Her Own Little Sea | Translation

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The following English translation was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence

[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante, I’m Daniel Alarcón.

Today we begin in a swimming pool. We’re in Santiago, Chile, in the early ’90s. Bárbara Hernández is six years old and taking swimming lessons. But every time she dives into the water, she thinks about the sea.

[Bárbara Hernández]: So I would imagine it. I remember when I was a girl, it was a very deep pool, like there were sharks, there were jellyfish, and it was a really dark pool.

[Daniel A.]: Even though Bárbara was born and raised in a city framed by the mountains, her first childhood memory has nothing to do with the mountains…

[Bárbara H.]: I don’t know, I remember being maybe five years old, or maybe younger, but I remember always being with my dad, playing in the waves, and my mom waiting for us outside on the beach.

[Daniel A.]: Sometimes, during the summer, they’d spend the day at a nearby beach. If they were lucky, they’d stay one or two nights… But they didn’t have the money to take much more vacation time than that.

[Bárbara H.]: And it was really beautiful, starting from there to connect with nature. For me, I think it’s always been a privilege, like going to the sea. So from there I think I’ve always had that love for, for our sea.

[Daniel A.]: That’s why that deep, dark pool in Santiago became, for an instant, her own little sea.

[Daniel A.]: She took lessons three times a week and looked forward to those days eagerly… She loved being there.

[Bárbara H.]: So if you really like training, the next step was to try racing — you weren’t really asked if you liked it or not, it was just what you had to do.

[Daniel A.]: So without thinking too much about it, at nine years old she started competing.

[Bárbara H.]: And since I wasn’t the fastest, it was really frustrating — not winning medals, and learning to swim after that really because I like the water, not because I was winning medals.

[Daniel A.]: Still, she kept trying to win. Throughout elementary school and into high school too. Training hours and hours in the pool. Competing year after year. Confirming again and again that no, she wasn’t the fastest. Or maybe she was simply swimming in the wrong place.

At 17, Bárbara would discover that there were many places to swim beyond the pool, and along that path she would begin to push her body to limits she’d never imagined.

Our senior producer Aneris Casassus continues the story…

[Aneris Casassus]: It was 2003. Bárbara had just started studying psychology and had joined the university swim team. That’s when a friend invited her to a competition in Valdivia, 850 kilometers south of Santiago. But this time it wouldn’t be in a pool — it would be in the rivers and lakes of the region, even in the sea. In Valdivia, water is at the center of everything. Snow from the Andean volcanoes melts, flows down through the lakes, becomes a river, crosses the city, and empties into a bay that opens onto the Pacific.

[Bárbara H.]: And when they invited me, without even knowing if I’d be able to finish the distances, it was about getting to swim in those conditions — I mean, just jumping into the water in a place that seemed like something out of a movie.

[Aneris C.]: She accepted the invitation right away. Up until then she’d only competed in pools, and the only river she knew was the Mapocho, a polluted, coffee-colored river that runs through Santiago. So the mere idea of submerging herself in clean, crystal-clear water, surrounded by swans and sea lions, seemed like a dream.

She traveled to Valdivia and dove into a five-kilometer race in the sea, on the crossing between the towns of Niebla and Corral. And without ever imagining it, she came in first overall, beating even all the men. At last, after so many years, she’d won her medal…

[Bárbara H.]: I realized that to swim in open water, it’s not enough to just be fast, a strong swimmer — it has to do with being able to adapt to the weather, to the conditions, to swimming in the cold, with currents, with animals. And I think that’s what I loved most about open water swimming.

[Aneris C.]: From that moment on, she never went back to the pool. Or rather, she went back to the pool in order to go back to the sea.

[Bárbara H.]: I learned that if I wanted to be a really good open water swimmer, I had to train many hours in the pool. The rigor and repetition of training is what later gives you the confidence to get into the sea.

