Courtesy of WOWSA, Huntington Beach, California.
When Benoît Lecomte undertakes The Longest Swim from Tokyo to San Francisco later this year, he is going to embark on the longest time in the water of any human in history over the 6-month period of the ordeal.
Lecomte summarized his training, “[It involves] many years of preparation. It is more than just a swim; it involves many subjects and people coming together from different corners: education, research, media…and of course training…with plenty of meditation and dissociation.”
Assume that Lecomte swims 8 hours per day as planned and he takes 50 arm strokes per minute and 100 leg kicks per minute. That comes out to a total 24,000 arm strokes and 48,000 leg kicks with fins per day. Multiply that daily exertion by 180 days in salt water that can be rough, turbulent and cold, and it comes out to over 4.3 million arm strokes and 8.6 million leg kicks cumulatively done over a 6-month period.
No one in history – including Olympic swimmers or ultra marathon swimmers – have swam 8 hours per day for 180 straight days, attempting to swim 8,000 km, wetsuit, fins or not. Without rest and without ever touching land as he ventures from Tokyo to San Francisco, this truly will be The Longest Swim.
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