“Swimming was something I would have never done if it was outside a pool because that was scary, and I don’t do scary things,” says Laurie Craigen '99.
Laurie Craigen ’99 turned to open water swimming because it frightened her, and it led her to waves — physical and otherwise — she never expected.
No one ever told her it would be easy. But they didn’t say it would be quite this hard.
The forecast had improved marginally, but the weather was not looking good on Sept. 6, 2024, when Laurie Craigen ’99 finally got the greenlight to make an attempt at fulfilling a lifelong dream — a solo swim across the English Channel. This 21-mile, cold-water marathon swim would complete the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming, a feat achieved by fewer than 375 swimmers in history.
Craigen rose early to meet a rainy, gray morning. Her friend Polly Madding, who was still recovering from her own successful swim across that storied waterway a week prior, helped her lug mountains of gear down the six flights of stairs from their rental apartment in Folkestone, Kent. They hopped in a taxi and sped toward the marina to meet Captain Eddie Spelling and his son and first mate, Mike.
The captain had reserved the right to cancel the swim at the last minute, based on the latest forecast that would arrive at noon from the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s national meteorological service. But the improved projections from the 9 p.m. forecast the night before held. Craigen and her friends clambered aboard Spelling’s boat, the Anastasia, as rain pelted down and the sea churned.
If ever there were an appropriate time to be quaking in one’s goggles, that would have been it.
Nevertheless, steeling herself with the sign of the cross and loosing a primal scream, Craigen leaped off the side of the Anastasia and into the roiling sea. In accordance with the rules of marathon swimming, she crossed the 100 meters or so back to the rocky English coast where she picked her way across the painful shingle to a patch of dry stones above the tide line and raised her arm. The boat’s horn blew, signaling the swim’s commencement. She stumbled back into the sea at 1 p.m., swimming strong and fast straight for France.
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After making the sign of the cross, Craigen leaps into the 64-degree water, beginning her swim to the shoreline of Dover's Shakespeare Cliff.
GROWING IN FEAR
Despite growing up in a loving family, cared for by parents who encouraged and supported her in everything she did, Craigen, a Hamilton, Massachusetts, native, admits she was an anxious, sensitive kid: “As early as I can remember, I always felt a little different from others. I experienced the world through a fear-based lens and had big feelings. I felt the safest when I was in my comfort zone, often keeping to myself or staying close to home.”
She used her smarts and her athletic skills to make her way to Holy Cross, where she majored in psychology and competed on the varsity swim team. She went on to earn a Ph.D. at William & Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, after which she established herself as an associate professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
Meanwhile, time moved on and her parents – still living just north of Boston – began needing more help. Craigen moved back to the Boston area in 2015 to be closer and was there when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2021. Her father also experienced a decline in health attributable to his time serving in the Vietnam War, where he was exposed to Agent Orange and developed post-traumatic stress disorder.
Throughout all her academic and career achievement, Craigen grappled with existential tumult. “My anxieties and fears were so big, I did best when I could stay in my comfort zone. And my comfort zone is talking to other people about their stuff and not dealing with my own,” she says. “I became really good at that and created a career out of it.”
Each new accolade only reinforced her focus on others and allowed her to pretend that everything was OK.
Craigen's love of swimming started early in her life.
At Holy Cross, Craigen was a member of the varsity swim team.
The young swimmer with her mother.
Craigen with her mother in 2022 after a successful swim of Manhattan Island.
Craigen with her father.
RECOGNIZING A VULNERABILITY
As her mother’s condition worsened, however, Craigen realized she needed to make some changes in her own life. Upon moving back to Boston, she turned to swimming to help make new friends.
It hadn’t yet occurred to her to look beyond the controlled, antiseptic confines of the swimming pool. “Swimming was something I would have never done if it was outside a pool because that was scary, and I don’t do scary things,” she recalls. “It’s a vulnerability that I wasn’t in touch with.”
But a chance conversation with another swimmer changed everything. This person told Craigen she swam far in open water not because she was comfortable with the concept, but specifically because it frightened her.
“That was a defining moment in my life,” Craigen says. “Even though I was a therapist and even though I talk about this stuff, suddenly it clicked. You do something because it scares you.”
This off-hand comment shifted Craigen’s frame of mind and that’s when she really committed to open water swimming: “It was no longer about swimming, it was about me needing to change my life and about something much deeper. It was about the fear and conquering my fear.”
