Marley swimming the busy English Channel in 2014.
Sara Marley ’90 associates swimming with fun. She never had the early wakeup calls and cold plunges of a swim team’s competitive demands, just summer pool and lake play. Happy memories.
Always a strong swimmer, she took to the Rockne Memorial pool for exercise as a Notre Dame student after returning from a year in Innsbruck and realizing, “Wow, I drank a lot of beer.”
Swimming for exercise has ebbed and flowed in her life over the years, but her affinity for and endurance in the water led her to a rare achievement. In 2018, Marley became the 169th person on record to complete what’s known as the open-water Triple Crown — the English Channel, the Catalina Channel in the Pacific off the California coast and a circumnavigation of Manhattan.
Training for those 20- to 30-mile water marathons mixes intensity and drudgery, a combination Marley is constitutionally equipped to handle. The repetition of lap after lap in a pool does not bore her, though she admits the start of any swim requires considerable mental fortitude. Once she gets going, she almost doesn’t want to stop.
A South Bend native now working as a journalist for Bloomberg in London, Marley’s open-water swimming quests began — modestly — after she moved there in 1998. A pool where she exercised near her office advertised a 5K swim-a-thon. Her workouts at the time amounted to about a mile, so she was wary about 3.1 all at once.
“I remembering thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a really long way, can I do it?” Marley says.
Around the same time, a new company offered swimming holidays. So began Marley’s open-water swimming quests with vacation-excursions to places like Croatia and Greece, Oman and the Maldives. A group from Ireland befriended her.
“I had on a wetsuit and all this stuff, and they were like, no, no. They took one look at me: ‘Come with us. You don’t need that. You'll be grand,’” Marley says. “They were just so lovely to me.”
That was the first in a series of encouragements from fellow travelers and swim club members that gave her the confidence to take on the challenge of the English Channel. “It was basically just surrounding myself with people who said, ‘Yeah, you can do this,’” Marley says. “You know, they were right.”
Her acceptance of that fact took some time. She built up to the solo swim in the Channel, including a relay that required only a daunting-enough hour in the water at a time, a fraction of what awaited her.
“I did a Channel relay before my Channel swim just to test the waters, as it were,” Marley says. “I jumped in the first time, and it was cold, it was 9 o’clock at night, early July, getting dark, and I was really like, ‘I want my mommy.’”
There’s a saying that long-distance swims are 100 percent physical and 100 percent mental. For Marley, the weight on that mythic statistical scale tilts more heavily toward the mental. The physical act of swimming, with her relaxed stroke, feels almost like walking. She likes to tell people she’s the laziest Channel swimmer they’ll ever meet.
Even for a “lazy” swimmer with an easy stroke, the prospect of 12 hours in the water, give or take, demands some strategic distraction from the magnitude of the undertaking. One of 47 grandchildren on her father’s side of the family, Marley planned to occupy her mind with a recitation of her cousins’ names. Singing songs from musicals was another tactic.
“I couldn’t concentrate enough, my mind just really drifted,” Marley says. “After five or 10 minutes, I’m just swimming. What was I trying to think of? Camelot? I don’t know, I’m just naturally spacey, maybe.”
The mantra “just swim to the next feed” to create the illusion of bite-sized increments also offers some mental comfort, but Marley’s plan called for a lengthy 45 minutes between calorie infusions. And those had to be quick to avoid bobbing backward in the current. Psychological landmines — to say nothing of the prospect of jellyfish stings — flood the mind. There’s only one way through: keep going.
“You have to stay loose and relaxed, but you still have to have your foot on the gas at the same time,” she says. “It’s finding that level of effort.”
She made it — of course, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion — and the adrenaline rush drowned out the physical fatigue she expected. “I was just wired,” Marley says, “I might’ve woken up a few people in the harbor, for which I apologize. ‘I just swam the Channel!’”
It was daybreak. A boat back to England awaited, then a car ride to London and public transportation home to avoid rush-hour traffic.
“The last 20 minutes, I was on the Tube, there were no seats and I just wanted to say to some of those people, ‘C’mon.’ You just want to tell everyone, and I refrained,” Marley says. “Then I got to my building and, very unusually, there was somebody else in the lift with me, and I’m sure I was grinning from ear to ear. I was just like, ‘I really have to tell you something: I just swam the English Channel.’ People tend to look at you like you’re slightly insane. I’ve never seen them before or since.”
Afterward, she took a brief break from the grind, one of her periodic respites from the water. She figured her husband probably about had it with her as the Channel swim approached, resisting even a pint at the movies, such did the training take over her life.
But Marley was far from finished. With other long swims interspersed, she completed the Manhattan circumnavigation in 2017 and Catalina, her Triple Crown coronation, in 2019.
Her planned return to normal life, mostly on dry land, took a COVID detour back into the water because outdoor swimming became one of the few available activities. A shoulder injury from overuse — “the arthritis isn’t too bad, considering what you’ve done,” the doctor said after the MRI — slowed her down after 2021, along with waning motivation after completing the Triple Crown.
Marley has since resumed swimming, pain free. Other global destinations hold appeal, but no other accomplishment compares to completing the English Channel, Catalina and Manhattan triumvirate.
Like the tattoos of three crowns on her left shin, those are indelible.
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.