Fewer than 2,000 people have swum solo across the English Channel from England to France since the first time it was done in 1875 because, frankly, the crossing is singularly difficult: The average time in the water is 13.5 hours, and that water is cold, choppy, and full of jellyfish. The average age of channel swimmers is 35, which makes what Denis Crean intends to do all the more impressive, or alarming, take your pick.
When Crean gets in the water in 2023, he’ll be one of the oldest swimmers by a large margin to attempt what he’s setting out to do: Not only does he intend to swim across the channel, but he also intends to turn around and swim back. “I’m going to do a double,” he says quietly. “As the crow flies, it’s about 42 miles. My goal is to do it in 24 hours.” He has asked not to publish his age.
An open-water swim enthusiast, Crean began teaching endurance swimming in the Potomac River in 2009, calling the collective WaveOne Open Water. It wasn’t long before “the competitive spirit,” he says, led to creating races in the Potomac, including from National Harbor in Maryland to Jones Point in Alexandria following the length of the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge, a distance of a mile and a quarter.
Three days a week, some 50 of his cohorts can be found training for their own competitions, or not, since the swimming is often a mechanism for overall mental and physical well-being. “The challenge varies for each individual,” says Crean. Practices are about motivation, staring down challenges, and activating potential.
Crean is not going into his channel challenge blindly. The swim marathoner was the first to swim the Potomac from Chain Bridge to Mount Vernon (22 miles, 9:42 hours), and he has won or come close to winning major swim marathons around the country. But he’s never done the channel.
“I’m pretty sure I can do a single. I’m not so sure I can do a double, so I went for it,” he says. “You know what they say, ‘If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough.’”
Feature image by Michael Butcher
This story originally ran in our August issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to our monthly magazine.