[Aneris C.]: So Bárbara kept training in the pool in Santiago, and over the following years she went back to the competitions in Valdivia several more times. And on one of those trips, she met him…

[Jorge V.]: Well, my name is Jorge Eduardo Andrés Villalobos Rosas…

[Aneris C.]: Jorge grew up in Valdivia and had been connected to the world of swimming for years. His sister competed in the local tournaments, and many times he acted as a judge…

[Jorge V.]: The most striking and funniest part is that I was a swimming judge and I didn’t know how to swim. I knew the whole rulebook, all the strokes, but I was, I was the person waiting there at the finish line, writing down the times, the details, everything, but with the water up to my knees.

[Aneris C.]: When he saw Bárbara at one of those competitions, she immediately caught his attention. She had an overwhelming personality. It wasn’t long before Jorge worked up the nerve to ask her out. Both were in their twenties, and they started a long-distance relationship — Jorge in Valdivia, finishing his degree in Naval Engineering at the university, Bárbara in Santiago, continuing with her psychology studies and swimming. But often, when Jorge went to visit her in the capital, he felt like Bárbara would stop training just to be with him. That didn’t seem fair to him, so he decided to learn to swim so he could join her. While Bárbara trained for her open water tournaments, he took beginner lessons.

[Jorge V.]: Kickboard, kicking, and then putting your head under the water. And I liked it, I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it, and I said, ah, this is what swimming feels like!…

[Aneris C.]: By 2014, they’d been together about two years when Bárbara got a new proposal. She was invited to a swimmers’ gathering at the Perito Moreno glacier, in Argentine Patagonia. It was a very particular event: the winter swimming festival, an international gathering of swimmers who specialize in icy waters. It’s a specific discipline where the requirement is that the water temperature be below 5 degrees. If it’s hard to picture, keep in mind that the average surface temperature of the ocean is 20 degrees. In the Caribbean Sea, for example, temperatures range from 28 to 31 degrees. It was the first time something like this had ever been held in Latin America. Bárbara wasn’t sure about going, but Jorge encouraged her…

[Jorge V.]: I told her: “You have to go. This might open the door to other things. Go, go enjoy it. See if you like it. If you don’t like it — fine. But don’t stay with the idea that you didn’t do it, wondering what it might have been like.”

[Aneris C.]: So in August of that year she traveled to the Perito Moreno glacier, one of the most awe-inspiring places on the planet. Picture an enormous wall of ice rising sixty meters above the water of Lago Argentino. It’s like a twenty-story building. But below the water, there are another 170 meters. In total, it’s a mass of ice five kilometers wide that flows down from the mountains.

[Bárbara H.]: I had never in my life seen so much snow. So arriving in the snow and knowing I had to get into the water in a swimsuit at Perito Moreno, I swear it was like — not knowing if I could do it, if I was capable, if… what would happen to my body.

[Aneris C.]: Because here we need to clarify something else. In ice swimming, wetsuits or any other kind of insulation are prohibited. Swimmers can only use a regular swimsuit, a cap, goggles, and earplugs. The idea is to test the human body’s ability to adapt to extreme cold, with no thermal help at all.

[Aneris C.]: As soon as she arrived, Bárbara began watching everything closely. There were 55 swimmers from 18 countries. Since they swam in groups, she had time to see what the other participants were doing.

How they entered the water, how they got out, and how they recovered.

When her turn came, Bárbara eased herself into the glacial water, little by little. One step, then another, caught between two opposing forces…

[Bárbara H.]: It’s like literally forcing your body, telling it to walk, and your body doesn’t want to, and it’s like, get wet, and your body keeps telling you, hey, turn back, it’s too cold. So that burning, that pain, that discomfort. And your mind, which is ultimately what you’re trying to train with this too. It’s what carries you through it, and it’s like, hey, no, well, we’re here now, breathe deep, connect with nature, with the mountains, with the lagoon, with the glaciers. And I talk to myself. So, beyond the discomfort or the cold, it’s like learning to be in that place until I start to swim.

