It’s no surprise that a woman was the first to swim the Channel four times | Alexandra Heminsley

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Sarah Thomas’s incredible feat points to a uniquely female resilience – and the healing capacity of wild swimming

On Tuesday morning, 37-year-old Sarah Thomas from Colorado, US, became the first person to swim the Channel four times without stopping. In just over 54 hours of swimming, and 130 miles, she redefined what an endurance athlete could be for a generation: until this week, only four swimmers had ever managed to make the journey three times without stopping.At an age when most of us are thinking about how little exercise we can get away with, and only a year after going into remission from breast cancer, she completed the feat with minimal fuss, emerging to a treat of champagne and M&M’s, with the comment, “I’m pretty tired right now.” Rather more tartly, her mother called her “a freak of nature”.

But those of us who follow outdoor swimming will understand that it isn’t actually that surprising that it was a woman who accomplished something so dramatic. Because women have been quietly dominating outdoor endurance swimming for some time now. A combination of obvious and not-so obvious factors currently means that across average times of male and female Channel crossings, the average female time is faster than men’s.

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This post was syndicated from Health | The Guardian. Click here to read the full text on the original website.


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