If you know me, you might know I like to take the stairs.
I wasn’t always this way. But somewhere around 2017 or 2018, I wanted to be healthier and it felt like a simple thing I could do in order to just be slightly healthier considering I broadcast games from the fifth floor of various stadiums and PressBox’s then-Hampden office was on the third floor of the building.
I’m also not psychopathic about it. My cutoff has usually been eight floors. If I stay in a hotel room on the 15th floor, I’ll probably take the elevator.
When my family arrived at our annual summer vacation week at Sea Colony in Bethany Beach this July, I realized our condo was on the ninth floor of the building where we were staying. This created a near crisis of conscience for me. Nine is greater than eight! I’m off the hook! Between going to the beach and the gym and putt-putt and taking the kids for ice cream after every meal, I’d be going up and down the nine floors some five or six times a day. The stairs couldn’t be an option!
But also, nine is so close to eight! Don’t I have an obligation to myself to attempt this? If I try it, will I bail? One of my biggest mental health struggles is that when I start something, particularly a workout or something physical, the idea of just bailing on it is so appealing to me that the thought alone provides a dopamine rush. There’s no way I could make it through the entire week.
This is where Katie Pumphrey enters into my mind.
My single favorite moment of 2024 (so far) in Baltimore happened on June 25. I couldn’t stop monitoring it. Katie Pumphrey, a Frederick native and Middletown graduate, swam 24 miles from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to the Inner Harbor. Such a trek had never been attempted before. She wanted to bring attention to the Harbor being declared swimmable and encourage more people to trust the science that got us to this point.
It was such a uniquely Baltimore moment and triggered a wonderful celebration when she reached the Inner Harbor. Pumphrey, a Baltimore resident, got into the water that morning knowing damn well she could complete the swim. She swam the English Channel twice and swam around the Island of Manhattan and the Catalina Channel. Those three are known as the “Triple Crown” of open water swimming. (She swam the Catalina Channel again later in the summer.)
Still, I couldn’t imagine what the mental health challenges of a 14-hour swim must be like. I get overwhelmed by the mental health challenges of a 14-minute run. So two days after her swim, I asked about it and was grateful for her honesty.
“My first really big marathon swim was the English Channel in 2015,” Pumphrey told me on Glenn Clark Radio June 27. “And I had kind of gotten to know the dark places of my mind into swims leading up to that one. But that was the biggest introduction to the depths that our minds and feelings can go. And I learned so much from that. It was so hard and recovering from that, like meeting those feelings was also really hard.”
Those words resonated with me not because I’ll ever know what it’s like to swim 24 miles. They resonated because in my own battles with mental health difficulties, meeting certain feelings has been damn near paralyzing. I’ve personally lost hours — sometimes full evenings — wrestling with the introduction to intense, overwhelming battles with grief, self-doubt and pure darkness. I’m not alone. Few of us are immune.
Pumphrey has worked on how to meet those feelings as she has continued in her marathon swimming career and in coaching other swimmers as well.
“You want to have tools in your toolbox,” she tells them. “You are going to have an emotional roller coaster, no matter how confident or prepared you are. And you just have to be OK feeling some of those feelings and also know that you can kind of pull yourself back to neutral. … You have to be kind and gentle to yourself.”
I didn’t swim 24 miles. But I swear to God I thought about Katie Pumphrey telling me how reaching the Inner Harbor “was just the most magical thing I’ve ever seen.” Nine flights of stairs — up and down — 31 times each during the span of seven days was my personal swim. It’s not actually an accomplishment of any sort. But when I departed, I felt good about it.
I’m grateful to Katie Pumphrey for the inspiration. It won’t be the last time I fall back on it.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Katie Pumphrey, Photographer Mollye Miller