Arts & Entertainment
First Chicago River Swim in Nearly 100 Years Set for This Weekend
This Sunday, around 400 competitors will be the first group to swim an event in the Chicago River since 1927.
The Chicago River Swim is an open water swim event organized by Douglas McConnell, the co-founder of A Long River Swim, which organizes open water swimming events to raise awareness and funds in the fight against ALS.
McConnell began the mission to host an open water swimming event in the Chicago River 13 years ago after being inspired by the Amsterdam City Swim event.
Chicago River Swim was scheduled to kick off last September, but got moved to Lake Michigan following concerns from city officials about water safety.
This year, the event is in full swing with daily water quality tests and endorsements from Mayor Brandon Johnson and other officials.
“The return of the Chicago River Swim marks a major victory for our city—a testament to decades of hard work revitalizing our river,” Johnson said in a statement.
Competitors will swim one or two miles, beginning at the Dearborn Street Bridge, heading west toward State Street, then looping back around west and finishing next to the Clark Street Bridge.
A competitive swimmer for more than 50 years, McConnell’s father died from ALS in 2006. McConnell’s sister Ellen was diagnosed with the disease shortly thereafter. In 2011, the duo founded A long swim to combine their love of open water swimming with their mission to combat ALS.
“It was really after Ellen was diagnosed that she and I said, ‘This is crazy town, and we got to do something,’” McConnell said. “Raising funds for research was a logical sort of target, … and Ellen is the one who thought of the name and thought of marrying up open water, swimming with ALS research.”
Last year the event raised $200,000, which was given to the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and to the Salvation Army Kroc Center Chicago, which provides swimming lessons to at-risk youth.
McConnell said it was a challenge to combat the public perception of the Chicago River as polluted and dirty in advertising the event, a struggle shared by Friends of the Chicago River Executive Director Margaret Frisbie, whose organization has long worked to restore the river’s water quality.
“I think people are so used to saying, ‘There was sewage in the river,’” Frisbie said. “The sewage is gone. On a rare occasion is there any sewage in the river. There has been more than $3 billion that has been spent to create a giant infrastructure project that dealt with our combined sewer problem.”
Frisbie, who joined Friends of the Chicago River in 2000, has long advocated for swimmable cities, arguing that a healthy river helps reduce climate change and extreme heat risks and provides residents a necessary source of recreation.
Rebecca Mann, a professional swimmer and the only person to have completed the Maui Nui Tri-Channel Crossing — a 40-mile swim among Hawaiian islands — said open water swimming is an adventurous change of pace from traditional pool competition.
“You can’t quite prepare for everything, for all the variables and the factors, and you have to be very adaptable in order to be good at it and to be successful,” Mann said. “Swimming in a pool and staring at the black line, it can get a little bit monotonous, but the second that you’re in a river, a lake, an ocean, everything is different.”
Mann won the women’s two-mile race in last year’s Chicago River Swim and will compete again this Sunday.
