2,000,000 Meters and Counting

Warning:  Serious gloating in this post.  I hit another mini-goal today, with the completion of my two millionth swimming meter since I starting adding up my laps a few years ago (I only started counting because I needed something to keep me going, thought it was cool when I realized 1,000,000 meters was attainable and now I've doubled that!).  So what is 2,000,000 meters?  It's 80,000 lengths and 40,000 laps (25 meter pool), too many flip turns to count and 804 workouts.  Reality knocking ... serious competitive swimmers probably do this in 1/3rd the time or less.  Much less.

Mississippi River Mini-Goal Completed

Sometime in late 2006, I realized I was cranking out the distance, but had never tracked it.  I really had no idea how far I went over time.  So beginning at the start of 2007, I opened up a handy spreadsheet and began tracking my distance for each swim.  Seeing that the totals were adding up, I thought it would be cool to set some goals.  My main goal was to keep swimming, so I set what at the time seemed to be an impossible goal ... swim to Hawaii from LA (via a lap pool).  That surely would keep me swimming for a number of years.  I told myself, I'd reward myself by swimming the last distance into shore at Waikiki (I can always dream).  Realizing that I needed some mini-goals to keep the long-goal in sight, I added a bunch of those.  Actually, some of them are far in and of themselves (e.g., swim to Bermuda from NYC, cross the USA, etc. - see list on left margin of this blog).  Today, I completed one of those not-so mini-goals, the length of the Mississippi (Duluth to New Orleans) or 1,171 miles.  It feels good to complete a mini-goal, but I'm still not even half-way to another goal I've added on top of Hawaii - the Atlantic Ocean.  Maybe I can swim the last lap like Kramer did on Seinfeld, and swim in the river around Manhattan (Let's not get too carried away).

Mini-Goal Completed - Canadian Border via Great Lakes

Today, I completed one of my mini-goal milestones on my way to swim the distance of the Atlantic Ocean from Leiden England to NYC (the same route our pilgrim forefathers took ... they missed Manhattan). The completed mini-goal was to swim the distance of the Canadian border through the Great Lakes region - Kingston to Thunder Bay - a distance of 1,134 miles (or 36,316 circular laps in a 25 meter swimming pool). This took 735 swimming workouts, begun officially on Jan 2, 2007.

My prior goals and future goals may be seen on the left of this page.