It’s not just the fastest swim ever for a woman, but the fastest swim for any swimmer ever to complete the dangerous 30-mile trek from the Farallon Islands to San Francisco, though the record is not yet certified by official record keepers.
It has been almost exactly ten years since the first time that a woman swam from the Farallon Islands to San Francisco, a 30-mile, shark-infested journey in ice cold waters that is an even longer trek than swimming the English Channel. Now, ten years later, a woman just broke the record for the fastest swim ever across that distance.
The Chronicle reports that 32-year-old Mill Valley resident Catherine Breed completed the fastest swim ever from the Farallones to SF this week, and her time of 13 hours, 54 minutes and 10 seconds beats the previous record held by swimmer Joe Locke by about four minutes. So Breed broke the all-time record, not just the women’s record. But she is not yet the official record holder, as the swim is not yet certified by official record keepers.
Breed’s Instagram video above captures the trip (set to reggaeton music), which started late Monday night and concluded Tuesday once the sun was up. “A swim measured in times I wanted to stop, times I said I was too cold, times we had to make adjustments, and ONE very critical point where I decided to just Fcking Fight,” Breed posted. “Of all the swims I have done this one was the mentally hardest despite almost perfect conditions.”
She looks a little sunburnt, or maybe jellyfish-bitten, in a follow-up video posted Tuesday, hours after she finished. “I shivered from Hour Four until when I finished, and swimming while shivering is really tough,” Breed says. And she adds she nearly quit the whole thing, even when she could already see the Golden Gate Bridge. “I went underwater, and I came up, and I let out this guttural scream, I was like ‘Ahhh! Let’s go to the bridge!’” Breed said. “And I turned on this gear I didn’t know existed. I was swimming race pace for the last hour and a half."
KRON4 notes the stretch Breed swam is “some of the Pacific Ocean’s most notorious great white shark territory.” But Breed struggled more from jellyfish stings to her face and neck.
Also according to KRON4, she’s already the “world-record holder for the fastest female swim across Lake Tahoe.” But Breed is not focusing on her Farallones-to-SF record.
“I don’t think I care so much about the record,” she says in her Instagram video. “I’m more just proud that I finished.”
Yet even that record-breaking swim may have just been a warmup. According to the Chronicle, Breed “aspires to swim the entire 840-mile length of the California coast next year.”
Related: First Woman Completes Swim From Farallones To San Francisco [SFist]
Image: catherine.breed via Instagram
