At 17, She’s Already Conquered Some of the World’s Big Swims
Close your eyes and imagine: You’re submerged in cold water. There’s darkness above you and beneath you. You’ve been swimming for hours, and you’ll be in the water for many more. Every 30 minutes, you receive a feed (liquid carbs that taste like strawberry lemonade) from your coach, who is closely following you on a nearby boat. The saltwater is making your face and lips swell. You’re tired. To make the time pass, you think about your friends.
But whatever you do, you do not stop swimming.
That is what Maya Merhige, 17, went through for 11 hours and 39 minutes this month as she swam roughly 23 miles across the English Channel, from England to France. The swim earned her the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming, which also includes the 20.1-mile Catalina Channel in California and a 28.5-mile swim around the island of Manhattan.
At barely 17, Ms. Merhige is collecting records in open-water swimming — with no intention of stopping. She is the third youngest person to complete the Triple Crown, as well as the third youngest woman to earn the Tahoe Triple Crown — a series of endurance swims in Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada border — which she completed in 2022. She became the youngest woman to swim the Catalina Channel in 2021, at 14, and the youngest person to cross the Ka’iwi Channel in Hawaii, at 15.
And she is not done. With an optimism and a zest for life that are true to her age, but with a level of self-discipline and determination that are beyond her years, she hopes to become the youngest person to complete the Oceans Seven, a swimming challenge that includes seven swims in open waters around the world, by 2029. The kind of open-water swimming that Ms. Merhige does is not necessarily about being fast, but more about finishing, she said. While trying to qualify for the Olympics has crossed her mind, she said she had not done the necessary training.
‘I cried the whole time’
Ms. Merhige, a rising high school senior in Berkeley, Calif., came to swimming by a process of attrition. When she was growing up, her parents wanted her to do something athletic, so she tried everything. “I hated dance, and I hated running,” she said in an interview at cafe in London this month. “And I hated soccer so much.”
She settled on the swim team, which involved 6 a.m. trainings before class. At age 9, she joined Swim Across America, a group that hosts big swims for charity. Her first experience with open-water swimming was in Lake Tahoe, while on vacation with her family.
Competitive open-water swimming comes with rules, stated by the Marathon Swimmers Federation. The swimmer cannot make contact with a vessel, object or person during the swim. Wet suits are not allowed, nor is any equipment to go faster or stay warm.
Ms. Merhige’s accomplishments have not gone unnoticed at her high school, where she has become somewhat of a local celebrity.
Ms. Merhige had hoped that she could keep her record-breaking hobby to herself. “I was like, I don’t want every single person to know me, because my school is like 4,000 people,” Ms. Merhige said. But when she left school for a week in January 2023 to swim the Ka’iwi Channel crossing in Hawaii, that changed.
The swim was much harder than anticipated, and she got stuck in a strong headwind that led her to swim in place for many hours. In the end, she spent 27 hours and 33 minutes in the water.
“I had jellyfish stings all over my face,” she said. “So I came into school looking like that. Everyone was like, ‘are you OK?’”
Emotional endurance
Being in the water for that long is grueling, both mentally and physically.
“The sea life is the biggest thing that really freaks me out,” Ms. Merhige said. “The sharks I’m like OK with, because my crew watches that.” Far worse, she said, are the jellyfish.
“I’d rather it be dark, then I couldn’t see them,” Ms. Merhige said.
To pass the time, Ms. Merhige thinks about her friends and the people who inspire her, like one of her swimming idols: Lynne Cox, who swam the Catalina Channel at age 14 and who broke records for the fastest crossing of the English Channel. In 1987, Ms. Cox swam from the United States to the Soviet Union, crossing 2.7 miles of the freezing Bering Strait.
“Open-water swimming is often a think tank for me because there’s no distraction,” Ms. Cox said in a phone interview.
Pain on pain
It was not always obvious that Ms. Merhige was going to swim the English Channel this month. Only days before, she was visiting doctors and trying to manage her chronic pancreatitis, which she said caused daily pain and nausea.
“We didn’t really know if I was going to be able to do the swim,” she said. “So that I was able to pull it together and just physically be able to do it was really exciting for me.”
In March 2023, after she fell while skiing, a benign tumor on her pancreas ruptured, and Ms. Merhige underwent surgery. “I was recovering, and then I started having really severe pain episodes,” she said.
Getting in the water gives her a sense of control. “I try to use the swimming as a distraction from the stomach pain, and then eventually the swimming gives me pain,” she said, “and then I’m just in pain.”
The soreness and pain from swimming is her own choice, she said, “so it’s a lot easier for me to accept that than to accept that pancreatic pain.”
Even on her most recent swim, from England to France on July 13, Ms. Merhige’s stomach was acting up. It didn’t stop her. “I’ve gotten used to it by now,” she said. “I was in pain pretty much after hour four.”
Gaining in popularity
Open-water swimming has gained traction over the past few years. “The sport has really exploded,” Ms. Cox, the swimmer and author, said. When she started out, in the 1980s, “there weren’t the numbers that you’re seeing now.”
Dozens of people cross the English Channel every year, for example. In 2023, 139 people swam across (66 of them women and 73 of them men). In 2019, the number peaked, with 156 swimmers successfully making the journey across, according to the Channel Swimming & Piloting Federation.
“People get bored swimming in the pool,” Ms. Cox said. “How long can you go back and forth in the same pool?”
Ms. Merhige feels the same, and is getting ready to complete the Oceans Seven, as well as start her senior year and continue her involvement with Swim Across America. But she is adamant that there is more to life, and she’d like to go to college (maybe on the East Coast, somewhere near a body of water) and study medicine.
“I love swimming,” Ms. Merhige said, “but I think I also want to, like, explore other things. So it’s not going be a career. It’s going to be a side hobby.”
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