[Aneris C.]: But it should be made clear that it’s not that your body warms up as you swim…

[Bárbara H.]: And that feeling of cold stays with you the whole time. I mean, people think that at some point your body is able to generate heat, like you stop feeling the ice. And that’s not how it works.

[Aneris C.]: That day, the water was at a temperature of almost 4 degrees Celsius. She was extremely, extremely cold, but at the same time there was something there that she liked. She felt her heart like she’d never felt it before…

[Bárbara H.]: Cold water connects you to the here and now. It’s sort of a survival thing too, right? But it makes you see things differently, feel them differently.

[Aneris C.]: Even though it was her first time in this kind of water, she managed to complete the longest stretch, the 1,000 meters. When she finished, she was completely euphoric…

[Bárbara H.]: That feeling of getting out of the water and your body like it’s on fire, doing everything it can to get back to normal and recover its temperature. It leaves you with the endorphins, the adrenaline, it leaves you really high.

[Aneris C.]: After watching her swim, the other participants were very surprised. They told her she had what it took to travel to the next Ice Swimming World Championship. It will be held in the city of Tyumen, in Siberia, in two years… Up until that moment, Bárbara didn’t even know that existed, but now — she definitely wanted to be there.

From then on, Bárbara and Jorge became something more than a couple. They formed a kind of team with a goal: to make it to that world championship. Bárbara would keep training hard, and Jorge would handle the logistics. They needed to raise money to fund the trip. They started talking to public agencies, businesses, and companies — they needed sponsors. And after knocking on a lot of doors, almost by chance, they found a businessman willing to help them. So two years later, Bárbara and Jorge were flying to Siberia, one of the coldest regions in the world. They were greeted by a snowstorm and a wind chill of 25 degrees below zero.

There were 1,200 swimmers at the World Championship. Most were from Nordic countries, from Russia, from the United States… Bárbara was very nervous but she dove into the water anyway.

[Bárbara H.]: That was really cool, like we didn’t know what the outcome would be. So winning in the categories, or being the first Latina to win a podium spot, was also really important.

[Aneris C.]: She won gold medals in the 200-meter and 450-meter categories for swimmers over 30, and bronze in the 100 meters.

[Jorge V.]: At that point, nobody knew Chile. It was so bad that when they put up the flags, they did it digitally, and we had a blank square because they didn’t know what Chile’s flag looked like. They didn’t have it.

[Aneris C.]: Bárbara returned to Chile with three medals and a nickname… After the feat, the press started calling her the “Ice Mermaid”… And she loved it.

[Bárbara H.]: I mean, she’s a Latina mermaid, dark-skinned, black hair, dark eyes, you know? Really far from the image of the Little Mermaid we all grew up with. And she swims in glaciers. Like, literally.

[Aneris C.]: From then on, Bárbara didn’t stop. She began specializing in icy waters and also in long-distance open water swimming. Nothing made her happier…

[Bárbara H.]: Who I am when I’m in the water. I’m not that person anywhere else, you know? Nothing gives you that sense of fullness, no matter how tired you are… like living water, the sea.

[Aneris C.]: That sea that welcomed her and made her part of its vastness…

[Bárbara H.]: It’s feeling that you belong to that place, that you’re giving it something of your own — so it’s like enjoying it, being grateful for it, and being willing to give whatever it demands of you.

[Aneris C.]: That way, giving herself over to it, she crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, the Beagle Channel, the English Channel, the Molokai Channel… swims that can last more than 15 hours straight.

And in 2022 she earned her first Guinness World Record for the fastest swim across Cape Horn, one of the most dangerous waters in the world. She swam five and a half kilometers in 15 minutes and 3 seconds.

In this kind of challenge, Bárbara is accompanied by a boat where Jorge usually rides, along with a few other people who join her team. The main rule is that Bárbara can never touch the boat — she usually stays between 3 and 5 meters away. When she wants to drink, they have to pass her a water bottle on a rope. Usually the water they give her has dissolved nutrients and is warm. That helps her recover a little. Because most of the time the water is so cold that Bárbara swims in hypothermia — meaning her body temperature drops below 35 degrees. She can also eat protein gummies. And if she needs to, she can take painkillers. Everything is planned down to the smallest detail — even the color of her swimsuits is chosen so as not to attract the attention of the local wildlife.

Bárbara comes across penguins, dolphins, turtles, leopard seals, jellyfish, all kinds of fish… She’s also swam in Hawaii, which is full of sharks…

Jorge, from the boat, is the one who gives her all the instructions. It has to be a clear message, almost military…

[Jorge V.]: Like: “Bárbara, five kilometers to go. There won’t be any more feeding. This is the last one, give it everything. Keep it steady, one hour left,” and that’s how I let her know.

[Aneris C.]: After so many trips together, each of them settled into their role. Bárbara as the swimmer, Jorge as her support. They became more and more professional.

They were ready to take the next step: Antarctica. Bárbara had spent years dreaming about it. She wanted to be the first woman to swim two and a half kilometers on the white continent…

[Daniel A.]: We’ll be right back…

[Daniel A.]: We’re back. Aneris Casassus continues the story…

[Aneris C.]: Bárbara was determined. She wanted to fulfill her dream of swimming in Antarctica. And she didn’t much care what anyone else said.

[Bárbara H.]: I mean, nobody should come and tell you your dream is impossible, or that something can’t be done just because no one has done it before. I mean…

[Aneris C.]: She wanted to be the first, but she knew it wouldn’t be an easy feat to pull off. She’d need to prepare for a very long time. Swimming in the most inhospitable place on the planet required a great deal of logistics. They spoke with the Chilean Navy to get their support. Because this was about more than just a personal record. Bárbara also saw it as an opportunity to raise environmental awareness about ocean conservation, and to reaffirm national sovereignty over part of Antarctica. Remember that Chile has a geographic and historical connection to the continent, and has several bases in Chilean Antarctica, the territory over which it claims sovereignty.

So, with the Navy’s support, they began planning the trip.

They had to do it in the middle of their other commitments. Besides swimming, Bárbara was already giving motivational talks and was starting to set up a foundation to promote women in sports. Jorge split his time between Santiago and Puerto Montt, a port city more than 1,200 kilometers to the south, where he’d landed a job as a naval engineer at a salmon farming company.

There were months and months of training and work. They added a swimmer friend to the team, another friend to help with logistics, and the physical therapist Bárbara had already been working with. Until, in January 2023, they set off on the adventure.

Bárbara, Jorge, and the team traveled to Punta Arenas, in southern Chile. From there they boarded a Navy vessel. A doctor and two nurses were part of the crew. From there they weighed anchor and set off for Antarctica. It took several days of sailing before they reached the Arturo Prat Antarctic Naval Base, in Chile Bay. That would be their operations center and the place where they’d try to accomplish the feat. They barely had any cell signal, but Bárbara managed to record a video that she posted to her Instagram.

(Instagram audio)

[Aneris C.]: They would stay there for a few days, adjusting and waiting for the weather and tide conditions to be right to start swimming. Along with the ship, two Navy motorized inflatable boats would accompany them. At the base, there was also a helicopter available in case of an emergency.

They had to think through the worst-case scenarios: Bárbara could pass out, have a cardiac arrest, or even be attacked by an animal. The team had to be ready to handle any kind of emergency. They talked about it among themselves, but never in front of Bárbara.

[Bárbara H.]: At the end of the day, Bárbara knows, she knows what she’s up against. But knowing it is one thing, and hearing it is another.

[Aneris C.]: It was the first time Jorge was completely in charge of everything that happened on that trip. He’d spent so many years watching her swim that he could easily pick up on any change in her kick, in her stroke, in the way she breathed… Any of those things could be a warning sign.

