Excerpts from The Believer: An Interview with Amy Appelhans Gubser
Favorite foods to eat while swimming a great distance, according to Amy Appelhans Gubser:
- Sweet canned peaches in syrup, to cut the salt from ocean water
- Mashed potatoes with butter, squeezed from a plastic bag
- Warm bone broth and Carbo-Pro powder, guzzled from a bottle
A my Appelhans Gubser surfaced in the public imagination in May 2024, when she became the first person in history to swim from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to the Farallon Islands, an epic thirty-mile journey through fierce ocean currents and frigid waters famously inhabited by great white sharks. What sustained her over seventeen hours—through facefuls of stinging jellyfish and ocean temperatures plummeting into the low forties—included years of planning, a swim stroke as steady as a metronome, and a stream of ’80s pop hits belted out by her kayaker, John Chapman. The fact that she was a fifty-five-year-old grandmother also featured prominently in international news headlines about her accomplishment.
The morning I heard of her feat, I was surfing with friends in Pacifica, a coastal town just fifteen minutes down Highway 1 from San Francisco; it’s also where Appelhans Gubser has lived for twenty-seven years. The swimming and surfing community here is close-knit. In 2020, I published a book called Why We Swim, which included a story about the open-water swimmer Kim Chambers. Chambers and Appelhans Gubser trained frequently together in 2015, when Gubser was part of the first two-way Farallones relay in July of that year; a week later, Chambers was the first woman to swim solo (in the opposite direction of Gubser’s 2024 route) from the Farallones to the Golden Gate Bridge. The two are good friends and fellow members of the historic South End Rowing Club, at San Francisco’s Aquatic Park. When I visited Appelhans Gubser at her home, she greeted me like an old friend, speculating that we’d probably swum together many times at Aquatic Park while I was reporting the book.
On a clear day, you can see the Farallones from just out her front door in Pacifica. Appelhans Gubser is a warm and joyful presence, open and curious about the world. Over the course of two hours, we finished each other’s sentences and laughed a lot. She lives with her husband, Greg Gubser, a retired harbormaster for San Mateo County and a veteran of the US Coast Guard, with whom she ran a surf camp for two decades. They first met as children, when both were selected to compete at the National Junior Lifeguard Championships in San Clemente, California; she was ten and he was twelve. She pointed out the many photographs hanging on the walls of their living room—impressive shots of Greg surfing, her swimming, and the couple’s children and grandchildren in and out of the water.
On land, Appelhans Gubser works as a fetal cardiology nurse at the University of California, San Francisco. Her thirty-year career caring for young patients, mostly in intensive care, has reinforced the calm, steadfast aspect of her character. But the enthusiastic, ocean-loving child within is very much evident in her girlish smile. On a gorgeous stained-glass panel in the entryway, fish lit by the sun twirl around emerald strands of kelp. In her mind, the water is never very far away.
—Bonnie Tsui
I. WATERWOMEN, UNITE
THE BELIEVER: I’d like to start by saying that pretty much everyone in my swimming and surfing community has told me we have to meet, so this is very exciting. We’ve done it.
AMY APPELHANS GUBSER: I know. Here we are. It’s so amazing, and I really am so honored that you’re here.
BLVR: One of the people who said we had to meet was our mutual friend Caroline Paul—a local legend, writer, waterwoman, pilot, adventurer. Not too long ago she told me she was going to go for an open-water swim with you in San Francisco Bay. As she explained to me afterward, it turned into a rescue.
AAG: We were in Aquatic Park, where the currents can be kind of challenging. So we went out for a swim, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw this man trying to climb out of the water on Hyde Street Pier. By the time Caroline and I got to him, he was a bit hypothermic and he wasn’t making sense. We found out he was actually a fairly experienced swimmer, but he hadn’t been in the water for a while. So I think he was unprepared for the current that swept him under. But my friend Tom rowed the boat around and it was like we had all planned and practiced this procedure to get him into the boat. We laid him along the gunwale, Tom tipped the boat, we popped him in.
BLVR: That’s so fortunate and good to hear, especially in light of what just happened to Nikolas Tomasevic. He was an experienced Dolphin Club swimmer who disappeared during a regular swim in Aquatic Park and was found a few days later.
AAG: It is horrible. A young, fit man who was acclimated to the water… It was really unexpected. I’m grateful to the dive team for finding him. From what I understand, he had a seizure disorder but had not had a seizure in four years. Was that possibly the reason he drowned?
When you swim in Aquatic Park, you kind of have a pirate’s code. Whoever lags behind stays behind; others don’t stop for you. And everyone then assesses the situation at the end of the swim. With the swimmer that Caroline and I helped rescue, his group realized that he wasn’t there after they all were in the shower. And they were like, Wait a minute. He would’ve been in trouble by that time, because he was still being pushed by that current.
BLVR: Obviously there are going to be hazards when you’re swimming in open water. You have to be knowledgeable and aware to minimize those as much as possible. But I was really struck by your spider sense that someone was struggling. There’s a certain kind of person who is always scanning. It’s not something you’re doing consciously, necessarily; it’s just what you do as a default mode. And I’m curious about that. How do you see that in yourself?
AAG: I think that’s always been my nature. I was an LA County lifeguard down on the beaches of Southern California—that honed my ability to be scanning and assessing the situation at all times.