The Anastasia pitched and yawed as Craigen battled waves and wind in the British shipping lane.
Over the next several years, Craigen – often joined by her sister, Amy – began venturing farther, longer and colder in open water.
Before long, Craigen was swimming year-round in Boston Harbor and completed increasingly lengthier swims. A 10K led to a 10-miler, followed by a 25-mile adventure across mighty Lake Memphremagog in northern Vermont and southern Quebec, captained by Phil White, a legend in the open water swimming community.
In July 2022, she swam solo around Manhattan Island, a 28.5-mile tidally assisted swim that’s considered one of the marquee open water events in the world. It’s grouped with the Catalina Channel in Southern California and the English Channel into the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming, a highly sought-after prize that, as of December 2024, had only been completed by 375 swimmers worldwide.
Craigen wondered if someday she could join them. So, she signed up to attempt the Catalina Channel in August 2023.
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“When I finished Catalina, I had a moment of disappointment, because I didn’t conquer my fear,” Craigen says.
Fellow swimmer Polly Madding had also set her sights on the Catalina Channel, so the friends joined forces, endlessly looping around Pleasure Bay in South Boston and various other open water swimming locales in eastern Massachusetts for the next 12 months.
Swimmers undertaking solo crossings of the Catalina Channel typically launch their swims from Catalina Island between 10 p.m. and midnight, and swim back to the California mainland 20.2 miles away.
This challenge is a good analogue for the English Channel, with its cool water and similar distance. Also, the weather is usually good enough that the escort boat’s captain, often called the pilot in marathon swimming, can pinpoint a specific day each swimmer will go. However, the waters off southern California are home to many critters, and then there’s the whole swimming-in-the-dark-for-six-to-eight-hours thing.
Craigen was terrified that she might meet the business end of a shark or get stung by jellyfish – fears that became reality for friends who’d previously swum the Catalina Channel. She attempted to control that fear by focusing on training hard. Having grown up fixated on pool times and performance standards, Craigen took that same focus on “fast” into her open water training.
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Craigen’s tattoo depicts the GPS track line of her English Channel swim; a shark, which symbolizes changing her relationship with fear; and a crown to represent achieving the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming.
It was exhausting, and her shoulders were sore by the time she and Madding arrived on the mainland. Craigen didn’t have as great a swim as she’d hoped and returned to Massachusetts feeling a little defeated, despite having successfully swum from Catalina in a respectable 11 hours, 12 minutes and 32 seconds.
The issue ran deeper than not breaking the 11-hour barrier, which had been her unvoiced goal. “When I finished Catalina, I had a moment of disappointment, because I didn’t conquer my fear,” she says. “I was scared, but moving away from that, I learned that it was about changing my relationship with existing – thriving – in fear.”
Craigen had already reserved a slot with Captain Spelling aboard the Anastasia to escort her across the English Channel in September 2024. But she realized she needed a different model if she was going to achieve her goal.
FINDING MEANING
After a short recovery from the Catalina Channel swim, Craigen returned to training, but changed her approach with the support of her coach, Charlotte Brynn, and her trainer, Ryan Lunny, to be gentler on herself and less rigid in adherence to an arbitrary goal.
She also announced plans to use the swim as a fundraiser for the Alzheimer’s Association’s Team END ALZ campaign in honor of her mother. And then, suddenly, the swim became about so much more than simply crossing a 21-mile-wide stretch of cold water.
When the training felt too hard or she wanted to skip a workout, she reminded herself: “I’m doing it for something bigger than myself now.” That helped in the dead of winter, when the last thing she wanted to do was get out of bed before sunrise to grind out lap after lap at the pool.
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Traversing the busiest shipping channel in the world, Craigen shared the water with ferries, tankers and other large watercraft.
As summer 2024 approached, Craigen felt confident in her training, but her mother’s condition had deteriorated. Pulled in a million different directions between family, work as an associate professor in the mental health counseling and behavioral medicine program at the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine at Boston University and every other responsibility on her overloaded plate, Craigen let herself relax into her training. She says that’s what kept her going when life got difficult.
But, still, she was anxious about the challenge ahead and expended energy worrying about things she couldn’t control. Would her flight to the UK be delayed or cancelled? Would her accommodations fall through – again? Would the weather be good enough to start? Would she be able to finish? Would she be able to swim away from the fear that was holding her back?