[Bárbara H.]: He was the one who gave the Navy the “okay” that everything was fine, or really the one who decided whether I had to be pulled out of the water, and everyone, in a way, deferred to him, especially in an emergency.

[Jorge V.]: If I see something that’s clearly not like Bárbara — for example, if I talk to her and she doesn’t respond, if she’s swimming in a zigzag, if she’s not lifting her head properly out of the water, if she starts swallowing water, if she starts dragging her arms in the water, or if she stops kicking. Those are reasons for me to stop swimming.

[Aneris C.]: Even if she refuses…

[Jorge V.]: She won’t want to. It’s one of the things we’ve talked about. She, the swimmer, the athlete, is never going to want to throw in the towel. […] And you’re her lifeline.

[Aneris C.]: A lifeline with enough authority to pull her out of the water by force if necessary.

[Bárbara H.]: That’s why I think he has to have that kind of character, to be able to make those tough calls, because he knows it would cost him — I think — part of our relationship, in a way.

[Aneris C.]: In other words, if Bárbara was capable of continuing to swim and Jorge stopped her out of his own fear, she wouldn’t forgive him for it. So there was Jorge, focused on telling a real risk apart from a false alarm. And keeping his fear bottled up like a pressure cooker. And Bárbara dealing with her own fear in her own way…

[Bárbara H.]: Don’t be afraid of fear, my mom says… It’s about looking it straight in the eye, understanding that it’s there, that it’s valid, it’s completely valid, especially when we’re talking about swims in, I don’t know, Antarctica, where it’s full of leopard seals and where we’re trying to do something that’s never been done before. But what I do is not deny what I feel. I think that’s what makes me different, or makes me stronger.

[Aneris C.]: After ten days in Antarctica, on February 5, 2023, the right moment arrived. The weather was good, the currents were good… So early in the morning they finalized the details, and a little while later Bárbara climbed into one of the boats with Jorge and the rest of her team — five people in total — and they moved a few meters away from the ship. They had brought three thermometers to confirm the water temperature, one of the requirements for setting a new record. The water was at 2.23 degrees. When the boat stopped at the designated spot, Bárbara took off her jacket and stood exposed to the elements, in a black swimsuit. She put on her goggles and swim cap. She kissed Jorge, and moments later dove into the icy waters of Antarctica…

[Aneris C.]: Right away, Bárbara began to stroke and kick…

[Jorge V.]: Watching her from outside is almost hypnotic — you hear the stroke, you hear the kick, you see her swimming, pulling through the water, and you feel like she’s in her… she reaches something like nirvana.

[Aneris C.]: Like an enormous sense of satisfaction, but mixed with a great deal of pain too.

[Bárbara H.]: You feel your arms and legs getting heavier and heavier, like the blood isn’t reaching your hands anymore. It’s not reaching your feet. Your body is very smart. So it prioritizes your internal organs. Heart, brain.

[Aneris C.]: That’s what happens, medically speaking, with hypothermia: the body loses heat faster than it can produce it. To survive, it reduces blood flow to the extremities and concentrates it in the vital organs.

In the midst of the pain and the cold, her strength was in her head. She kept repeating to herself, over and over…

[Bárbara H.]: If my shoulder hurts, well, I’ve got two good legs that are still kicking. And if my leg hurts and I get a cramp, I say, well, I’ve got two arms that are still pulling through the water, and if I feel like my whole body is failing, I say, hey, you still have a mind, memories, thoughts, people you love and who love you a lot — enough to make you want to keep going instead of quitting, because life is hard, you know? Because I’m cold, or because I’m hungry. That’s not reason enough to give up.

[Aneris C.]: In that whirlwind of thoughts, Bárbara kept stroking and kicking… At one point she felt extremely hungry and dreamed of biting into the freshly baked, warm bread she’d have for breakfast on the Navy ship. Far in the distance she could hear Jorge’s voice telling her, “Come on, negra. Come on.” She had no idea how much time had passed in the water. She only knew she had to keep swimming until she reached the red buoy.

