Born: 1969 (circa), United States (assumed)
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
In 2024, 55-year-old Amy Appelhans Gubser made headlines like “This Grandmother Swam 30 Miles Through Shark-Infested Waters to Set a Record.” She is the first person on record to complete the swim from the San Francisco Bay to the Farallon Islands. Technically it wasn’t 30 miles, but she finished the 29.6-mile (47.7 km) swim in 17 hours and three minutes on May 11, 2024, having set out at 3:30 a.m. The Marathon Swimmers Federation said it “has a reasonable claim to be the toughest marathon swim in the world.” While five other swimmers had done the route in the reverse direction, going east to west meant Gubser would be hit with the colder temperatures near the islands when at her most exhausted.
It was by no means Gubser’s first long-distance, open-water swim, but it was her longest to date. Although she’d been a swimmer in college, even earning an athletic scholarship at the University of Michigan, she’d set the sport aside to pursue her career as a nurse and raise two children. It was only in her mid-40s that a friend convinced her to get back in the water—once she got past literally crying over how cold the water was and got swimming, “every cell in my body was alive,” she later recalled. Over the next ten years, she did a variety of competitive and solo swims, breaking the 40-km mark in 2017 swimming across Monterey Bay. The next year, she did the first officially documented swim of the width of the Santa Monica Bay (43.2 km in 17 hours, six minutes) at age 50, and headed across the Atlantic the following month to swim from Ireland to Scotland (34.5km in 17 hours, ten minutes). In 2023, she circumnavigated the island of Manhattan (45.9km in just under eight hours and 43 minutes).
“When you do open-water swimming you can look across a body of water and see where you’ve come from. It’s so much more profound. In pool swimming you’re going for time, but in open-water swimming time doesn’t matter because you’re up against so many elements you cannot control. Your job is just to persevere so you can eventually break through. I like that,” Gubser has said.
Swimming is also not the only tough job she’s committed to—when not in the water, Gubser was also working in the fetal cardiac unit at a children’s hospital. In fact, after completing the Farallon Islands swim on a Saturday, she was back at work the following Tuesday.
“I just think it is amazing that I can do this,” she said, adding, “if I was in a room of elite athletes, I would be extremely underwhelming.”