McKnight swims the busy English Channel.
Around age 9 or 10, Patrick McKnight ’88 decided he wanted to live the life of Walter Mitty — but in reality, not only in his daydreams.
“I thought, ‘I want to experience things. People write about them and talk about them. I don’t want to do any of that. I just want to do it,’” McKnight says. “I picked a few doozies.”
That includes climbing Mount Everest and, currently in the planning stage, sailing around the world with his wife, two of their children (maybe the third on occasion as work permits) and his brother lined up to join him. Twice his Everest attempts were called off, and though he did eventually reach the summit in 2018, he redirected his energy after an earthquake forced his second cancelation three years earlier.
“I came back to Kathmandu and drank a lot of beer, sitting there trying to figure out what to do next,” McKnight says. “A bunch of reporters were sitting there. I just was chatting with them, and they said, ‘So, what are you going to do? And I said, ‘Well, I think I got to stop climbing for a little bit. After I sober up, I need to reprioritize and refocus.’”
The world’s highest peak would have wait. Over beers with the reporters in Kathmandu, McKnight put his Plan B on the record. “I’m chatting with these guys and I said, ‘Well, I guess I’m going to swim the English Channel.’ And I got home, and that’s what I did.”
That and more within a year, and in record-breaking fashion, but it required extensive mental and physical preparation. The George Mason University psychology professor considers himself as much a man of thought as action.
“I’m definitely a man of thought,” he says, “because when I came up with every single one of these objectives, I spend an inordinate amount of time reading, thinking, ‘What do I know about myself, what are my strengths and weakness, and how do I prepare myself for them?”
Swimming long distances is a strength. When it comes to swimming in the open sea, though, his fear of deep water and sharks represented a rather considerable weakness. For McKnight, the prospect of overcoming his anxieties provided motivation.
“I want to know whether I can do it,” he says. “Can I keep it together? Can I finish? I mean, there are dark moments.”
Sometimes literally. In July 2016, to prepare for the English Channel, McKnight swam another leg of what’s known as the open-water Triple Crown, 20 miles between Catalina Island and the California mainland. Swimming overnight, the fear of what might lie beneath the water prevented him from appreciating the creatures that did accompany him. Distracting himself from the preoccupying prospect, however unlikely, of a shark encounter required intense attention to his own mechanics, allowing as few thoughts as possible to seep in about the water’s inhabitants.
“In the middle of the night, I had dolphins and seals swimming alongside me, up underneath, and the bioluminescence was amazing. If I weren’t so scared, I could’ve actually taken it in,” he says. “The way I eliminated my fear was focusing on my stroke. I didn’t take one stroke that entire swim without thinking about it.”
He also thought about his own physiological needs — what to ingest and how often to maintain his energy, learning the metabolic particulars of his own body in those extreme conditions.
A support crew in an accompanying boat provides regular feedings. For McKnight that meant drinking a corn starch concoction that he learned he could tolerate well. “I wouldn’t recommend it as a culinary delight,” he says, but it got him through the night.
Swimmers have to stay in the water to adhere to open-water swimming rules and feeding cadences vary based on individual needs. Every 15 minutes in McKnight’s case, which also provided mental scaffolding necessary for him to surmount the full distance, breaking it to manageable parts. Many, many parts, but modest increments if they could be considered as single entities, rather than part of the daunting whole.
“A lot of people say, ‘How do you swim for 12 hours?’ And I say, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never swum for 12 hours in my life. I only swim for 15 minutes at a time.’ I swim between feeds. Now, if you ask me how many 15 minutes I can do: infinite. You keep feeding me, I’ll keep swimming.”
For 34 days in 2016, McKnight, age 50 at the time, more or less kept swimming. Nine days after stitching together about 44 15-minute swims to finish the Catalina to California leg in 11 hours and 4 minutes, he swam the slightly longer English Channel in 12 hours and 54 minutes.
Friends in New York City, where he grew up, told McKnight they did the math and he could set a record. If he could enter what’s now known as 20 Bridges, a circumnavigation of Manhattan, scheduled for that August 15, he would complete the Triple Crown in 34 days, the shortest time ever.
Spent from the previous two legs, he hesitated but agreed if he could get a spot. A group sprung into action and made it happen. “Everybody had helped me so much, I was grateful,” McKnight says, “but I was tired.”
Water temperatures exceeded 80 degrees around Manhattan that day, the heat an Achilles’ heel for McKnight, adding more physical strain to the fatigue and muscle soreness from his previous swims. But other water conditions helped. “I had a current that was like five knots,” he says, “If I were a beer can, I would have finished.”
He did not set out to complete the Triple Crown, let alone in record time. When it was over, he felt hungry in more ways than one.
“I ate everything in sight for about three weeks,” McKnight says, and contemplated what to do next, what objective might offer mental sustenance. He has a personal “triathlon” that, to his knowledge, no other person has ever done, and he’s two-thirds of the way there.
Swim the English Channel. Check.
Climb Mount Everest. Check.
Sail around the world. Still to come.
“I want unique experiences,” says McKnight, who has other extreme excursions on his mental to-do list after the global circumnavigation, including swims in frigid glacial water. “I would like to know what I can do.”
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.