Jennifer Figge Swims the Atlantic

Two days ago, a 56-year-old woman named Jennifer Figge from Aspen, Colorado set foot on dry land in Trinidad, becoming the first woman to ever swim the span of the Atlantic Ocean.
That’s an amazing feat of determination and endurance, no matter who does it. But to undertake it at 56? By comparison, 41-year-old Olympic silver medalist Dana Torres looks like a fresh-faced youngster in the sport. So much for the “I’m too old” or “Well, I’m not 30 anymore. What do you expect?” excuses for any of the rest of us.  It’s probably no coincidence that both feats were in swimming, which allows an athlete to train hard without impact stress or strain on not-quite-so-young-anymore joints. But, still.
One report said Figge trained in an outdoor pool, even in blizzards, to toughen herself up for swimming in rough conditions, and that her training regime was intense enough to cause her to vomit two or three times a day in the course of her workouts. Reports also say that in the Atlantic crossing, she battled eight-foot swells at times. I’ve kayaked in 6 to 8-foot swells, and that’s no picnic. I can’t imagine swimming through them and not collapsing in exhaustion and frustration within half an hour.
But reading about Figge’s effort also brought a couple of other thoughts to mind:

On one of my visits to Hawaii, I watched a TV newscaster talking about 25-foot waves on the north shore of Oahu, and the rush of surfers eager to challenge themselves on those heights. After the factual recitation of the story, the newscaster leaned forward into the camera and said with a touch of bemusement, “You know, you gotta wonder what goes on inside the head of someone who looks at a 25-foot wave and says, ‘Gee! I want to be on that!” 
Amen. So what possesses a 56-year-old woman to look at the Atlantic Ocean and say, “Gee! I want to swim all the way across that!”? 
Maybe some day I’ll get to ask Figge myself. But in the meantime, a perusal of interviews she gave before the attempt give at least a couple of clues. In an article in the Boston Globe, Figge, whose mother was a professional opera singer, and whose husband was a successful banker (now retired), says, “I haven’t really had many challenges in life, so I have to challenge myself. Pushing myself to the limit is the only way I know how.” 
The second piece of the puzzle is that Figge says she used to smoke cigarettes, but that her son asked her to stop. So, the article says, “she had to replace her cigarette addiction with another habit.” Apparently, endurance sports was her answer. 
Those two pieces make sense to me. First, I think there may be a certain amount of risk and challenge humans crave. The exact amount may differ, person to person, but there’s certainly a lot of literature about why we take risks when we don’t have to that supports—or at least explores—that idea. Put us in too safe and easy an environment, and we begin to find ways to compensate for that overabundance. Bungee jumping, I think it’s fair to say, would not have been popular in the cave days, when surviving every day was a risky and uncertain adventure. 
And second, regardless of our inclination for challenge or risk, you’ve got to seriously want—or maybe even need—that challenge in order to put up with what Figge did to train for and accomplish such an arduous feat. A social worker friend of mine who worked with addictive populations for most of his 30-year-career says that he and his co-workers often tried to get their clients to take up marathon running, as a way of channeling the addicts’ propensity for extreme immersion into a more productive outlet than alcohol or drugs. A personality trait or tendency that can be a liability, in terms of substance addiction, can be a huge asset, in terms of dedication and drive to accomplish an extraordinarily absorbing, grueling, and challenging goal.  
I found myself pondering another question, as well, as I read the stories about Figge’s journey and accomplishment. My first thought was, “Wow. She sure has a high tolerance for risk.” But in truth, I think Figge’s feat had more to do with endurance than risk. While it sounds risky to swim an ocean, Figge was accompanied by a sailboat with a diver, doctor and sailor, and she did the swim in a shark cage attached to the boat. She didn’t have to navigate, or figure out how to survive. She slept aboard the boat each night, spending anywhere from 20 minutes to eight hours a day in the water. There was a certain amount of risk, to be sure—sailboats are not invincible in the Atlantic. But her real challenge was simply to keep going. It was about marshalling the internal strength, focus, and drive to keep moving when the swells tossed her around, her body was cold, and her arms and legs were exhausted.
What did she learn along the way? I’d be curious. Sometimes, endurance feats teach less about ourselves, or life, than adventures or journeys requiring a lot of decision-making and risk evaluation, without any support systems to show us the way. But at the very least, marshalling the inner fortitude and bodily strength to swim an ocean successfully certainly would prove … that we could. And at age 56, that alone is quite something.
(An interesting book on this topic is To the Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance)