The pools closed in 2020, and a stir-crazy kid from Raleigh went looking for somewhere else to swim. Her family drove out to Falls Lake, she got in, and something clicked. "Open water feels very freeing," Lorelei Schmidt later told CBS 17. "I'm not bound by lane ropes or having to follow a black line at the bottom of the pool."

Six years after that first lake swim, the black line was replaced by 21 miles of the busiest shipping lane in the world. On Friday, Aug. 7, Schmidt — 17 years old, a rising senior at Broughton High School and a member of the Marlins of Raleigh swim team — walked out of the water on the French coast after crossing the English Channel from England in just over 12 hours. WRAL and CBS 17 reported her time as 12 hours and 5 minutes.

With that, she collected the final jewel of the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming.

Three swims, one crown

The Triple Crown is made up of the English Channel, the Catalina Channel off Southern California, and the 20 Bridges Swim around Manhattan Island. Schmidt finished Catalina and 20 Bridges in 2024, and has also swum the Molokai Channel in Hawaii. Fewer than 500 people in the world have completed all three; by one count kept at ultraswimming.org, the number stood at roughly 400 as of late 2025. Fewer than 2,000 swimmers have ever made a successful Channel crossing — a smaller club than the one that has stood on top of Mount Everest.

The Channel is 21 miles at its narrowest point, but almost nobody swims a straight line. Tides push swimmers sideways for hours, the water is cold, and the finish is wherever the sea decides to put you. "It's rarely a straight swim because there's currents to deal with," her Marlins coach, John McDonald, told ABC11 while she was still training. He predicted she could be in the water 11 hours. He was close.

Her attempt had originally been set for around Aug. 4, but weather pushed the window back, and she waited out the forecast before getting the green light for Friday. The swim itself is a long, unglamorous rhythm. "I'm just swimming, swimming, swimming," she told ABC11 of her routine. "Every thirty minutes, I stop, tread water, get something to eat, and then go back." A kayaker paddles alongside; a support boat carrying her family and coach trails behind.

Watched from 4,000 miles away

Back in North Carolina, people refreshed the tracker all day. Among them was Billy Thorne, who coached Schmidt when she was a preteen and followed her dot inch across the Channel toward France.

What makes the story land isn't just the distance. It's that the whole thing started as a workaround — a teenager denied her pool, improvising in a reservoir, and discovering that she liked the version of the sport with no walls and no clock. "You can go to the same place and do the same swim over and over and over again every single day, and no two are going to be the same," she told ABC11. That appetite for variability is exactly what carried her through cold, chop and current for half a day.

McDonald, describing what sets her apart, pointed to something quieter than raw speed: her stroke barely changes, hour after hour. Endurance, in his telling, is mostly consistency wearing a hat.

Schmidt now heads into her senior year of high school as one of the youngest members of a very small fraternity of marathon swimmers — a Raleigh kid who turned a pandemic inconvenience into a crown, then went back to class.