Thomas is believed to be the first swimmer to complete the swim of the entire length of Lake Mead.
LAS VEGAS, October 7, 2023. Ultramarathon swimmer Sarah Thomas set another world record with a monumental swim that no other swimmer has ever attempted. Sarah completed a 50-mile swim of the entire length of Lake Mead – from the Colorado River to the Hoover Dam. Thomas’s swim across Lake Mead started in South Cove, where her favorite river, The Colorado, enters the lake. She followed the lake 50 miles away until she ran out of water at the Hoover Dam. The swim took her 26 hours, 45 minutes and 45 seconds (26:45:45) to complete.
Courtesy FOX 5 Vegas
Thomas was accompanied by her support boat that included her husband, Ryan Willis, who served as a pilot, their friend Craig Lenning, crew chief, and her friend Celeste Jacroux, her official time-keeper. Thomas, a breast cancer survivor, took on this swim to raise cancer research funds with Swim Across America.
Sarah Thomas: I was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer in 2017 at the age of 35,” said Sarah. “It was a terrifying time, and we didn’t know how much my treatments would impact my ability to swim in the future. Being able to partner with Swim Across America combines two of my passions: open-water swimming and doing everything I can to fight cancer so that others won’t have to go through what I went through.
The accomplishment adds another bullet point to Thomas’s list of record-breaking feats.
–The first person to complete a four-way crossing of the English Channel in 54 hours and 10 minutes in 2019. She did so one year after completing treatments for breast cancer.
–The world record for the longest continuous, unassisted, non-wetsuit swim done in current-neutral conditions. That record-breaking swim covered 104.6 miles over 67 hours in Lake Champlain (USA) in August 2017.
–The first person to complete a two-way crossing of the North Channel in 21 hours and 46 minutes in 2022. The North Channel is the body of water bounded by Northern Ireland (to the west), Scotland (to the east), the Isle of Man (to the south), and the Atlantic Ocean (to the north), and
–The first person to complete a two-way swim of Lake Tahoe (lengthwise) in 2013. The swim is 42 miles, and she completed it in 22 hours and 30 minutes.
“Cancer treatments tested me in a way I never thought possible,” noted Sarah.” Despite undergoing chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation therapy, I never gave up on my dream of doing a swim that most people thought was impossible.” And a year after completing treatments, she did the impossible – becoming the first person to complete a four-way crossing of the English Channel.
To follow Sarah’s progress or support her cause, visit swimacrossamerica.org/sarahthomas.
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Swim Across America, Inc. (SAA) was founded in 1987 with its first open water event in Long Island Sound. Since then, the nonprofit organization has raised over $100 million to fight cancer. In its 36 years of “making waves to fight cancer,” more than 100,000 swimmers and 150 Olympians have swum the circumference of the earth three times, uniting a movement to fight cancer that has created a groundswell of support spanning all generations. Today, more than 24 communities hold open water and charity pool swims yearly, from Nantucket to under the Golden Gate Bridge, supporting innovative cancer research, detection, and patient programs.
Swim Across America’s funding of clinical trials for patients helped contribute to four FDA-approved life-saving immunotherapy cancer treatments, including Yervoy, Opdivo, Tecentriq, and Keytruda. In June of last year, a clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering was published in The New England Journal of Medicine that showed a 100 percent success rate in treating patients in a phase 2 clinical trial for advanced rectal cancer with Dostarlimab, an immunotherapy treatment produced by GlaxoSmithKline. The clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering was funded by early-stage grant funding from Swim Across America. More than 60 scientific grants are funded each year. There are now ten dedicated Swim Across America Labs at major institutions, including Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, John Hopkins Medicine Baltimore, Rush University Medical Center Chicago, Baylor Scott & White Charles A. Sammons Cancer Center in Dallas, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center New York, Infusion Center at Nantucket Cottage Hospital, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland and San Francisco, the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, The Swim Across America Pediatric Research Lab at Columbia University Medical Center New York, and at Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine.
To learn more, visit swimacrossamerica.org or follow us on Facebook @SwimAcrossAmerica or on Instagram or Twitter @SAASwim.
