After swimming around the island of Manhattan in 2021, Liz Uribe has topped herself once again.
Originally from Tucson, Ariz., Uribe moved to Iowa to attend graduate school at the University of Iowa in 2009. She did some open-water swimming as a teenager, but it wasn't until she moved to Iowa City that she began open-water swimming regularly — at marathon distances.
This year, Uribe participated in the week-long "8 Bridges Hudson River Swim" marathon, swimming between eight bridges in seven stages for up to nine hours each day. The marathon started 35 miles south of Albany in Catskill, New York and ended in the New York harbor.
"The sheer amount of swimming was a challenge … having to get up the next day and know that you were going to do it all again," Uribe told host Ben Kieffer on IPR’s River to River.
Uribe faced other challenges: headwinds, swimming against the tide, hail, poor visibility and continuous rain for hours.
Yet her biggest fear wasn’t the obstacles — not even having to swim around barges and yachts — it was that the marathon would be called off when conditions got bad.
"I wanted to finish," she said.
Uribe worked to keep herself safe and moving forward. She said she swallowed a lot of polluted water, but luckily didn't get sick.
"My suit was just covered in just dirt after coming out of that river, and it was pretty gross," she said.
Uribe said she enjoyed the sights during the first three days of the marathon, swimming past beautiful places like the Bannerman Castle near Beacon, New York.
"I did really enjoy — despite the storms that came later — really enjoyed swimming past the Statue of Liberty. That was really, really cool," she recalled.
Uribe plans to continue swimming at different open-water marathons around the country and hopes to swim across the English Channel in the next few years.
