Lori King’s Marathon Swim Story

Today I spoke with the first woman to swim around the island of Bermuda, Lori King. Upon rediscovering her love of swimming later is life, Lori tried to politely decline an invitation to swim in the open water, strongly preferring the pool. Needless to say, she eventually found her rhythm and got over her fears.

There’s quite a bit of mom chat in this episode. About how hard it can be, but also how having kids mentally trains you to get through the tough parts of marathon swimming. Once you get to the start line, all you have to do is swim. I hope you enjoy this episode.

In her own words: Lori King grew up in Norristown Pennsylvania and started swimming competitively by age 5.  In college, she swam Division I for La Salle University.  After college, she temporarily fell away from swimming, moved to New York City, married and had two children.  She began a career as a research analyst for the Visiting Nurse Service Research Center, which eventually led her to earn a Masters of Public Health, from Columbia University (2010).

As her career progressed, she felt something was missing in her life and returned to swimming in 2004.  In 2006, she was introduced to open water swimming and her lifelong passion evolved.   In 2010, she competed in her 1st open water event, followed rapidly, by 6 and 12-mile open water swims, in Bermuda and Key West, respectively.  

While trying to juggle family life and swimming, she has since competed in numerous open water marathon events, such as the Catalina channel swim, the Manhattan Island swim, the 120-mile 8 Bridges Hudson River Staged Swim, Capri-Napoli, Ibiza Marathon swim, & Kalamata Greece swim to name a few.

On June 15-16, 2016, Lori became the first woman (second person) to successful swim the 36.5 miles around the island of Bermuda in just over 21 hours.

In December of 2016 Lori was awarded the Global Marathon Swimmer Yudovin Award for most adventurous swim by the Marathon Swimmers Federation for her Bermuda swim.  Lori has used her swimming to speak to swim teams and organizations aimed at empowering girls and was featured on “heroes on our Island” television news segment.

Settled in Long Island, New York, family comes first for Lori but with their support she is able to live her dreams and reach her goals one swim at a time.