She and Jorge and the team had agreed that Bárbara wouldn’t stay in the water more than 40 minutes… because she could develop hypothermia too severe. Once that time was up, Bárbara would get out of the water whether or not she’d reached the two-and-a-half-kilometer goal she’d set for herself.

[Jorge V.]: And Bárbara had been in the water 40 minutes, and she still had 300 meters to go.

[Aneris C.]: At that moment, Jorge, from the boat, heard the voice of the ship’s commander over the radio.

[Jorge V.]: And he tells me, the 40 minutes are up. Do we call off the swim, yes or no?

[Aneris C.]: While Bárbara kept swimming, Jorge had to make one of the hardest decisions of his life… He knew she wouldn’t want to stop swimming, but he also knew it could put her at risk.

[Jorge V.]: And I looked at the whole situation and quickly told him: No. She finishes when we reach the buoy, which is 300 meters away.

[Daniel A.]: We’ll be right back…

[Daniel A.]: We’re back. Aneris continues the story…

[Aneris C.]: Bárbara had already been swimming 40 minutes in the icy Antarctic water, but she still had 300 more meters to go to set the record. Jorge decided she should keep going. So Bárbara kept stroking and kicking, her muscles growing heavier and more numb by the minute, drawing strength from every gulp of air…

Far in the distance she kept hearing… “Come on negra, come on”… “come on, come on, come on”. Then she kept going, one stroke and then another.

[Aneris C.]: One kick, then another… while she kept hearing Jorge far in the distance…

[Jorge V.]: The last bit, the last bit…

[Aneris C.]: Until, finally, she reached the red buoy.

Bárbara had broken a new Guinness World Record. Or rather, two: one for the longest swim in polar regions, and another for being the only woman to complete two and a half kilometers in Antarctica.

She had spent 45 minutes and 30 seconds in the icy sea. No one else would have lasted more than 10 minutes in those conditions.

Bárbara got out of the water with the help of two divers who lifted her onto the boat. She put on a wool cap, a jacket, and Jorge hugged her tightly. But the worst wasn’t over yet… They laid her down on a kind of stretcher, with warm blankets. And they sailed back to the ship that way.

They pulled her up with ropes tied to the stretcher while, in the background, the Rocky theme song played.

[Aneris C.]: They took her to the infirmary, which had been prepared to receive her. Bárbara’s body temperature had dropped to 27 degrees — 10 below normal. That’s considered severe hypothermia. Most people would pass out once they hit 30 degrees. For Bárbara, this whole part feels very blurry…

[Bárbara H.]: My face is totally numb. Like, no, I don’t remember much else, you know? I remember after the recovery, and just bits and pieces of the swim.

[Aneris C.]: Bárbara couldn’t stop shivering; not being able to control her body drove her to despair…

[Bárbara H.]: You go through a really hard time — I think that’s the toughest stage. Wanting to bundle up the whole time, even though the room is really warm, and your body has to recover little by little.

[Aneris C.]: The medical team had to raise her temperature by one degree an hour, monitoring her constantly, with warm IV fluids and electrodes. Jorge got scared when he saw how Bárbara was acting…

[Jorge V.]: She’s like, like drunk people. Especially the heavy drunks. The kind you’re trying to keep calm and tell her: you know what? It’s okay. And you? No, I don’t want to. And suddenly, she’s covered in electrodes and trying to pull them off, and — no, I want to leave. I want to find my mom.

[Aneris C.]: This wasn’t the usual Bárbara…

[Jorge V.]: How are you doing?

[Aneris C.]: Really good, with this little thing.

[Jorge V.]: The thermometer.

[Bárbara H.]: With the thermometer — but everything’s fine.

[Aneris C.]: She recovered her temperature much faster than expected.

[Jorge V.]: Strangely, Bárbara had dropped to 27, 26 degrees — almost a ten-degree difference. It should have taken half a day to recover from that. Bárbara was fine again within two hours.

