Amy Wamsley will hit the open water again this month for a two-mile swim in the Chicago River to benefit A Long Swim, a nonprofit that raises funds for ALS research. In sharing the news of her upcoming swim with the News, Wamsley also reflected on the year since her monumental swim across the English Channel, and the unexpected challenges that came after. (Submitted photo)
‘Finding the fun’ in the water again
- Published: September 2, 2026
Local resident Amy Wamsley had assumed she wouldn’t be swimming the Chicago River again this year.
She was among the 300 swimmers in the first organized open-water swim in the river in 98 years last September, and had applied for this year’s event, but wasn’t sure she’d been selected. Still wanting to aid the effort, she contacted organizers about volunteering instead.
“They said, ‘Why are you volunteering? You’re swimming,’” Wamsley told the News in a recent interview.
So Wamsley will indeed return to Chicago for a two-mile swim Sunday, Sept. 20 — but the delayed news puts her about a month behind on fundraising. To participate, she needs to raise $1,750 by Sept. 6.
The swim, organized by nonprofit A Long Swim, raises money for ALS research and swim-safety education for youth in underserved Chicago communities. A Long Swim, founded by marathon swimmer and ALS advocate Doug McConnell, has raised more than $3 million for ALS research at Northwestern University’s Ozdinler Lab.
Folks interested in helping Wamsley reach her fundraising goal can go to runsignup.com/Aswimventure to learn more.
Wamsley said she’s a big supporter of A Long Swim and the work they do — but signing up for Chicago had another, quieter and more personal purpose for her. When she applied, she said, she was still struggling to return to the water after months of barely swimming at all.
Last year’s inaugural Chicago River Swim came three months after the defining swim of Wamsley’s life. On June 13, 2025 — her 50th birthday — she crossed the 21-mile English Channel in 16 hours and 56 minutes, fulfilling a goal she’d set when she was 12.
Taking up the mantle of that goal again after more than three decades, she said, meant that the Channel became the enduring rhythm to which she attuned her life: she swam every day, training for hours. She organized her life around qualifying swims. Her focus narrowed to following through on a goal that had now become a promise — one she’d made both to herself and to a swath of loved ones and community supporters.
And when it was finally done — the monumental thing she had always said she’d do — she came home. The community that had followed her progress across the English Channel with bated breath rallied around her, stopping her on the street to congratulate her. Everyone — including this news outlet — wanted to know what was next.
“And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I don’t even know,’” she said.
She’d experienced the highest high of her life up to that point when she stepped onto the sand in France, but she hadn’t known to expect the emotional crash that would come after. Other endurance athletes later told Wamsley that it can be a common reaction after reaching an enormous, long-sought goal: without the Channel ahead of her, she found herself trying to divine what mattered in the life that came after it. She kept herself moving through last September’s Chicago swim — the next goal on her list — but in the months after, she struggled to stay afloat amid a depression she said was unlike anything she’d experienced before.
Wamsley said she started measuring herself against new goals, new deadlines of her own making; if she missed one, she said, it felt as though she’d failed publicly — even if no one else knew the deadline existed.
“I put those made-up targets on myself,” she said.
Before the Channel, Wamsley had sometimes trained between two and six hours a day, but for about eight months after Chicago, she said, there were months when she swam only once or twice. She began retreating from social circles, stopped answering some emails and, for a time, stepped away from Amy’s Swimventure, the nonprofit she founded in 2024 around water conservation and encouraging women to pursue their goals.
“It was like, ‘Wait a minute — I can’t go out there and inspire people or help educate about saving rivers if I can’t even get up and take care of myself,’” she said.
So she looked for help: She started working with a therapist, and started the slow grind through reconsidering the pressure she had put on herself — and the way others had come to see her.
As if to illustrate that point, during her interview with the News, a woman passing nearby overheard that Wamsley had swum the English Channel and approached to say how inspiring the accomplishment was to her. Wamsley received the praise warmly, and the woman parted with a smile.
Interactions like those, Wamsley said, are something she’s been thinking about for much of the last year. She takes seriously the fact that her swim has meant something to people beyond herself — particularly, she said, at a time when people are looking for reasons to believe difficult things, good things, are still possible.
“There’s not a lot to celebrate, and I’m glad that I was able … to do something people could celebrate,” she said.
But for a while, Wamsley said she struggled with the fact that being an example also left her feeling that she needed to keep proving that she was worthy of it.
“I didn’t know how to handle it,” she said.
Through the ongoing work of attuning to her own, smaller rhythms, Wamsley said she’s grateful that people kept asking her, “What’s next?” If, at first, the pressure to do something as big as the English Channel felt like too much, once she began to work through how she felt, the question settled into something more grounded and personal.
“It helped drive me to think, ‘Remember who you are, and what you’ve done,’” she said. “And that’s been really, really helpful.”
Wamsley said she’s struggled with how much of her depression she wants people to know about. When asked during the interview whether it was something she wanted kept out of print, she said it wasn’t — and that being honest about what followed the Channel is also part of taking the responsibility of inspiring others seriously.
“I know there’s so many other people who struggle with it,” she said. “We don’t talk about it enough.”
One of the goals that had lingered through her most difficult period finally took Wamsley back to the water this June: For her 51st birthday, she spent four-and-a-half days visiting each of Ohio’s 17 scenic rivers, getting into the water — sometimes swimming, sometimes only briefly — and learning about the waterways along the way.
The trip began painfully. Stepping down a muddy bank into the Olentangy River, Wamsley slipped on a tree root and sliced open her hand.
“I lifted up my hand, and I had blood dripping all the way down,” she said.
But she cleaned and bandaged the wound and went into the river anyway, then monitored the cut through the rest of the trip. Other hazards presented themselves: At one stop, a companion spotted a partially obscured sign warning of an undertow as Wamsley prepared to enter. Heavy June storms also meant elevated bacteria levels in some waterways, requiring her to check available water-quality information as she traveled — the kind of observation she’d always done as part of Amy’s Swimventure.
To that end, Wamsley said she’s spoken at an Ohio Department of Natural Resources annual meeting about water conservation and “primary contact” — direct bodily contact with rivers and other waterways — and hopes to return to educating people about what she learned during the 17-river trip.
Thus, Wamsley is beginning to make room for both swimming and her nonprofit work again. Finding a remote job that allows her to train in the mornings has helped: She’s back to swimming several days a week and has reconnected with her coach, Dan Simonelli. She said she intends to pursue some larger open-water swims again down the road.
Wamsley mused on a piece of advice her coach has been offering her for months, over and over: Get into the water and “find the fun.” She said she’s taken that advice very much to heart.
“I’m finally starting to find the drive,” she said. “I’m finally starting to find the fun.”
Those who wish to contribute to Wamsley’s Chicago River Swim fundraiser can visit runsignup.com/Aswimventure.
The Yellow Springs News encourages respectful discussion of this article.
You must login to post a comment.
Don't have a login? Register for a free YSNews.com account.
No comments yet for this article.