One determined athlete is opening up about the strange — and sometimes scary — side effects she endured after swimming 40 miles for 21 hours straight.
“When I was getting towards the end, I was worried about my throat closing,” Rebecca Mann, a two-time USA National champion swimmer and former Olympian, told People in an interview published on Saturday, June 21.
Mann, who narrowly missed securing a spot on the 2019 U.S. Olympic team, became the first person ever to swim the 40-mile Mau Nui Tri-Channel Crossing, the spot between the Hawaiian islands of Maui, Molokai and Lanai, that same year at the age of 21.
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During the swim, Mann, now 27, says she experienced severe swelling that impacted her ability to breathe. At one point, she became so swollen that her nostrils closed and she couldn’t breathe through her nose.
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“That wasn’t a big deal for me because I was like, ‘Okay, it’s fine. I can breathe through my mouth,” she told the outlet, adding that the severe swelling started about nine hours into the swim. “But then my uvula started hanging down onto my tongue.”
In addition to the swelling — Mann told the outlet that it was difficult to swallow for hours after her swim — she also experienced extremely lucid dreams after she completed the challenge.
@beccawmann If you heard 4 things, no you didn’t
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“I start having these dreams where I’m just stuck in the ocean and they’re scary, but they’re also not scary at the same time,” she explained. “It’s just really strange. I’m always in the middle of the ocean trying to do the swim, and I’m not in good enough shape, and there are a bunch of sharks around me, and I don’t have a boat next to me, and it’s really bizarre.”
Years later, she now details what she learned from spending 21 straight hours in the ocean on TikTok, to the delight of her nearly 10,000 followers.
“First is that hours were going to blend together,” Mann says in one TikTok video that has been viewed more than 219,000 times. “There’s a five hour period that I have no recollection of. I just remember that it was 3 am and then all of a sudden the sun was up.”
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She continued, “The second thing was that my elbows were really going to hurt and my elbows have never hurt from swimming before, so that was really weird. Third thing was that I was going to have ‘Wrecking Ball’ by Miley Cyrus stuck in my head for over 10 hours, which was interesting. I like that song but not enough to have it on repeat for 10 hours.”
When asked if she would swim in the ocean for 21 consecutive hours again, the athlete did not hesitate to answer “yes.”
“When I go through a challenge — that’s my best self,” she explained in the interview. “I think that it teaches me a lot about myself, and it reminds me of who I am, who I want to be, and I think that’s the biggest lesson; just getting through all of the bad parts of life.”
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