56-Year-Old Swimmer Makes History

Posted February 9, 2009, 9:02 pm in Extreme



Another 50+ endurance athlete has found a place in the record books. 56-year-old Jennifer Figge has become the first woman in history to swim across the Atlantic Ocean.  Figge, from Aspen, Colorado, swam across 2,000 miles of ocean inside a shark cage attached to a sail boat.

She left the Cape Verde Islands off Africa's western coast on Jan. 12 and arrived in Trinidad on Feb. 5th.  She originally planned on swimming to the Bahamas but high winds and waves up to 30 feet forced her to veer nearly 1,000 miles off course.

Figge says she’s not done yet. After a short rest in Trinidad, she plans on swimming to the British Virgin Islands, arriving in late February.

Her journey comes a decade after French swimmer Benoit Lecomte made the first known solo trans-Atlantic swim, covering nearly 4,000 miles from Massachusetts to France in 73 days.

Figg first dreamed of this feat in the early 1960s. During a flight to Italy with her mother, the plane was bounced around by a storm. Instead of being scared, Figge says she told her mother, “I hope that lightning hits the plane and we get to go down in the middle of the Atlantic and get into those cool life vests and swim the rest of the way.”



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