Liberty Lake woman makes distance swimming history at Priest Lake

Kim Bowler swam through the night, swam through the fatigue, swam through the choppy, wind-whipped waters of Priest Lake. The shoreline didn’t seem to get any closer.

The 41-year-old from Liberty Lake had been toiling through the lengthy Idaho Panhandle lake northwest of Sandpoint for the better part of 24 hours from Aug. 19–20 when her right arm gave out. She compensated with her left until it too faltered.

“I encountered a little more than I bargained for, I guess,” she said in a Sept. 20 interview in Missoula. “A lot more wind and waves coming right at me, so it was a little bit rougher. My muscles totally gave out, so I was swimming like a T-Rex, I couldn’t get my hands out of the water.”

Twenty hours and 24 miles later, she arrived upon a shore that seemed like it would never come. She finished, “but it wasn’t pretty.”

“At the end, I always want to raise my hands and be like, ‘I did it!’ And this time I was just like, ‘There it is, it’s done,’” she recalled. “That beach was taunting me for hours. Finishing, I was just like, ‘Ugh, finally.’”

In finishing, however glamorously or not, Bowler became the first woman, and the second person ever, to swim the length of the lake. The achievement came two years after she became the first person ever to swim the length of Idaho’s Lake Coeur d’Alene, also 24 miles.

She noted with a laugh, though, that people weren’t exactly lining up to be the first to swim the lakes.

“Any body of water I look at I say, ‘I could swim that,’” she said. “I feel like we could all do it, with the right training. I just was the one.

“I don’t feel like an elite athlete, by any means,” she continued. “I just love it and was able to put in the work.”

Normal person, big dreams

Her coach, Sarah Thomas, made a similar observation. Thomas, 42 and from Colorado, holds the world record for the longest unassisted swim ever: 105 miles across Vermont’s Lake Champlain in 2017. And in 2019 she became the first person to swim four back-and-forth laps across the English Channel.

But, like Bowler, she holds a full-time job on land; she’s a veterinarian recruiter.

“She just seemed like a normal person with a big dream, and I feel like that’s all of us to some extent,” Thomas said in a phone call Tuesday. “She was just really driven and motivated and wanted to do something really special that hadn’t been done before, and obviously I relate to that. And she’s just really kind.”

Unlike lifelong swimmer Thomas, though, Bowler picked up swimming again in her early 30s after a more than decade-long hiatus from childhood.

Bowler was born and raised by two teachers in Missoula; her parents and other family members still reside there. She began swimming competitively at about 9 years old with Missoula Aquatic Club. She continued competitive swimming until high school, she said, when she felt burned out and stopped.

She recalled that Olympic medallist swimmer Dave Berkoff and his wife Shirley – parents of 2024 Olympic medallist Katharine Berkoff – were involved in coaching her youth competition program in the 1990s.

After graduating Sentinel High School in 2001, she attended two years of college at University of Montana before going to Montana State University’s Great Falls College to complete a nursing degree. She’d left swimming behind.

She spent about 13 years as a neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU) nurse for Benefis Health System’s hospital in Great Falls before she and her husband, Chris, moved to the Spokane Valley. They settled in Liberty Lake about 10 years ago. Bowler worked for about eight years as a NICU nurse at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center, caring for critically ill and premature infants, before moving to a job as a surgery center nurse.

It wasn’t until she moved to the Spokane area a decade ago that she got back into swimming. She fell in with a masters swimming group – that is, a swimming club for adults – and their proximity to Lake Coeur d’Alene meant that they quickly “pulled me into the lake,” she said.

Bowler hadn’t truly swum open water – just casual dips in lakes and rivers while camping – until taking to the water with the masters club.

“They usually swim about 1.2 miles, and to me at the time that was long, a long time,” she said. “They also introduced me to little open-water events I could compete in, little 1-mile, 2-mile events, so for a little while I did that.”

But traditional competition like racing wasn’t really her thing, she explained: The self-imposed anxiety and expectations made it more fun to finish an event than to actually participate in one.

‘I think I can do that’

All the while, though, she was increasingly following the broader open-water swimming scene, particularly the longest of long-distance swims. And, she realized, “I’m not ever the fastest, I’m kind of slow and steady, and, ‘I think I can do that.’”

That’s how she came upon Thomas. After learning of Thomas’ four laps of the English Channel, Bowler said, “I just wanted to prove it to myself, I guess,” that she could do something like that.

So she enlisted Thomas as a coach, becoming one of her first clients when she was just stepping into mentoring other “ultra-marathon” swimmers.

