Photos courtesy of SWNS. Article courtesy of WOWSA, Huntington Beach, California.

What does it take to swim across an ocean?

Ben Hooper is finding out.

Since he started training to swim across the Atlantic Ocean one year ago, he has now swum 100,000 lengths in his local pool at Leisure At, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire with the help of a team of sport science specialists at Hartpury UWE College.

The 36-year-old has swum an average of over 2,100 25m lengths each week or 52,500 meters swimming freestyle and breaststroke or more than a 10 km marathon swim each workout if he swims 5 times per week.

But that year-long total of 1,566 miles is still less than he needs to swim to complete his goal of Swimming The Atlantic.

He projects to swim at least 2,000 miles from Dakar Harbour in Senegal to Natal on the northeast Brazil. Starting in Africa in November 2015, Hooper expects to arrive in South American in January 2016; a short 3-month span.

His 6 hour per day training regimen has been done in pools across the UK, America and throughout the Mediterranean Sea. He plans to become the first person to swim every single mile of the entire width of the Atlantic Ocean or 2,000 miles between Africa and Brazil.

The Swim The Big Blue will raise money for a number of good causes, but he acknowledges that “completing 100,000 lengths hasn’t been easy, but it is child’s play compared with the real ocean.”



Copyright © 2015 by World Open Water Swimming Association