[Aneris C.]: Nobody, not even the medical team on board, could explain how she’d managed to recover so quickly.

[Jorge V.]: My theory is that she’s a kind of fakir. A fakir trains to walk on hot coals. Bárbara trains mentally to withstand the icy water, so it delays hypothermia longer, and at the same time she can bounce back quickly — like her body is, I don’t know, molded, shaped for that.

[Aneris C.]: Once she’d finished recovering, Bárbara left the infirmary and walked around the ship to thank everyone who had helped her fulfill her dream. For Jorge, it was a relief to see her like herself again. Especially after all the stress he’d been through.

[Jorge V.]: That pressure cooker starts to loosen its lid, and finally I go to say goodbye to Bárbara that night. Bárbara looks at me, sees my face, and gets scared. She gets scared and asks if I’m okay. No — I wasn’t okay…

[Bárbara H.]: Right, seeing him so affected, so… so emotional, was strange, and it was also like his battery had just died — but all at once, like he’d just been processing everything that had happened, and the decision he’d made…

[Aneris C.]: The decision to let her stay those extra five and a half minutes in the water to reach the goal…

[Jorge V.]: What would have happened if she hadn’t recovered well? Whose decision was it to leave her in the water? It was mine. So that’s when, like we say here, it hit me, and I realized that, of course, I could have been the reason Bárbara died […] That idea hit me, I let it sink in, and I realized it could have happened that way. And obviously it broke me, it broke me.

[Aneris C.]: Bárbara tried to reassure him…

[Bárbara H.]: Obviously we were all happy with the decision he made, so it was more about making sure he felt secure, and knew that he really had done the right thing.

[Jorge V.]: But I told her: what if it hadn’t turned out well?

[Aneris C.]: That’s when the pressure cooker Jorge had been carrying finally burst. He broke down crying and hugged Bárbara tightly, as she kept telling him, again and again, that he had made the right call.

[Bárbara H.]: It’s what had to be done, right? Otherwise, we never would have taken the risk. We never would have achieved what we wanted to, you know?

[Jorge V.]: She believed in me the way I believed in her. And that was the beautiful part — that it all turned out fine.

[Aneris C.]: But in some way, that experience in Antarctica would leave its mark on what came next…

[Aneris C.]: In the months that followed, Bárbara and Jorge kept traveling the world. Bárbara finished swimming the Seven Seas and became the first South American to complete that challenge.

And in 2024 she set a new goal: the double crossing of the Catalina Channel, in the United States. She’d already swum it once, but now she wanted to double the bet. It’s a round trip from Santa Catalina Island to the California coast — almost 70 kilometers, more than 20 hours of continuous swimming…

This time only Bárbara and Jorge would travel… But they’d ask local kayakers for support.

On October 14 of that year, a new adventure began… With a Chilean flag, Bárbara posted a video on her Instagram minutes before jumping into the water…

[Bárbara H.]: I’m a little nervous, because this is going to be the longest swim we’ve ever done.

[Aneris C.]: At 11 at night, Bárbara was diving into the sea once again…

She soon reached a good pace, 62 strokes per minute. Every half hour, a kayak would come up beside her to give her a bottle of water and protein. Jorge rode in another boat, and every so often he’d stream the swim on social media…

But at one point, things started to get complicated…

[Aneris C.]: Since the swim had started at night, Bárbara had a light attached to her cap with velcro, so she’d be visible in the dark. The light issue was solved quickly and easily. But after a while, Jorge started to notice something strange about Bárbara.

[Jorge V.]: Bárbara didn’t look right, didn’t look good — mentally, I mean. She kept hinting at it several times, and at one point during the swim I saw her do something strange with her arms.

[Aneris C.]: Something about her stroke, and the way she lifted her head out of the water, caught Jorge’s attention. So he told her to stop, and pulled up beside her with his boat.

[Jorge V.]: And I told her, “Bárbara, you know I don’t think you look good. You keep telling me you’re not okay. For me, that’s reason enough to stop swimming.”

