Gainesville/Miami guy wrote:
Giver of Credit wrote:She may not have swum 100 miles per day, but we should give her some credit for her work ethic. She quit the Stanford swim team when the NCAA imposed the "weekly hours limits on athletic training time."
I am not faulting her. I just don't understand how no one involved for Wheaties ever noticed the impossibility of that number.
As I said, she was a truly great swimmer. I agree with another poster who suspects that a decimal place got moved. She might have averaged almost ten miles a day, though even that seems highly improbable - to average so much for 35 years, from her little kids start to her 40s. If a decimal place got moved it would still be 127,575 miles. How many elite marathoners run that many miles in a lifetime. Very few I suspect.
Swimming miles and running miles are not the same. I'm hoping you are not trying to compare the two.
For a runner to complete 127,575 miles in a "lifetime" I figured the following:
Begin running at age 15 and stop running at age 60. This is a round # of 45 years. 365 days in a year - I didn't compute leap years b/c I'm lazy.
Roughly 7.8 miles per day for those 45 years. Considering the number days per year many elite distance guys/gals run 15 or more I'd say that this is indeed possible by more than a few. Take into consideration that many will run marathons and what-not more frequently later in life - 3x+ daily mileage - it makes it even easier to hit this number.
Swimming on the other hand, I have no clue. Personally, I wouldn't want to be face down in the water with no scenery for all those years.