to French Polynesia, Breed and her sister entertained themselves by amassing trash they discovered floating within the water and making a retailer of trinkets for his or her mother and father to buy at. They’d bounce off the boat into deep water, by no means nervous about what lurked beneath. At one level, she remembers, she and her sister even tried to draw reef sharks by squeezing blood into the water from small cuts on their legs, hoping the blacktips close by would come nearer. “Our whole childhood was just being a little feral in the ocean,” she says. Being fearful of the water by no means actually crossed their minds.

After starring within the pool at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, Breed—recognized to her buddies as Cat—selected Cal over a number of suitors. “If swimming failed, where did I want to have a degree from?” At Berkeley, she bonded along with her teammates—they dubbed themselves the “Golden Class”—and excelled at center distance and distance occasions, finally ending in Cal’s all-time prime ten within the 500-yard freestyle, 1,000-yard freestyle, and 1,650-yard freestyle. 

She loved pool swimming, however the exercise is, by its nature, an train in constraints. You swim the identical distance, staring down on the identical black line, make the identical kick flip, then swim again to the place you began. Again and time and again, 1000’s upon 1000’s of instances. 

Open-water swimming can appear daunting, if not overwhelming. After all, ocean water is commonly very chilly, and, as marathon swimmer Elaine Howley as soon as put it, ‘things with teeth’ are throughout you.

Breed hungered for extra. She’s the type of one who thrives on new challenges. She huge wave surfs and backcountry skis within the winter. Her school housemate and good pal Sarah Stoker Enix ’17 says she’s “the strongest, grittiest person I know.” So Breed returned to the ocean, becoming a member of the Dolphin Swimming & Boating Club, a historic, tightknit group dedicated to swimming and different water sports activities in San Francisco’s Aquatic Park.

To the uninitiated, open-water swimming can appear daunting, if not overwhelming. After all, ocean water is commonly very chilly, and, as marathon swimmer Elaine Howley as soon as put it, “things with teeth” are throughout you. Whereas pool swimming guarantees an absence of novelty, no two open-water swims are the identical. Tides and currents shift, typically abruptly. Ships and motorboats share the water, as do seals, kelp, and all method of marine life. In a pool, swimmers can put their head down and log laps on autopilot; in open water, in case you don’t lookup each half-dozen strokes, you possibly can rapidly stray off beam.  

This is form of the purpose. Being in open water gave Breed a way of freedom. So she realized handle tides, currents, and the chilly. And she started swimming longer distances, chasing achievements whereas abiding by the principles of open- water marathon swimming: no wetsuit, no intentional bodily contact with help crew, and no touching the escort boat at any level. For vitality, she trusted buddies and help crews to toss her “feeds” of carbohydrate-rich meals.

Breed took to the game instantly. She set a ladies’s world report for the quickest lengthwise crossing of Lake Tahoe, turned the primary particular person to swim from the Golden Gate Bridge to Half Moon Bay, blitzed the English Channel, and made that profitable crossing of the North Channel between Northern Ireland and Scotland, a swim that required her to realize weight to offer insulation, pushing her physique fats proportion up into the “high twenties.” Doing so required a simple technique: she mainly ate on a regular basis. “Two breakfasts, pint of ice cream whenever I wanted.” It didn’t come naturally. “It’s really hard being a late 20s, early 30-year-old woman actively putting on weight when it feels like the whole world’s trying to lose it.” It labored, although; she says when she got here out of the water on the finish of the swim she was truly scorching. 

That helped put together her for her most difficult try to date: from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge, a bone-chilling, shark-infested, 30-mile route. Just six swimmers had accomplished it. 

In August 2025, at the hours of darkness of evening, Breed launched, starting close to the jagged outcroppings of the Farallons. To her left, a help boat mirrored her progress. To her proper, Enix, a former Cal rower, stored tempo in a kayak, offering encouragement, info, and one other set of eyes. Crucially, Enix additionally towed a Shark Shield, a tool that emits electrical pulses that may overstimulate the electroreceptors in a shark’s snout, inflicting spasms and discomfort. Additionally, Breed wore a Sharkbanz anklet, which emitted a magnetic discipline, additionally designed to repel sharks. For good measure, her swimsuit bore a yellow-and-black sample designed to distinguish her from the profusion of seals. In a location just like the Farallons, dwelling to one of many largest nice white populations on the earth, you possibly can by no means be too cautious, particularly throughout migration—which it was. 

As Breed swam, unseen creatures surfaced and roiled the water round her. Tides surged. Soon sufficient, the chilly started to take a toll. Every time Breed begins an open-water swim, she has to face down her fears. In the previous, she would lean into the truth that she wasn’t in management. She’d suppose again to what she realized concerning the thought of “energy units” whereas swimming at Cal, how “negative thinking or letting those intrusive thoughts come in is taking up some of those units.” Her aim was to “stay hyper-focused on what I’m doing and one stroke after another.”

On most swims, she might fall into a straightforward rhythm, what some open- water swimmers name a “moving meditation.” To move the time, she’d typically identify her physique elements, from A to Z. Mostly, although, she stayed fixated on the duty at hand, asking herself questions like: How’s my core? When’s the following feed? How’s my tempo? How’s my temperature?