[Bárbara H.]: There were at least ten more hours of swimming left, and I was already really hungry and really cold.

[Aneris C.]: They both agreed. Jorge asked the boat’s captain to stop, and Bárbara swam over to him. The moment she touched the ladder, it was all over.

As she got out from the boat, Bárbara announced it on her Instagram.

[Bárbara H.]: I swam almost 16 hours, we finished one lap, but I couldn’t finish the second. I’ve got severe hypothermia.

[Jorge V.]: I feel like Antarctica was a turning point for me — obviously, the double Catalina swim brought all of that to the surface. So that was the first time we made that decision.

[Aneris C.]: The first time, in ten years, that they’d made the decision to stop. And they both did it with a lot of fear.

[Bárbara H.]: For us, it’s really expensive to be able to pay for these swims. Training is one thing, but funding them and getting all the way there — it makes you really afraid of losing your sponsors. Or how the press is going to treat you, what people are going to say about you…

[Aneris C.]: They felt a huge amount of pressure…

[Bárbara H.]: In the sense of thinking, “man, I can’t mess this up,” like I have to do everything perfectly — like if I make a mistake, we’re going to lose everything we’ve achieved, things like that.

[Aneris C.]: But none of what they feared so much happened — quite the opposite, actually. The sponsors were just as happy, people still supported her, the press too…

[Bárbara H.]: I think it was a way to show them, but also to show myself, that I really can make hard decisions, and that I’ll always put my safety above everything else — and that if the conditions aren’t right, you just don’t do it.

[Aneris C.]: Making that decision led her to see things completely differently than she had before…

[Bárbara H.]: I think the idea of failure doesn’t have to do with whether you finish a swim successfully or not. Failure is when I’m not able to take care of myself, or to stop, or to make a decision — no matter how hard it is — that I know I have to make.

[Aneris C.]: It was as if, in some way, that decision reconnected her with the real reason she’d started doing all of this in the first place.

[Bárbara H.]: Clearly the medals aren’t enough. Becoming a millionaire off this — that’s not it either. Getting into the Guinness World Records book — well, thanks, I guess. But what I have, I think, has much more to do with that connection with nature.

Where I’m the one who adapts to nature.

[Aneris C.]: She often corrects journalists when they say she “conquered” Antarctica, or “conquered” the seven seas, or “conquered” the glaciers…

[Bárbara H.]: And I tell them, sorry, but you don’t conquer something that’s completely ungovernable. And nature is something completely ungovernable. The glaciers, the wildlife, the ocean — I, I’m the one who adapts to these extreme conditions.

[Aneris C.]: And the reward she finds in doing it can’t be compared to anything else…

[Bárbara H.]: Like, I mean, swimming next to an ancient glacier and seeing all those blues, like… I mean, there’s no medal in the world that compares to that feeling. There isn’t one. I swear, there really isn’t.

[Daniel A.]: In 2025, Bárbara earned her fourth Guinness World Record with the longest swim in history by a woman at less than five degrees Celsius. She did it in Puerto Natales, Chile. And in August 2026, she went for the rematch: she attempted the double crossing of the Catalina Channel again, and this time she succeeded. She swam for 23 hours and 42 minutes and thus became the second woman — the first Latina — to achieve the Double Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming, after having also completed the double crossing of the English Channel and of Manhattan Island.

Aneris Casassus is a senior producer at Radio Ambulante and lives in Buenos Aires. This story was edited by Camila Segura and me. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. The music and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Adriana Bernal, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Germán Montoya, Sara Selva Ortiz, Samantha Proaño, Natalia Ramírez, Maira Reina, Juan Pablo Santos, David Trujillo, Elsa Liliana Ulloa, Luis Fernando Vargas, Franklin Villavicencio, and Mariana Zúñiga.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO.

Radio Ambulante is a podcast by Radio Ambulante Estudios, and it is produced and mixed on Hindenburg PRO.
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Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.