Long before she made the Olympic trials, or helped Cal to two NCAA swimming titles, or embarked on all the rest of it—rehab from the four ACL tears, the record-breaking marathon swims, the 11-hour slog across the North Channel in 52-degree water, and now the unprecedented attempt to swim the entirety of the California coastline—Catherine Breed was just a kid who saw the ocean not as a threat but a sanctuary.
Back in those days, when her family went sailing off Jack London Square Marina, or took trips to French Polynesia, Breed and her sister entertained themselves by collecting trash they found floating in the water and creating a store of trinkets for their parents to shop at. They’d jump off the boat into deep water, never worried about what lurked beneath. At one point, she recalls, she and her sister even tried to attract reef sharks by squeezing blood into the water from small cuts on their legs, hoping the blacktips nearby would come closer. “Our whole childhood was just being a little feral in the ocean,” she says. Being scared of the water never really crossed their minds.
After starring in the pool at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, Breed—known to her friends as Cat—chose Cal over a host of suitors. “If swimming failed, where did I want to have a degree from?” At Berkeley, she bonded with her teammates—they dubbed themselves the “Golden Class”—and excelled at middle distance and distance events, eventually finishing in Cal’s all-time top ten in the 500-yard freestyle, 1,000-yard freestyle, and 1,650-yard freestyle.
She enjoyed pool swimming, but the activity is, by its nature, an exercise in constraints. You swim the same distance, staring down at the same black line, make the same kick turn, then swim back to where you started. Again and again and again, thousands upon thousands of times.
Open-water swimming can seem daunting, if not overwhelming. After all, ocean water is often very cold, and, as marathon swimmer Elaine Howley once put it, ‘things with teeth’ are all around you.
Breed hungered for more. She’s the kind of person who thrives on new challenges. She big wave surfs and backcountry skis in the winter. Her college housemate and good friend Sarah Stoker Enix ’17 says she’s “the strongest, grittiest person I know.” So Breed returned to the ocean, joining the Dolphin Swimming & Boating Club, a historic, tightknit group devoted to swimming and other water sports in San Francisco’s Aquatic Park.
To the uninitiated, open-water swimming can seem daunting, if not overwhelming. After all, ocean water is often very cold, and, as marathon swimmer Elaine Howley once put it, “things with teeth” are all around you. Whereas pool swimming promises an absence of novelty, no two open-water swims are the same. Tides and currents shift, sometimes abruptly. Ships and motorboats share the water, as do seals, kelp, and all manner of marine life. In a pool, swimmers can put their head down and log laps on autopilot; in open water, if you don’t look up every half-dozen strokes, you can quickly stray off course.
This is sort of the point. Being in open water gave Breed a sense of freedom. So she learned how to manage tides, currents, and the cold. And she began swimming longer distances, chasing achievements while abiding by the rules of open-water marathon swimming: no wetsuit, no intentional physical contact with support crew, and no touching the escort boat at any point. For energy, she depended on friends and support crews to toss her “feeds” of carbohydrate-rich foods.
Breed took to the sport immediately. She 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, blitzed the English Channel, and made that successful crossing of the North Channel between Northern Ireland and Scotland, a swim that required her to gain weight to provide insulation, pushing her body fat percentage up into the “high twenties.” Doing so required a straightforward strategy: she basically ate all the time. “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 worked, though; she says when she came out of the water at the end of the swim she was actually hot.
That helped prepare her for her most challenging attempt to date: from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge, a bone-chilling, shark-infested, 30-mile route. Just six swimmers had completed it.
In August 2025, in the dark of night, Breed launched, beginning near the jagged outcroppings of the Farallons. To her left, a support boat mirrored her progress. To her right, Enix, a former Cal rower, kept pace in a kayak, providing encouragement, information, and another set of eyes. Crucially, Enix also towed a Shark Shield, a device that emits electrical pulses that can overstimulate the electroreceptors in a shark’s snout, causing spasms and discomfort. Additionally, Breed wore a Sharkbanz anklet, which emitted a magnetic field, also designed to repel sharks. For good measure, her swimsuit bore a yellow-and-black pattern designed to differentiate her from the profusion of seals. In a location like the Farallons, home to one of the largest great white populations in the world, you can never be too careful, especially during migration—which it was.
As Breed swam, unseen creatures surfaced and roiled the water around her. Tides surged. Soon enough, the cold began to take a toll. Every time Breed begins an open-water swim, she has to face down her fears. In the past, she would lean into the fact that she wasn’t in control. She’d think back to what she learned about the idea of “energy units” while swimming at Cal, how “negative thinking or letting those intrusive thoughts come in is taking up some of those units.” Her goal was to “stay hyper-focused on what I’m doing and one stroke after another.”
