Local swimmer’s goal spawns new nonprofit
- Published: September 14, 2024
A local resident is gearing up for a dual challenge: Amy Wamsley is slated to swim across the English Channel next spring — a goal she’s held since childhood. At the same time, she’s currently working to build her newly established nonprofit, Amy’s Swimventure, which is aimed at both advocating for water conservation and empowering women to jump in and meet their goals head-on — two areas close to Wamsley’s heart.
A swimathon fundraiser in support of Amy’s Swimventure is set for Friday, Sept. 13, at the Antioch College Wellness Center.
Wamsley told the News in a recent interview that, when she was 12, she read an article in Time Magazine about English Channel swimmers while waiting in the lobby of a chiropractic office with her mother.
“At the time, I was on the swim team, and I thought, ‘I can do this — I want to do this,’” Wamsley said. “And I thought, ‘When do I want to do this? How about when I’m 50?’”
As it happens, Wamsley will turn 50 next year, so the time will be ripe for meeting the goal she set more than three decades ago.
“I’ve always had this goal in the back of my head, and I would train, and then stop, train, and then stop,” Wamsley said.
Villager and swimmer Amy Wamsley is planning to swim across the English Channel next year — a goal she’s had her entire life. (Submitted photo)
After several starts and stops in training over the years, Wamsley said she realized the clock was ticking down to her 50th birthday. In 2021, she started swimming again in earnest, about a mile at a time, at the Xenia YMCA.
The ability to swim a mile in under 40 minutes is one of the qualifying factors for a famed U.S. open swim course: the 1.5-mile swim across the San Francisco Bay from Alcatraz Island. When the then-aquatics director at the Xenia YMCA asked Wamsley if she wanted to try the swim with her, Wamsley said: “Sure — OK!”
“I said ‘yes’ — and then I started to do research on it,” Wamsley said. “And I realized, holy crap, this is going to go really hard.”
In its warmest months, the average temperature of the San Francisco Bay is 55–60 degrees — much colder than the typical lap-swimming pool temperature of around 80 degrees. The bay’s strong currents and sometimes choppy water can send swimmers off-course.
Nevertheless, Wamsley completed the Alcatraz swim in 2022 in about two hours — a triumph that kicked her English Channel dreams back into high gear, she said. She realized that the San Francisco Bay’s cold water and strong currents made it “a great place to train” for a channel swim.
“To swim the English Channel, I just have to redo [the Alcatraz swim] 13 times in my head — like a goldfish,” Wamsley said with a laugh.
The English Channel is one of the most difficult open swim locations in the world, at a distance of about 21 miles. Similar to the San Francisco Bay, water temperatures range from 55 to 63 degrees in warmer weather, but the environment can be much more harsh, with ocean swells and currents predictably pushing swimmers to travel anywhere between 25 and 30 miles on their journey.
Wamsley said she’s slated to undertake her channel swim between May 30 and June 10 next year. In the meantime, she’s enlisted the aid of a swim trainer based in La Jolla, California, and is currently swimming five or six days a week, sometimes for up to six hours at a time, based on her trainer’s guidance.
The training has Wamsley participating in increasingly long open swim events: In July this year, she completed her second Alcatraz swim — this time at twice the distance, swimming to the island and then back again. She’ll swim a 10K in the Potomac River near Washington, D.C., at the end of September, and in early October, she’ll swim 10 miles down the Tennessee River in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“The first half of my training plan ends with me swimming around Coronado on Halloween,” Wamsley said, referring to an 11.5-mile open-water course around Coronado Island near San Diego, California. “It’s my qualifying swim for the English Channel.”
Ultimately, Wamsley said, her goal is to complete the English Channel swim in 13 to 15 hours.
“The odds are stacked against me,” she said. “The average swimmer is around 35 years old, and I’m doing this for my 50th birthday — and I don’t have the typical swimmer’s body.”
