They’re out there, and every now and then you bump into one: ordinary people who do extraordinary things.
Amy Mazur, recently retired and about to turn 63, is such a person. She plans to swim the English Channel this summer.
The idea was hatched a couple of years ago, when the coach of her swim club in Moscow suggested the challenge. Since then, Mazur has maintained a rigorous training regimen that is equal parts physical conditioning and cold-water acclimation. She has poured more than $15,000 into the venture, which includes hiring a sea captain registered with the Channel Swimming Association and an official observer to witness her swim.
These are rarified waters, as the Channel Swimming Association has only authenticated 1,975 solo swimmers in its 98-year history. The fastest time for the 21-mile strait is 7:17, while the fastest female time — set more than four decades ago — is 7:40.
A realist, Mazur has set her goal at 13 hours.
Can’t do it alone
Though Mazur will do all the swimming, she is only half of a team. The other half is her coach, Tammy Bonney, who lives with her husband about a mile from Mazur’s home in Moscow. Both women have big personalities, laugh heartily and are great friends who finish off one another’s sentences. If you’ve seen the movie “Nyad,” Bonney is the Jodie Foster to Mazur’s Annette Bening.
An accomplished swimmer herself, Bonney sets a high bar for physical conditioning. Training days in the pool can run up to six miles, while open water swims in the Snake River can be even longer. Endurance training is a big part of their regimen, but cold-water acclimation is another key component.
On a bone-chillingly cold day in late January, the pair drove down to the Snake River at Wawawai. They sat in Mazur’s truck for a few minutes, doing deep-breathing exercises while listening to an app on Bonney’s phone. Speaking in English, a sonorous male voice with a thick Dutch accent told them to “… keep breathing, no pause between inhalation and exhalation. Into the belly, into the chest, make a circle, let it go.”
After several minutes, the voice ordered them to hold their breath. “Let the body do what the body is capable of doing. Be aware of your heartbeat and slow it down.”
Mazur easily held her breath for two minutes. Then she stepped out of her truck wearing only neoprene booties, a thin one-piece swimsuit, a hat and gloves. Bonny, similarly clad, accompanied her.
The air temperature was hovering in the low 20s, and the wind was blowing. Humidity was high, and conditions at the dock were wickedly cold. Slowly and deliberately, Mazur and Bonney waded into the 34-degree water.
It was a powerful display of the human body’s ability to tolerate absurdly unpleasant conditions.
Taking care not to immerse their hands or heads, Mazur and Bonney treaded water for 10 minutes while carrying on a giddy, but still perfectly normal conversation. When they emerged, their skin had the ruddy tinge of lobsters on their way to being boiled alive.
Away from the river, the pair was spotted cross-country skiing under a full moon in January — wearing nothing more than shorts and tank tops. They haven’t parachuted naked over Antarctica, yet, but don’t be surprised if they do someday.
Driven to succeed
Mazur is an intense woman who talks loud and fast, scattering ideas like leaves in a tempest. She is perpetually in motion, both professionally and personally.
Prior to her retirement last year, she was a distinguished professor of political science at Washington State University, where she spent 32 years. She says she is internationally renowned for her research, which focuses largely on feminist policy issues and comparative methodology, with an emphasis on France. Though retired from WSU, she still edits a journal on French politics and continues to do international research.
Her personal life is similarly filled with achievement.
Raised in a suburb of Chicago, Mazur was captain of her high school swim team. Knowing she wouldn’t be competitive at the collegiate level, she kept swimming on her own while pushing ahead with her professional development. Then, nearing 50, she began dabbling in triathlons.
“I was such a good swimmer that I was usually ahead of the men when we came out of the water,” she says, but triathlons were too punishing; the running generated too much pain in her feet.
In 2014, she joined the Chinooks, a U.S. Masters Swimming club in Moscow. Bonney was already a member, Mazur says, “and that’s when our swim partnership started.”
In the fall of 2022, their coach suggested Mazur consider swimming the English Channel. The coach had kids, and commitments, and couldn’t coordinate a long-term project, so Bonney stepped up to become Mazur’s coach.
Mazur quickly joined the Channel Swimming Association, but it took a while for her and Bonney to build momentum.
