Or maybe not...

Did you catch the story last weekend about the first woman ever to swim across the Atlantic -- at age 56? It took her 25 days; she rested on a boat each evening and swam during the day. Or at least during most days; she swam on "19 out of 25 days"; "her longest stint in the water was about eight hours, and her shortest was 21 minutes."

Sounds pretty impressive, no? Well, at least it does until you start reality-checking the claim. Swimming 2,500 miles, from the Cape Verde Islands to Trinidad, in 25 days?


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Not possible. A woman swimming 100 meters in one minute -- that's slower than the world record pace for the 100 meter freestyle, but faster than the record for the 800 meter -- would take almost 28 days to swim that distance, swimming around the clock. (And it's entirely impractical for a boat to remain in a fixed position overnight in mid-ocean, when you can't just drop anchor. But that's a minor complication.)

It turns out that she swam only a small fraction of the journey, resting on the group's catamarin for the rest of the trip. The best estimate is that she swam about 250 miles in total -- one tenth of the distance involved in "crossing the Atlantic."

To be fair, apparently Benoit Lecomte, the man who, in 1998, was the first person to "swim across the Atlantic," did much the same thing:

Reached Thursday at his home near Dallas, Lecomte said he did it the same way Figge did — taking frequent breaks on board a boat that moved toward his destination.

He said he doesn't know how many miles he actually swam — "It's a very good question" — and added he, too, took frequent breaks and swam no more than eight hours a day.