Such concerns are normal for swimmers undertaking the English Channel, who typically have a 5- to 10-day “tide window,” during which they wait for the pilot to tell them the weather is good enough for an attempt. Pilots generally queue three or four swimmers on a tide, and when the weather cooperates, swimmers launch one at a time across the busiest shipping channel in the world.
But British weather is notoriously fickle, and there are no guarantees in the English Channel. Control is an illusion and the only certainty comes when a swimmer’s hand scrapes sand on the French shore.
So much of swimming the English Channel – and, indeed, life itself – lies beyond the influence of mere mortals. In fact, the buildup to starting the swim has been dubbed the “Dover-coaster,” given that the outlook can change from favorable to impossible in a matter of hours. The resulting emotional equivalent of a rickety old Coney Island joyride is not a ticket most people seek to buy. Still, each summer, swimmers arrive in Dover or another nearby English town a few days or weeks before their tide to wait for word from their captain that it’s time.
Every summer, roughly 250 swimmers and relay teams are scheduled to swim, but some years, a quarter or more go home without ever having a chance to try. Many others start, but are unable to complete the swim for any number of reasons, including illness, injury, and in extremely rare cases, death. This high attrition rate gave the English Channel its nickname: the Mount Everest of Swimming.
HOPE FLOATS
With her anxiety understandably running high, Craigen boarded a plane bound for London and made her way another two hours southeast to the Kentish coast. She arrived on Aug. 27, almost a week before her tide window was to open on Sept. 2. She checked in with the pilot, who told her the weather had not been good, but “we live in hope.” He promised to keep dutifully checking the forecast.
That hope, however, started wearing thin as one day after another slipped by, unswimmable. Craigen’s tide window dwindled. Checking in daily, Captain Spelling repeated the same bad news from earlier in the window: The forecast was lousy. As he had advised so many other apprehensive swimmers in summer 2024, he told her she’d probably have to wait until next year. “Unless you can stay until Sept. 14,” when the weather was forecast to improve, “you should go home,” he wrote.
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Craigen’s support crew aboard the Anastasia held up a variety of signs to cheer her on during her journey.
Craigen was devastated by this prophecy and didn’t think she had it in her to train another year. A bigger concern was whether her parents would still be alive next summer: “I didn’t know if I could live with that.”
And something snapped in that moment.
“My whole life, I’ve struggled with depression,” she says. “I’ve fought and fought and fought. But in that moment, I had no fight left.”
In tears, she went to lie down, and says that as she climbed the steps to her room, she thought to herself, I am done. “And there was no fear. But then, I felt this weird need to pray.”
Craigen can’t recall the specifics of that prayer, but over and over again, she prayed while listening to music, a stanza from the song “Rest on Us” repeating in her mind:
As the Spirit was moving over the waters Spirit, come move over us Come rest on us Come rest on us
“I fell into a spiritual place. I heard water,” she says. She stayed in that place for over an hour, only waking from her reverie when her phone pinged. It was a message from the pilot: “I’ll put you on standby.”
Buoyed by this potential shift in fortune, Craigen began methodically packing her gear and readying for a chance to swim.
SEPT. 6, 2024
Craigen launched her English Channel attempt into whipping whitecaps, as her crew did their best not to tumble overboard as the Anastasia pitched and yawed in the salty swirl.
Despite the gnarly conditions, Craigen looked utterly at home, slicing across the tops of waves and grinning as she bottomed out in others. She playfully spat water toward her friends, letting them know that the fearful, anxious swimmer they thought they’d be supporting had been replaced by a focused athlete who was basking in the challenge laid out before her.
In that moment, swimming with confidence despite conditions so dicey the pilot later said he had never allowed another swimmer to start in such conditions, Craigen continued on an unexpected spiritual journey.
“I just kept trying to settle my brain, and I went through all the people in my life. I went through every moment. It was a life review, like ‘A Christmas Carol,’ where I was looking back at everything. I thought about all my parents did to help me, having brought me to my first swim practice and how they were there at every single swim meet. I prayed and thought about my grandparents. Every memory flashed in my head and I just felt so grateful,” she says.
