Post by University of California, Berkeley

What drives someone to swim the entire California coastline? For Catherine Breed (BA Integrative Biology '15), the answer is simple: “Someone can do it. Why not me?” At Berkeley, Breed excelled at distance swimming events and finished in Cal’s all-time top 10 in the 500-yard, 1,000-yard, and 1,650-yard freestyle. She’s helped Cal to two NCAA swimming titles and made the Olympic trials. Still, she wanted to go bigger. Always one to thrive on new challenges, she joined the Dolphin Swimming & Boating Club to take on open-water swimming. The sport involved navigating erratic currents, shifting tides, and sharks—Breed finally felt free. She went on to set a women’s world record for the fastest lengthwise crossing of Lake Tahoe, became the first person to swim from the Golden Gate Bridge to Half Moon Bay, zipped through the English Channel, and crossed the North Channel between Northern Ireland and Scotland. After countless ventures spent learning how to manage freezing temperatures, swimming in no wetsuit, and enduring long distances without contact with her support crew, Breed was prepared for her biggest challenge to date: a 30-mile stretch from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge. “Grit is my superpower,” she says. Indeed, 13 hours and 54 minutes later, she broke the overall record, men’s and women’s. Now, Breed is preparing to take on her biggest challenge yet: she will swim the entire length of California. “There’s never a good time to do something this big or to go do something scary,” she says. “If you don’t do it when you’re thinking about it, it probably will never happen.” Read the full story at: https://lnkd.in/gTCy9FRj #CalAlumStory #UCBerkeley