A New Milestone in Long-Distance Swimming
In the quiet of the night on July 21, long-distance swimmer Catherine Breed emerged from Lake Tahoe at Skylandia Park, near Tahoe City, and cracked open a Pabst Blue Ribbon with her boyfriend. She had just completed an epic 60-mile swim around California’s deepest lake, marking a new achievement in long-distance swimming and taking a significant step toward her ambitious goal of swimming the entire California coast.
Breed, a 32-year-old resident of Mill Valley, isn’t the only person to swim the circumference of Lake Tahoe, but she is the first to do so over consecutive days. She followed the Lake Tahoe Water Trail, a multiday route around the lake typically used by kayakers and stand-up paddlers. However, she approached it in a unique way: “I wanted to show people, look, you can swim around Lake Tahoe, you can swim the water trail. You can make up your own adventure,” she said.
For Breed, the Lake Tahoe swim was a stepping stone toward swimming 900 miles along the California coast, from Oregon to Mexico, which she plans to begin next summer. As a marathon swimmer, she holds multiple records for swimming in large, open bodies of water. She was an all-star swimmer on a full-ride scholarship at UC Berkeley, where she ranked in the university’s top 10 in multiple events: the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free.
Her pursuit of endurance, marathon swims began after college. In 2017, she swam the length of Tahoe, setting a record for the 21.3-mile-long course that runs south to north, from Camp Richardson to Incline Village, Nevada. She is also the first person to swim from the Golden Gate Bridge to Half Moon Bay and set a record for swimming across Monterey Bay.
Unlike those swims, Breed’s recent journey around Lake Tahoe isn’t a ratified record. The lake isn’t a perfect circle, so there is no established route that can be judged, timed, and repeated with ratified results. She knows of several others, all women, who have swum the Lake Tahoe Water Trail. One woman swam the trail over the course of two years, while another swam it alongside biking and running over 12 days, but took a day off, so it wasn’t consecutive.
“I don’t think there ever will be, or ever could be, a Tahoe perimeter record,” Breed said. “So it’s more just like, ‘Go have fun. Go do it.’”
Even so, swimming around Lake Tahoe is a feat worth noting. She divided the distance into multiple segments completed on sequential days, stopping in Sunnyside, Rubicon Bay, Baldwin Beach, Cave Rock, and Sand Harbor. On Instagram, she compared it to running a marathon or 50-kilometer endurance race every day for multiple days in a row.
Breed adhered to the rules of marathon swimming, which she said are ingrained in her. She wore a normal bathing suit and no wetsuit, and did not touch any of the boats, kayaks, or stand-up paddle boards that people used to support her swim.
While she timed her swims for early in the morning or late at night, when the water would be calmer, she still encountered adverse conditions: pushing through choppy water and winds, avoiding Jet Ski-type watercraft, and the occasional water plane coming in for a landing.
Breed started her swim on Wednesday, July 16, after driving up to Tahoe from the Bay Area earlier in the day. She wanted to get in the water right away and kick off the swim with a “digestible” 4 miles from Skylandia to Sunnyside, on Tahoe’s West Shore.
“It was the perfect way to start off the swim,” Breed said.
The next morning, she set off down the West Shore toward Rubicon Bay, logging 9 miles in under four hours. July can be an ideal month to set out for a swim in Lake Tahoe. Breed is accustomed to and trained for swimming in cold water, so Tahoe felt relatively pleasant with surface water temperatures in the mid-60s on the days she was in the lake.
Her favorite stretch came on the third morning, swimming in Rubicon Bay as the sun rose over the mountains. In the winter, Breed skis in the backcountry down the snow-covered slopes of those mountains. Swimming offered a wholly different perspective: “The lake’s never going to look the same to me when I’m standing on top of those peaks,” she said.
When she is swimming, Breed said her mind is often blank. She enters a meditative state. Still, moments of gratitude surfaced through her thoughts, resupplying motivation for the next stroke and the stroke after that.
Other parts of the swim were more challenging. On Day 4, as she set off from Stateline toward Cave Rock, winds picked up and the surface of the lake became choppy, which was like “swimming over tiny mountains,” she said.
Jet Ski-type personal watercraft were another nemesis in the water. Throughout the swim, Breed’s distance from shore varied, but there were times when she was swimming up to a half mile from shore, where swimmers rarely if ever venture.
“We definitely had a few instances where we both had to stop and make ourselves big and wave our hands so that an oncoming boat would divert themselves,” Breed said.
Breed had a team of supporters nearby at every stroke, something she stresses is vital for feats like this. She is a volunteer ski patroller at Palisades Tahoe ski resort and her boyfriend works on the ski patrol, too. Their co-workers on ski patrol played a big role in supporting her swim, paddling a boat alongside her or providing meals or a place to sleep.
On the way to Cave Rock, a friend on a paddleboard followed her closely as she navigated waves and choppy water. At one point, they lost their water bottles and had to go find them, Breed said. All the way, she continually checked in to make sure they were both safe before continuing onward.
Even though it was a harder section, the fourth day’s leg to Cave Rock may have proven invaluable toward her larger goal of swimming the California coast, where adverse, choppy waters will be more likely than not.
“This wasn’t a record, it wasn’t even like a big first, it was just something I wanted to do and enjoy it and be present,” Breed said.
Breed recommends swimming the Lake Tahoe Water Trail to anyone who is up to the challenge. But her eyes are already set on the next step toward the California coast. Her next training swim will be from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge, a route that she expects to be much more difficult than Tahoe with cold water, sharks, wind, and strong currents. And it also has her extremely hopeful about her big challenge next year.
“It just made me realize Swim California is totally possible and is going to be very fun,” Breed said.