“I’m really glad that Kim was one of my first,” Thomas said, “Hopefully I helped her, but she helped me quite a bit too,” by being kind and understanding as Thomas first began coaching others.

Bowler trained for about two years before swimming the length of Coeur d’Alene, including completing an 11.5-mile swim in nearby Lake Pend Oreille. She swam four or five days a week, on average, while managing a career and helping to raise two children: a son, Kale, now 14, and a daughter, Jojo, now 11.

“I honestly would say the training is way harder than the swim,” she said. “It takes so much time away from family and it is monotonous, and it takes so much motivation to get out the door some days.”

Part of her motivation came from her vision of a grand swim, which she’d held when she first sought coaching from Thomas.

“Pretty much when I enlisted my coach two years before, I knew that I wanted to something big, more than just 10k, 20k, I wanted to do something respectable,” she said. “I ended up picking Coeur d’Alene so that I could be the first one.”

The attempt went swimmingly. Conditions were ideal and “it was beautiful, meant to be, I couldn’t ask anything to go more smoothly for that one.”

With 4 miles left, she said, she felt great. At the end, she triumphantly “just walked right up on the beach.”

The effort was so smooth, in fact, that “I said to my husband, ‘I still have more in me, I think I can do more.’”

That’s how, two years later, she found herself taking off into Priest Lake with yet another 24 miles of swimming until she could rest. This time was not so easy.

‘This is hardcore’

Under the rules of the Marathon Swimmers Federation, to which she also adhered for the 2022 swim, Bowler wasn’t allowed to wear a wetsuit, which would provide insulation but also buoyancy. She donned an approved one-piece racing swimsuit, swim cap and goggles. At night she was allowed clip-on lights on her back and swim cap.

Although she had support crew and designated observers from the federation in boats, and Chris in a kayak alongside her, she was strictly forbade from touching another person or a boat. Taking on food and water, which was allowed, without inadvertently touching a person or a boat required creativity, she said.

“They have a water bottle attached to a rope, they just throw it out to me,” she said. “I drop it when I’m done and they reel it back in.”

In the water bottle was a mixture of water, electrolytes and carbohydrates – she drank 8 ounces every 40 minutes. Bananas and granola bars were available, she added, but solid food wasn’t appealing as she treaded water.

But those rules weren’t the primary challenge, she said. Instead it was simply the natural conditions.

“The first part, lots of waves and wind,” she said, “but I was right at the beginning and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got this, this is hardcore.’”

As night fell and the wind and waves persisted into darkness, she said, she felt less secure in the water, and she worried Chris’ kayak could overturn. Fortunately he remained a good, and upright, companion throughout: “He just knows what I like. We can kind of bicker and still know we love each other.”

She occupied her mind in a variety of ways. She counted strokes: “One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four … Any little thing that helps in your head, your mind just wanders so quickly to so many different things.”

Her mind wandered 8,509 miles away to Fort Portal, a town on Uganda’s western border with Democratic Republic of the Congo. She heard of the area from her church, which sends groups to build drinking-water wells in villages where children often walk to school with large jugs to bring home filled after classes.

Hearing of the rocky soil hampering well construction the church is eying for 2025, she decided to make the Priest Lake swim a fundraiser. Her “Swim for a Source” online fundraiser, which remains open through fall, had raised $2,680 of its $15,000 goal as of Tuesday. It’s available at gofundme.com/f/swim-for-a-source-building-a-well-in-uganda.

“Sometimes I’m like, this is for Uganda,” she remembered, “I’ve got to keep going.”

And she did, reaching the shore in about 20 hours – the same time it took her to swim the same distance in superb conditions two years prior. It wasn’t a surprise to Thomas.

“I make people work harder than they want to work” in their training, she said. “I really focus on, you just have to put in the time, you just have to put in the work … I have a pretty high level of confidence that they can set out to do whatever they wanted to do.”

Bowler, she said, “definitely did the work. It was a struggle for her, I think with both swims, to balance her swimming, her family, her work, just life … I think Kim, and most of my other swimmers, really do embody that, ‘I’m just a normal person with a big dream.’”

But, she added, “Kim has that grit, that gumption, to finish whatever she sets her mind to.”

For Bowler, the Priest Lake swim marked the satisfaction of her feeling two years before that she had another big swim in her. Shortly after the August swim, she told the Coeur d’Alene/Post Falls Press that she didn’t plan to do any more swims of that magnitude.

A month later, her view somewhat shifted, not the least because her latest swim was so arduous.

“I have already mentioned to my husband that I would like to do a redemption swim, so to speak – finish on a higher note,” she said. “I still say I’m not doing that anytime soon. It might be a year, years. But now I can at least say I won’t rule it out.”