Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel. Her name still gets remembered for it one hundred years later. But while New York was still throwing her a parade, another woman was finishing up her own record breaking swim across those exact same waters. She’s remarkable.

So let’s get to know Mille Gade Corson.

This wasn't her first attempt. Three years earlier, in 1923, she'd tried and failed, pulled from the water two miles short of France, completely spent.

She trained through the winter in the Hudson River at forty degrees, walked four miles a day, boxed, fenced, and worked handball on the side. Her trainer told a reporter flatly that she had more endurance than Ederle and could beat her over a longer distance.

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Two other swimmers went in that same day in August 1926. An Egyptian swimmer, Ishak Helmy, was seized by cramps in the middle of the night and had to be pulled out. An Englishman, Frank Perks, made it almost the entire way, then quit a mile and a half from shore. Corson was the only one of the three who finished.

Two days after Corson came ashore, Gertrude Ederle collapsed under the weight of her own fame. A doctor was called to her apartment. A policeman stood guard at her door. Her family gave her a sedative to head off what they were openly calling an imminent nervous breakdown. She told a reporter through the door, "they think I'm a machine."

The record Ederle held didn't even survive the month. A German war veteran broke it by nearly two hours less than 48 hours after Corson's own swim, twenty four days after Ederle first set it.

Corson's own hometown gave her a proper homecoming. Bridgeport rejoiced. Her backer's twenty to one bet on her success paid out, with the winnings reportedly going to her children.

Corson wasn't done. The following September, she went back for the harder direction, England to France, a crossing only three men in history had completed.

Nine hours and forty minutes in, four miles from the French coast, the cold beat her. The water temperature had dropped eight degrees. "I am so cold," she told the crew of her tug, over and over. "I can not keep on." They pulled her aboard sobbing. She told the press she wouldn't try again that year. She never did complete that direction.

This is where the story usually stops. It shouldn't.