Not on this evening. Her physique rebelled. Fatigue tugged at her. She let her thoughts wander, specializing in her shivering and the depth of the darkness round her. She observed the ocean birds and felt the sardines thumping into her. Jellyfish stung her neck and face. She’d lengthy mentioned “Grit is my superpower,” believing that these kinds of endurance assessments are 90 % psychological and 10 % health. Now she felt herself desirous to give up. 

As six hours was ten, then twelve, she did every thing she might to maintain going. She’d been this depressing as soon as earlier than, crossing the North Channel, and had resorted to mentally itemizing all of the issues in her life that had been more durable—the ACL accidents, household adversity, ending an Ironman on a torn meniscus. 

Finally, after 13 hours, the Golden Gate got here into view. In the kayak, Enix checked the time and hollered at her pal: You can break the course report! 

 “I don’t even care,” Breed yelled again. 

She will need to have although. Soon after, she set free a scream and picked up her tempo, blasting towards the bridge. Upon hauling herself onto the boat, she heard the information: She’d damaged the general report, males’s and ladies’s, by simply over 4 minutes. Media consideration adopted, additional cementing her stature within the open-water swimming world. Quinn Fitzgerald, the manager director of the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA), declared her “a remarkable ambassador for the sport.” 

Still, Breed wished to go larger. An thought, lengthy germinating, got here to the fore: Instead of simply swimming segments of the California coast, why not make a run at the entire thing? It could be an epic quest, the sort that takes months, not days, the watery equal of one thing like mountaineering the Pacific Crest Trail. She considered others who’d undertaken comparable expeditions: Ross Edgley, who swam across the entirety of Britain; Lewis Pugh, the endurance swimmer recognized for his marathon and polar swims; and Sean Conway, the primary to swim the size of Great Britain. She famous that almost all of those had been males. 

Breed wished to do one thing like that—one thing grand, the type of factor you possibly can’t do whenever you’re older and have youngsters. If not now, when? She Googled to see if anybody had swum the size of California and located solely a point out of two brothers who’d paddled it. Satisfied, she set her aim: to swim from the border of Oregon to Mexico. She’d full the swim in levels, stopping every day after 5 or 6 hours, then choosing up the following day at that very same level. 

She didn’t want additional motivation. “I think endurance athletes have a hard time giving people their ‘why’ because they’re like, ‘I don’t know. It’s just there.’ I’m looking at it and [thinking], ‘Someone can do it. Why not me?’” But for an expedition like this, one with important prices, she wanted a bigger function. That’s the place Sea Dreamers got here in. A pair years earlier, she’d began the nonprofit group with a aim of fostering a group of empowered ladies and ocean stewards via ocean-based actions, conservation, and training. She would use her swim to additional these targets. 

As she deliberate the expedition, her Berkeley community stepped up. Fundraising, monetary oversight, authorized recommendation, management for Sea Dreamers—all dealt with by folks with a connection to the varsity. Cal benefactor Ned Spieker ’66 donated to the trigger. And whereas Enix can’t be there to kayak, she is dealing with advertising and serving as treasurer of the nonprofit, serving to handle funds and operations. 

She’d been this depressing as soon as earlier than, crossing the North Channel, and had resorted to mentally itemizing all of the issues in her life that had been more durable.

The launch date for the try, dubbed Swim California, is round July 1. The 33-year-old Breed plans to be out till October and can make greater than a dozen media stops alongside the best way to advertise marine conservation. The full route will cowl roughly 900 miles of California shoreline, one of many longest staged ocean swims ever tried. “Just rugged and wild and something no one had even conceived  of” is how WOWSA’s Fitzgerald places it. “Kudos to Cat for just having the sheer ambition and creativity to come up with a challenge like this.”

The swim will probably be ratified by Fitzgerald, making certain Breed adheres to the game’s exacting verification requirements: unbiased observers logging stroke price, water temperature, and tempo at common intervals; GPS monitoring of the route; and photograph and video proof establishing an official report of the swim. (For this swim, like Edgley’s Britain expedition, she’ll use a wetsuit; she desires to concentrate on distance and affect, not chilly endurance.)

Breed is aware of she has to go all-in, so she’s quitting her job as a medical system gross sales consultant. “Med tech’s not going anywhere, but my chance to swim the coast of California before I want kids and to settle down and be married—that’s right now,” she says. “And four months is such a small amount of your life.”

To put together, she’s learning those that’ve taken on comparable feats. She’s spoken with Conway, and browse up on different makes an attempt. She is aware of the potential obstacles: hypothermia, riptides, a blown shoulder. When Edgley swam round Great Britain, his tongue started to disintegrate, the extended salt publicity and friction breaking down the floor over time. 

Breed is undaunted. “There’s never a good time to do something this big or to go do something scary. And if you don’t do it when you’re thinking about it, it probably will never happen.”

As she says this, she is sitting on the Cal campus on a sunny spring day, the whistles from water polo apply audible as college students stroll previous. It’s the primary time she’s been again to Berkeley shortly. She lives in Mill Valley and spent the previous couple of years commuting to San Francisco most days, the place her work took her to UCSF earlier than she educated on the Olympic and Dolphin Clubs. More college students stroll by, headed to class. Their lives are scheduled and orderly, as Breed’s as soon as was. 

Now she units off into a terrific unknown. The identical child who as soon as squeezed drops of blood into the water, hoping to lure sharks, will spend months transferring via that very same ocean—chilly, huge, and alive.  

Chris Ballard is an creator and journalist who has taught on the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His newest guide, The Plunge: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water, got here out in June from Simon & Schuster.