At 8.30am on 8 August 2017, Sarah Thomas began a 104.6-mile swim in Lake Champlain, New York. 67 hours and 16 minutes later she set a new record for the world’s longest current neutral swim. By Jonathan Cowie

By Jonathan Cowie

CENTURY SWIM

PUSHING TO KEEP MY FOCUS WAS A HUGE CHALLENGE

It is 2am on an August morning and I open up a webpage on my phone. The small dot blinks its way slowly across the screen. It’s hypnotic, the track almost imperceptibly stretching its way across the map. I fall back asleep. When I wake I refresh the screen; the small dot is still moving. I shower, get dressed, go to work, come home, go swimming, go to bed, wake up, go for a run, go to work, watch a film, go to bed. Throughout, the dot continues its inexorable progress.

She’s still swimming. There’s something comforting about the blink-blink of the tracker. The anxiety of opening the webpage, like checking to see if a date has messaged you, is immediately assuaged by its progress. Everything is alright with the world. And thousands of miles away, Sarah Thomas toils through the night.

How do you even consider swimming 100 miles as a possibility? Last year, Sarah Thomas swam into the record books with an 80-mile swim in Lake Powell from Utah to Arizona, an awesome feat that stretched the boundaries of what is possible in marathon swimming. At the end of that swim the 35-year-old health recruiter still felt strong. She recovered quickly, feeling back to normal within a couple of days. Driving back from Lake Powell, Sarah’s husband turned to her and asked: “So, what do you think about 100 miles?”

“I’d literally been thinking the same thing,” she recalls. But Sarah was unsure if she was ready to commit to the training and they agreed to talk about it in a few months. “I wasn’t sure if I was burned out or ready to go again right away.”