It was a combination of the realizations of these added challenges to her goal, as well as support from community members, that Wamsley said spurred her to create her new nonprofit, Amy’s Swimventure. Inspired by her dedication to such a difficult goal, Wamsley said friends and neighbors offered to support her channel swim financially.
“People would say, ‘How can I support you? Let me throw you a couple hundred bucks,’” Wamsley said. “And I thought, ‘I have to come up with something that can benefit others.’”
Amy’s Swimventure is built on two pillars, with the first being supporting and encouraging women, particularly when it comes to aging, including the experience of perimenopause and menopause, which she said are “under-discussed and under-researched,” both within the medical field and by the general public at large.
“I’ve literally been swimming and having a hot flash in the pool and thinking my head’s about to pop off,” Wamsley said. “Amongst women, we talk about the changes in our body as a whole, the aches and pains and mood swings and trouble sleeping and wonder, ‘What’s wrong with me? Is this normal?’ And nobody can really tell us that we’re normal, except other women.”
Body image among women is another focus of the nonprofit; Wamsley pointed to her own experiences — a man recently told her she was “not a swimmer” because she doesn’t look like Olympian Katie Ledecky, for example — as well as those of well-known open-water swimmers.
“[American swimmer] Sarah Thomas has swum the English Channel four times consecutively, nonstop, and people say, ‘You think she’d be skinnier,’” Wamsley said. “Are you kidding me? This woman’s body has carried her further than you can imagine.”
This pillar of Amy’s Swimventure, focused on supporting women, she said, will encompass working with other nonprofits to host workshops and seminars concerning women’s leadership and development, connecting women with medical and mental health professionals and providing opportunities for women to explore new hobbies and interests.
“A lot of women are going through the same things, so I’m willing to say, ‘Hey, this is what I’m going through — what are you going through?’ I want to build a platform that helps women realize that if they want to do something, they can do it,” Wamsley said.
She added that the nonprofit also seeks to create mentorships for women interested in environmental conservation — a goal that ties in with Amy’s Swimventures’ other pillar, water conservation.
Having spent a lot of time swimming in open water, often in nearby Buck Creek or Caesar Creek, Wamsley said she’s intimately familiar with the importance of clean, healthy water systems.
“While I’m swimming, sometimes I’m grossed out — there’s no other way to put it,” she said. “I’m swimming in the Little Miami and seeing Budweiser caps or Solo cups, or I’m swimming in Lake Michigan and seeing plastic — and then my stomach is upset for three days after from bacteria, because it’s not just litter, there’s also chemical runoff.”
She pointed to the national chatter around swimming qualifiers for the Paris Olympics being delayed after sewage overflow and runoff following a hard rain made the water quality in the Seine River unsuitable for swimming.
“What people don’t realize is that the same thing is happening in American cities all the time,” Wamsley said. “The same thing happens in Buck Creek, and people take their kids to swim there. I swim there.”
With that in mind, Wamsley said she’s met with Clark County Soil and Water District personnel and studied water regeneration efforts in the Midwest and beyond with the goal of educating and empowering folks to address water quality in the Miami Valley. Over the next year, Amy’s Swimventure aims to test the bodies of water where Wamsley performs open swims, host workshops and seminars on water conservation and collaborate with local conservation groups to connect the public with ways — even small ones — to affect sustainable change.
“I know it’s an uphill battle, but I think we have to start with what we can do,” she said. “Maybe that means starting with walking down to the Little Miami and picking up trash.”
A swimathon fundraiser in support of Amy’s Swimventure will be held Friday, Sept. 13, in the Wellness Center pool. Wamsley will undergo a six-hour pool swim, and interested donors can pledge financial sponsorship for laps.
For more information on the swimathon fundraiser, and to pledge, go to the nonprofit’s webpage at http://www.aswimventure.org. For more information on individualized sponsorship, email Wamsley at amy@aswimventure.org.
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