“For 12 hours, I was having this spiritual experience,” she continues. “I heard the songs from the night before. And I wasn’t scared at all because I had already ceded control.”
Once she started swimming, she says “there was no doubt in my mind. I knew I was going to finish. There was such peace. There was nothing in my way.”
The vantage point from aboard the Anastasia offered a different perspective. Those on deck struggled to keep their feet and stay dry in the misty rain and spray. At virtually the same temperature as the 64-degree water, the chilly air and stiff breeze under heavy cloud cover meant those topside were chilled. Her friends bundled up against the cold, hoping Craigen had done enough acclimation training to tolerate the chill for the 12 hours or more she’d need to get to France.
The waves had died down by nighttime as Craigen got closer to France.
A few hours into Craigen’s swim, the buffeting wind still had not died down, nor had the sea settled as forecast. That’s when Captain Spelling said that if conditions didn’t improve significantly by nightfall, he’d have to terminate the attempt because continuing after dark would be too dangerous. Despite the lights attached to the back of her cap and her swimsuit, Craigen would become much more difficult to see and track after sunset. The big swells were already obscuring her from view for a second or two at a time, and after dark, that challenge would intensify to a level Captain Spelling refused to risk.
Craigen’s on-deck support crew increased the fervency of their wishes for calm water and pushed out requests on social media for her family and friends to send positive energy and prayers.
And then, bit by bit, the wind dropped and the water calmed. As twilight encroached, the sea turned glassy. Craigen’s crew allowed themselves a brief sigh of relief. With daylight fading, two butterflies appeared, flitting over and around Craigen for about an hour as she zoomed along. The lights of Calais loomed closer as she crossed into and through the French shipping lane.
Then, it was dark.
But Craigen swam on in her steadied, practiced rhythm, each stroke bringing her closer to land.
When Craigen was about 200 meters off the beach, First Mate Mike Spelling helped one of her crew members down the ladder at the back of the boat to swim to shore with Craigen – a common safety measure employed at the critical conclusion of many channel swims.
Gentle waves pushed the pair toward the desolate strand, and in short order, Craigen tested whether the water was shallow enough to stand. She awkwardly stood up, then stumbled, then found her feet again. She took several ungainly steps eastward until her toes touched dry, cool sand.
She’d done it.
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Those who successfully swim the channel head to Dover’s oldest pub, The White Horse, when they return to English soil to commemorate their achievement.
Breathless, with teeth chattering, Craigen scanned the ground quickly, looking for a rock to take back with her. Collecting a small memento from the far shore is another common element of marathon swimming. There weren’t many to be found, but she scooped up several nearly perfect seashells and, with a wry smile, stuffed them down the front of her friend’s swimsuit to ferry back to the boat; more than 12 hours of swimming had done little to diminish Craigen’s quirky sense of humor.
The swim was over, save for the last challenge – returning to the Anastasia, which waited patiently as close to shore as she could safely float without risk of running aground on a rock or sandbar.
Several dozen long strokes later, Craigen was at the ladder. She carefully climbed aboard the gently rocking vessel where she wrapped up in dry towels and hugged her friends hard.
Mission accomplished.
CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT
Two weeks later, back in Massachusetts and reflecting on the whole experience, Craigen says she’s still struggling to comprehend all that transpired. “If I tried to put it in words, it would diminish it,” she says. “It started out as just a swimming goal. Could I do the thing I didn’t think I was capable of doing and could I change my relationship with fear?”
But, somewhere, beyond words and in that liminal space between England and France, Craigen achieved much more than simply completing an iconic 21-mile open water swim. She quieted anxiety, conquered fear and thrived in challenge, all while raising some $16,000 for the END ALZ cause.
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Craigen with her mother, following her return from England.
Shortly after she got home, Craigen visited her mother in the North Shore nursing home where she’s being cared for. Though her mom struggles to speak these days, she beams when Craigen arrives; love doesn’t need language. She hands Craigen a silver, coin-shaped charm to add to the other two she wears on a delicate chain around her neck.
This coin, supplied by Craigen’s aunt, Mary Thomas, carries the imprint of a three prongedccrown on one side and the words “English Channel 2024” on the reverse. The other two represent Manhattan Island and Catalina Channel, respectively; Craigen’s mother had those engraved for her upon completion of those swims. Together, the three charms create a gentle music as she moves, the sound of triumph and victory.
