University of Connecticut Athletics
UConn Swimming Alumna Sarah Thomas is an Inspiration
11/14/2019 10:21:00 AM | Women's Swimming and Diving
by Danny Barletta
Plenty of UConn athletes have gone on to have successful careers after graduating (Kemba Walker, George Springer and Diana Taurasi just to name a few). But marathon swimmer Sarah Thomas may have surpassed all of them with her latest achievement.
In September, Thomas became the first person in history to swim across the English Channel four times non-stop. Only four people had ever crossed the Channel three times without a break, but Thomas shattered that record by completing a fourth lap.
Thomas swam an incredible 130 miles in just over 54 hours to make human history. She said she was able to do it by not focusing on the magnitude of the overall task.
"When you're planning something like that, the key is to just take it one piece at a time," Thomas said. "When I'm doing the swim, I'm not thinking about how long I've already been swimming for or how much I still have to go. You stay present in the moment that you're in and deal with whatever challenges or difficulties you're facing in that moment and then celebrate the successes and the small victories along the way."
Before she was a world-class marathon swimmer, Thomas was a student-athlete at UConn, where she graduated with a degree in political science and journalism in 2004.
Thomas was born in Kansas, but she spent parts of her childhood in Tennessee and Texas as well. She said she started swimming when she only a year old and never really stopped. She began swimming competitively when she joined a swim team at age 7.
When the time came to apply to college, she knew she wanted to go east. Thomas looked at many schools before deciding on UConn.
"I just fell in love with UConn," Thomas said. "I loved the campus, and I knew I'd be able to walk on the swim team, so that's how I landed there."
In her time on the UConn swimming team, Thomas was a distance swimmer (shocker, I know) who took part in both the 1,000 meter and mile events. She said her favorite part of being on the swim team was her teammates, many of whom she is still friends with to this day.
After leaving UConn, Thomas planned to stop swimming competitively, but she missed it too much. After a couple of years, she joined an adult swim team, where she was encouraged to do an open-water 10K swim. Once she took part in one, she became hooked on open-water marathon swimming.
"It's just really fun to be in the open water," Thomas said. "It's a lot more free than being in a swimming pool, where you've got lane ropes and walls in the way. When you're in open water, you really feel like you can just keep swimming until you don't want to swim anymore. It's a novel feeling for me to go out and swim across a lake. It's fun."
After that, Thomas began working up to longer distances. She went from 10K swims to 20-mile swims to 50-mile swims. She credits swimming at UConn for giving her the knowledge on how to train for those kinds of distances.
"Being on the swim team and being able to compete at a D-I level, it helped me just to have a basis for how to train," Thomas said. "I swim with people who didn't compete at the collegiate level, and they just don't have as much knowledge or experience as to how to train."
Eventually, Thomas worked her way up to a 104-mile swim in Lake Champlain, which was her longest swim before the English Channel. Around that time, she was looking for a salt-water setting to do her next long swim, and she decided on the English Channel, which she had swam across once before in 2012. Only this time, she was looking to make history.
Soon after that though, the unthinkable happened. Thomas was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to undergo nine months of treatment. She went through chemo, radiation and a mastectomy but still swam as much as she could. Between the end of her treatments and the English Channel swim, she had only a year to prepare, which she said was very challenging because she would be building from scratch.
At times during the training, she said she wasn't sure if she'd be able to do it. But at the end of her two-day journey full of nausea, caffeine and carbohydrates in a water bottle, and fighting strong tides, Thomas prevailed with one of the most amazing accomplishments in the history of swimming. She said that completing the swim as a cancer survivor made it mean even more.
"I think it's a little extra special to know that I was able to rebuild basically from nothing and get back to where I was before," Thomas said. "When you go through cancer, they always talk to you about your new normal, how you just have to accept that things are going to be different."
"That was not really ok with me. Yes, I'm not the same. Yes, I've changed. But I didn't want to give up what I love doing, so being able to finish this swim not being 100% the same as I was prior to cancer, that's a little empowering."
When she's not setting world records and being an incredible inspiration to others, Thomas currently lives and works as a healthcare recruiter in Colorado. She said she definitely didn't expect the type of recognition she has gotten for this accomplishment but she greatly appreciates it.
"It's kind of neat to be able to be an ambassador for marathon swimming and breast cancer survivors," Thomas said. "It's been fun to show the world what my sport is all about and to show breast cancer survivors that they don't have to settle for less than what they want out of life."