BLVR: So that’s your background as a waterwoman?
AAG: Exactly. And then my husband, Greg, and I started and ran Surf Camp Pacifica for twenty years. There were so many children in the water all the time. And being a mom, I wanted to have a program where, as a parent, you come down and know that everything looks tight and is addressed. The water, it can be really wonderful and inviting, but it can also be really hellacious and really dangerous, especially for children ages six through eighteen.
BLVR: And beyond, to be quite honest.
AAG: And beyond. So when we pulled this program together, I just knew we had to be attentive to safety.
BLVR: It’s baked in. I would love for you to tell me more about growing up in Southern California by the water.
AAG: Goodness. When I was ten years old, we moved to California from the Midwest. My mom and my sister and I lived two blocks away from the beach in Playa del Rey. And my mom knew that during the day we were probably going to go to the ocean, so she had us join the swim team, and all the swimmers on the team would go to the Junior Lifeguard Program.
BLVR: That’s an amazing program.
AAG: It is. My mom brought me and my sister to the beach and said to the instructor, “I need to get my girls into the program.” He’s like, “Well, the program’s already started. There’s no way. There’s a formal process.” And my mom’s like, “You don’t understand. My girls are going to go to the beach and I really want them safe.” And so he said, “All right… Let’s do a buoy swim.” So he drew a line in the sand. He lined us all up. I mean, I’d never swum in big waves. And we were at Marine Avenue, Manhattan Beach, and there was actually surf, and the buoy was outside the surf line. I didn’t know what to do, but I was a good swimmer. There were probably about thirty-five kids; we all swim out and around the buoy and come back in. And I get out of the water and I’m rubbing my eyes, and I go up to him and I say, “Did I win?” Because I did. I beat everybody. And he’s like, “Yeah, OK, we’ll figure out a way to get you in the program.”
BLVR: “Did I win?” Your instinct was competitive.
AAG: Yeah. Competition was the foundation for me as a kid. I’ve evolved such that I’m not interested in being competitive anymore, but that’s how I learned about ocean safety and to love the beach. It helped define me. I was down at the beach every single day. After Junior Lifeguard, me and my friends would just go to the beach in Playa del Ray, or we’d ride—we’d skateboard or Rollerblade or roller-skate—down to Marine Avenue or El Porto and just spend the day. I grew up as a latchkey kid and had free range.
BLVR: That’s the title of your autobiography: “I Grew Up on Marine Avenue.”
AAG: Laughs I just kind of excelled at swimming, and then swam through high school, swam in college. I got a scholarship to the University of Michigan. After university, I joined the LA County Department of Beaches and Harbors as a lifeguard. I flew back from Michigan to try out. I remember showing up at Venice Beach and it was like a ten-foot shore-pound day. And there were probably close to a thousand swimmers who had come to try out. It was still a good old boys’ network. Only the first swimmers to cross the finish line became lifeguards. That day the water was really cold, probably in the fifties, and I had just come out from Michigan, so I was kind of acclimated to cold. That felt like an advantage, but the water was something else. I just remember I said to myself, It’s going to be painful getting out, because it’s just this ginormous shore-pound wave, but as soon as you get out past it, it will be OK. And coming back in was also going to be a nightmare.
BLVR: Right, because you have to negotiate the pitch of the wave and the timing.
AAG: Correct.
BLVR: And it’s funny because only with the knowledge of timing can you look at that and not be completely—
AAG: Derailed.
BLVR: I remember talking to [the world-record-breaking open-water swimmer] Lynne Cox about that, when she did her swim around the Cape of Good Hope. The twenty-foot shore pound was insane—she kept getting thrown back into the sand before she finally made it. But you have to know how to do it so you don’t exhaust yourself just trying to get into the water.
AAG: You can lose your breath because you panic, and also because of the cold. A lot of people just stood there after they told us to go, trying to figure it out. But I knew that if I went deeper, I would just have to pull on the bottom and get through.
BLVR: Oh my god—do you really just grab onto the sand and claw your way through?
AAG: I do. I dig in and I push and I get my feet under and dolphin forward. I was able to pop out through the wave, and I ended up being the first woman finisher and the fourteenth finisher overall. That was an extremely fast year. In fact, a lot of the swimmers in the group went on to compete in lifeguarding internationally. I was so proud I accomplished that.
BLVR: What were your swimming events in college?
AAG: I swam the one-hundred- and two-hundred-yard backstroke. But my swim coach, Jim Richardson, would say as he trained me, “There’s something different about you, because I can’t get you to your aerobic threshold.” He kept telling me I was a distance swimmer. When I was a sophomore, he shifted my training plan to distance swimming, and I cried every day because everybody’s getting out and I’m still grinding it out in the water.
BLVR: And putting in how many hours—
AAG: Hours and hours, sleeping less, then working out. And just not understanding the balance or where my emotional breaking point was. There was no emotional, psychosocial, or psychological support. And no nutritional support. I mean, we’re eating a candy bar, going to practice. I think I was just overtrained and exhausted.
BLVR: But he identified that you were a distance swimmer.
AAG: Correct. I didn’t understand that. He laughs now: “See, I told you.”
Read the rest of the interview over at The Believer.
Discussion in the ATmosphere