Ben Hooper: How to cross the Atlantic without a boat.
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Ben Hooper: How to cross the Atlantic without a boat.

A daring Briton explains how to become the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean swimming
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The 36-year-old swimmer (or a madman?) seems to have conceived the impossible - to be the first person to cross the Atlantic in swimming. The task is not easy even for those who are equipped for such a journey on a boat.

Ben Hooper will set sail on November 1 from Dakar on his 2000 nautical mile voyage to Brazil's Natal. Every day he will spend 12 hours in the water: 6 hours floating, then resting, and then again, hands in teeth and forward.

The Atlantic, for a moment, is currents up to 7 knots and a wave 30 feet high.

Such loads imply a special diet to compensate for 12 thousand calories that Ben will burn in Atlantic waters.

The athlete will be followed by an escort vessel with a crew of 15 (!) medical officers, scientists and experts, officials from the Guinness Book of World Records and TV people documenting the British feat. The swimmer will rest on the same boat during «stops».

By the way, he wasn't born with gills instead of lungs, as it may seem. When he was 5 years old, he almost drowned during a swimming lesson.

For most people, a «lesson» like this would end with a fear of water, but Ben just decided to get better. Now he's training hard and in the last year he swam 100,000 times back there in his Cheltenham pool. We don't know the length of the pool, but the figure looks impressive.

Ben is sharing:

«My motto is to dream, live and reach, whatever obstacles you may have in your way».

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