Benoît Lecomte

Benoît Lecomte is a French-born long distance swimmer who has received wide credit for being the first man to swim across the Atlantic Ocean without a kick board in 1998. He did this to raise money for cancer research as a tribute to his father.



“It became very clear to me that the only way to go forward was to use my passion to get attention on an issue that affects all of us.”


   

Lecomte said the most difficult part of the swim will be dealing with the isolation of swimming alone for eight hours every day.

“The challenge is to keep your mind sane and to be focused. It’s mind over matter,” he said. Lecomte has been training on land to be able to “disassociate” his mind from his body.

“Before going in the morning I know exactly what I am going to do with my mind, hour by hour. I’ll be making my own movies, creating my own buildings, and reliving moments I lived in the past and engaging all my senses so I can remember what I was doing very precisely.

“Remembering how the smell was, how the wind was, the sun on my skin, to be very detailed about all those elements. Then you get transported into a particular day.”






At the end of September, Lecomte plans to take off from a Tokyo beach and spend the next six months making his way some 5,500 miles across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco.

He'll swim for eight hours a day, then board a support boat to eat and sleep. The next day he'll jump back in the water at the exact same spot.