For most 15-year-olds, summer break is a time to hang out and relax before the new school year starts.
And while Maya Merhige enjoys hanging out with her friends as much as the next teen, she also had a bigger goal: completing a long-distance swim around New York City.
On July 15, Merhige successfully swam around the entire island of Manhattan in eight hours and 43 minutes. She's only the third person her age to complete the "20 Bridges Swim," named for the bridges that swimmers pass under during their journey.
For the Berkeley Calif. native, the 28.5-mile swim was worth more than bragging rights. Since 2020, she has been doing long distance swims in partnership with Swim Across America, a nonprofit that hosts charity swims and donates the funds to cancer research. So far, she has raised over $17,000 this year.
Merhige tells CNBC Make It that her swimming cap is decorated with the names of people in her life who have been affected by cancer.
"I use those names to remind myself of what cancer patients go through during treatment," she says. "My pain and frustration when swimming is not nearly as much as what they go through."
Since she started swimming for cancer research funding, she's raised over $75,000.
'I didn't know that I was breaking records'
The 20 Bridges Swim isn't Merhige's first attempt at a long-distance swim. She's been breaking records for years.
In 2022, Merhige became the youngest swimmer in the world to swim the Kaiwi Channel, which lies between Molokai and Oahu, islands in Hawaii.
The Kaiwi Channel swim took 27 hours and 33 minutes to complete and is about 26 to 28 miles long; its strong currents makes it particularly challenging to swim in. Merhige also holds the title for the youngest woman to swim the Catalina Channel in California.
"When I started swimming, I didn't know that I was breaking the records, at all," she says.
In preparation for her long-distance swims, which fall under the category of open water swimming, Merhige usually trains for three months.
Her training schedule involves swimming three to five days in a pool during the week and a long swim every weekend in open water. Merhige paces herself by starting at 30 minutes for her long swims, and she increases the length by 30-minute increments until she hits her goal.
"For this swim, my longest was four hours," she says. "Sometimes it's six, sometimes it's eight."
Merhige sang songs from 'Hamilton' on her journey around Manhattan
During Merhige's swims, she stays motivated by singing songs in her head. She has a crew that travels with her, and there's always a boat on one side of her and a kayak on the other, ready to help her if she needs a break.
"My crew was like Maya we're about to swim under the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, you should sing some songs from 'Hamilton,'" Merhige recalls about her swim.
Though she often keeps her mind occupied — she sometimes tries to solve her math homework in her head — the best times during Merhige's swims are when she's thinking about nothing at all, she says.
"I usually at a certain point will get into this mindset where I'm just swimming, and I don't even know what I was thinking about," she says. "Once I get to that point is when the swims are the best because I'm not thinking about the pain."
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