“At first, it was not realistic,” Bonney concedes. “It was just a day dream.”
But Mazur wouldn’t let it go.
During an academic conference in San Francisco, she got in touch with the Pacific Open Water Swim Co., which caters to athletes seeking to swim beyond the pool in dramatic natural settings. The company provides training, support, and safe escort to many destinations in San Francisco Bay — including the infamous prison at Alcatraz.
So far, Mazur has made three trips to the Bay Area to train. Bonney has accompanied her on two of those trips, learning how to be more effective as a coach and a support person.
Mileposts along the way
The English Channel is known as the Mount Everest of swimming, so it was clear Mazur needed significant open-water experience before attempting it. (Apropos Mount Everest, her brother, Dan, is an accomplished high-altitude climbing guide who has reached the world’s highest summit. Physical endurance, evidently, is low-hanging fruit in the Mazur family tree.)
With her eyes on a distant prize, she entered an 11-mile event on the Willamette River known as the Portland Bridge Swim. “I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Mazur says, adding, “We were in the ‘See if Amy can do it’ phase.”
The Portland Bridge Swim went badly, and she did not finish. Mazur and Bonney spent that night in a hotel room filled with icepacks, massage oil, and doubt. A lot of doubt, actually.
“It was game over,” Mazur says. “My body told me I just couldn’t do it.”
Still, her mind kept making promises her body eventually learned to fill. Mazur began ticking off major swims, starting with a six-hour marathon in San Francisco Bay. During that swim, a coach from the Pacific Open Water Swim Co. brought the escort boat to stop and called Mazur up to the transom for a pivotal suggestion: Stop using a speed stroke, with both hands entering the water at 12 o’clock, and begin using an endurance stroke with hands entering the water at 11 o’clock and 2 o’clock.
“That was a huge turning point in my training,” Mazur says, her eyes staring inwardly as she recalled the moment. “That’s when we knew it was possible.”
From there, the momentum really started to build. To kick things off, she flew to Europe for what she calls her “Five Seas” training trip. Then there was a 12-mile swim across Lake Tahoe; check. Then came her qualifying swim for the English Channel: six hours, non-stop, in Lake Coeur d’Alene; check. In April, she will travel to Arizona for a grueling, four-day event across four big reservoirs, totaling 41 miles; check, please.
The English Channel awaits
Though she’s done a lot of open-water swimming, Mazur still hasn’t done anything as committing — or intimidating — as the English Channel. Key to the endeavor is the support boat she hired for a three-day window, starting July 21. Only a handful of boats are certified by the Channel Swimming Association, and Mazur was lucky to book one for a time when winds and tides are favorable.
Even with an experienced skipper at the helm, there are plenty of things that can scuttle a swim across the English Channel. Things like bad weather, choppy water, commercial ships in busy shipping lanes, jellyfish, boats carrying migrants seeking a better life, floating debris and horrors yet unknown.
“On top of that, there’s the monotony of it because there’s nothing to see,” Mazur says, adding, “This is my one shot at it. I’m not going back if this gets called off.”
She will continue training, but the next few months will be a blur of activity. A few days ago, Mazur flew to Belgium for a month-long stint as a visiting professor, and from there it’s off to Croatia for a week-long training camp. She’s no stranger to European waters, having cracked off long swims in the Adriatic, Aegean and Ionian seas, as well as the English Channel itself.
Mazur will return to Moscow in May, but it will be a short stay because in early June she plans to enter a six-kilometer swim in the Mediterranean near
Marseille, France. After that, she will spend the rest of June and early July training in her old haunts near Amorgos, Greece and Puglia, Italy.
On July 12, she will move into her final base camp, a house near Calais, France overlooking the beaches where English Channel swims typically end. On July 20, she and Bonney will take the ferry over to Folkestone, England — where Mazur has rented an Airbnb within walking distance of the marina. They will call their skipper at 6 p.m. every night, and he will decide which of the three allotted days is “the” day.
At 2 a.m. on the big day, Mazur will step into the water in England and, if all goes well, she will step onto a beach in France later that afternoon. At that point, her three-year dream will be a reality.
