The END-WET 2025 Guest Swimmer is....
Hello everyone,
In 2025 we have the privilege of welcoming Katie Blair as our Guest Swimmer.
I grew up in Mannheim, Germany, where I started swimming competitively at the age of 11 - so a bit of a late start. Around the age of 15, I discovered triathlon and became obsessed with the idea of wanting to compete in the Ironman Hawaii. Many thousands of hours of training later, I was able to make that dream come true, finishing the Ironman Hawaii in 2001 and 2002. A perk along the way was making International Triathlon Union - Long Distance World Champion (18-24) in Frederica, Denmark in 2001.
Focusing on my son Ashton, born in 2004, and pursuing a college education, I considered myself retired from the demands of endurance sports. Little did I know that a bathroom flyer at Colorado State University would get me started on a whole second endurance sports career. Said flyer promoted the Horsetooth Reservoir 10K swim and had me curious if I still “had it”. A cool mountain 10K swim later, I was suddenly training with a small group of “crazies” that dreamt of the English Channel.
16 years later, I have an eclectic collection of adventurous swims under my belt – some successful and some not. I completed the triple crown of open water swimming with my 2012 English Channel swim. Succeeded in the Kaiwi Channel in 2013, while failing after 8h in the too-cold-for-Katie North Channel in Ireland. I swam a triple-width crossing of Lake Constance in 2014, Lake Memphremagog and Tampa Bay in 2015, Lake Erie in 2019, and from St. Lucia to Martinique in 2020. In 2022, I failed at the lofty goal of trying to circumnavigate St. Lucia.
Following the failure, I was considering myself retired again (even moved to Florida). However, I find myself drawn to complete the Swim Around Key West at least once a year and am living by the warm Atlantic waters of central Florida, where I train steadily. My son Ashton, now 20, is an aspiring mechanical engineer studying at Purdue. Meanwhile, I was able to complete my PhD in Psychology with an emphasis in Performance Psychology in 2023 and am currently working for the United States Space Force. I am excited to finally make it to Endwet and am starting to think that retirement is probably not my thing.