On most swims, she could fall into an easy rhythm, what some open-water swimmers call a “moving meditation.” To pass the time, she’d sometimes name her body parts, from A to Z. Mostly, though, she stayed fixated on the task at hand, asking herself questions like: How’s my core? When’s the next feed? How’s my pace? How’s my temperature?
Not on this night. Her body rebelled. Fatigue tugged at her. She let her mind wander, focusing on her shivering and the depth of the darkness around her. She noticed the sea birds and felt the sardines thumping into her. Jellyfish stung her neck and face. She’d long said “Grit is my superpower,” believing that these types of endurance tests are 90 percent mental and 10 percent fitness. Now she felt herself wanting to quit.
As six hours turned into ten, then twelve, she did everything she could to keep going. She’d been this miserable once before, crossing the North Channel, and had resorted to mentally listing all the things in her life that had been harder—the ACL injuries, family adversity, finishing an Ironman on a torn meniscus.
Finally, after 13 hours, the Golden Gate came into view. In the kayak, Enix checked the time and hollered at her friend: You can break the course record!
“I don’t even care,” Breed yelled back.
She must have though. Soon after, she let out a scream and picked up her pace, blasting toward the bridge. Upon hauling herself onto the boat, she heard the news: She’d broken the overall record, men’s and women’s, by just over four minutes. Media attention followed, further cementing her stature in the open-water swimming world. Quinn Fitzgerald, the executive director of the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA), declared her “a remarkable ambassador for the sport.”
Still, Breed wanted to go bigger. An idea, long germinating, came to the fore: Instead of just swimming segments of the California coast, why not make a run at the whole thing? It would be an epic quest, the kind that takes months, not days, the watery equivalent of something like hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. She thought about others who’d undertaken similar expeditions: Ross Edgley, who swam around the entirety of Britain; Lewis Pugh, the endurance swimmer known for his marathon and polar swims; and Sean Conway, the first to swim the length of Great Britain. She noted that most of these were men.
Breed wanted to do something like that—something grand, the kind of thing you can’t do when you’re older and have kids. If not now, when? She Googled to see if anyone had swum the length of California and found only a mention of two brothers who’d paddled it. Satisfied, she set her goal: to swim from the border of Oregon to Mexico. She’d complete the swim in stages, stopping each day after five or six hours, then picking up the next day at that same point.
She didn’t need extra 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 significant costs, she needed a larger purpose. That’s where Sea Dreamers came in. A couple years earlier, she’d started the nonprofit organization with a goal of fostering a community of empowered women and ocean stewards through ocean-based activities, conservation, and education. She would use her swim to further these goals.
As she planned the expedition, her Berkeley network stepped up. Fundraising, financial oversight, legal advice, leadership for Sea Dreamers—all handled by people with a connection to the school. Cal benefactor Ned Spieker ’66 donated to the cause. And while Enix can’t be there to kayak, she is handling marketing and serving as treasurer of the nonprofit, helping manage finances and operations.
She’d been this miserable once before, crossing the North Channel, and had resorted to mentally listing all the things in her life that had been harder.
The launch date for the attempt, dubbed Swim California, is around July 1. The 33-year-old Breed plans to be out until October and will make more than a dozen media stops along the way to promote marine conservation. The full route will cover roughly 900 miles of California shoreline, one of the longest staged ocean swims ever attempted. “Just rugged and wild and something no one had even conceived of” is how WOWSA’s Fitzgerald puts it. “Kudos to Cat for just having the sheer ambition and creativity to come up with a challenge like this.”
The swim will be ratified by Fitzgerald, ensuring Breed adheres to the sport’s exacting verification standards: independent observers logging stroke rate, water temperature, and pace at regular intervals; GPS tracking of the route; and photo and video evidence establishing an official record of the swim. (For this swim, like Edgley’s Britain expedition, she’ll use a wetsuit; she wants to focus on distance and impact, not cold endurance.)
Breed knows she has to go all-in, so she’s quitting her job as a medical device sales representative. “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 prepare, she’s studying those who’ve taken on similar feats. She’s spoken with Conway, and read up on other attempts. She knows the potential obstacles: hypothermia, riptides, a blown shoulder. When Edgley swam around Great Britain, his tongue began to disintegrate, the prolonged salt exposure and friction breaking down the surface 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 practice audible as students walk past. It’s the first time she’s been back to Berkeley in a while. She lives in Mill Valley and spent the last few years commuting to San Francisco most days, where her work took her to UCSF before she trained at the Olympic and Dolphin Clubs. More students stroll by, headed to class. Their lives are scheduled and orderly, as Breed’s once was.
Now she sets off into a great unknown. The same kid who once squeezed drops of blood into the water, hoping to lure sharks, will spend months moving through that same ocean—cold, vast, and alive.
Chris Ballard is an author and journalist who has taught at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His latest book, The Plunge: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water, came out in June from Simon & Schuster.
