Round And Round Skip Storch Goes

In researching about Diana Nyad's upcoming swim between Cuba and Florida, scheduled for next week, The Daily News of Open Water Swimming talked with Skip Storch who was inducted in the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame in 2009 and learned his record-setting double-circumnavigation and triple-circumnavigation of Manhattan Island came at the end of a lifetime of distance swimming.

Skip's track record is impressive with variou open water experiences that began at a young age:

1967 (age 10): Completed a 10-mile staged swim in a 25-yard pool.
1969 (age 11): Chased out of the water by a large poisonous water moccasin in Lake Maron, South Carolina.
1978 (age 19): 13.8 miles in a 12-hour swim in a 25-yard pool.
1979 (age 20): 36.6 miles in a 24-hour breaststroke swim in a 25-yard pool.
1980 (age 21): 15 miles in a 10-hour swim in a 25-yard pool.
1981 (age 22): 28 miles in a 24-hour swim in a 25-yard pool.
1987 (age 30): 28.5-mile Manhattan Island Marathon Swim in 8:24.
1987 (age 30): 20-mile 5-hour swim in the Hudson River from the Bear Mt. Bridge to Nyack, New York.
1988 (age 31): 153-mile staged swim down the length of the Hudson River, from Albany to New York City in 54 hours and 50 minutes.
1998 (age 32): 22-mile 6-hour swim from New Hamberg Yacht Club to The West Point Military Academy.
1989 (age 32): 85 of the 99 miles of the New Jersey Coast.
1990 (age 33): Nearly 100 of 154 miles of the length of the Long Island Sound.
1990 (age 33): 15-mile, 5 hour 30 minute swim the length of the East River through Hell's Gate to the Statue of Liberty in a wetsuit.
1991 (age 34): 24-hour 21-mile swim in a 25-yard pool.
1993 (age 36): Unsuccessful 33-mile 25-hour attempt from Cuba to USA in a shark cage.
2005 (age 48): 150-mile 41:30 staged swim down the Hudson River from Albany Yacht Club To Battery Park in New York.
2007 (age 50): Set double-circumnavigation swim record around Manhattan Island in 20:56 en route to a non-stop triple-circumnagation record of 32 hours and 52 minutes.

Pools, rivers, oceans: a lifetime of open water swimming.

Copyright © 2010 by Steven Munatones