Round Rock man’s plan: swim the mighty Pacific
Ben Lecomte wants to be first to make it from Tokyo to San Francisco.
GEORGETOWN— Ben Lecomte emerged from the South San Gabriel River in Georgetown one hot August morning wearing a swimsuit, goggles, a snorkel and flippers. At 5 feet 10 and 155 pounds, the slender 48-year-old looked like he was just out for a lark in the tranquil water.
But he was training to do something no one else has done.
Lecomte, a Round Rock resident, wants to be the first person to swim 5,500 miles across the Pacific Ocean from Tokyo to San Francisco. In 1998, he swam 3,500 miles across the Atlantic to raise money for cancer research in memory of his father, who died of cancer at age 49.
Now, with the backing of a nonprofit group founded by actor Mark Ruffalo and other scientific organizations, he’s again willing to brave the sharks, giant waves, cold water and mind-numbing tedium.
“Somebody told me one time that people who don’t understand what you are going to do are going to call you crazy, and the people who do understand are going to call you passionate,” he said, smiling, during an interview along the San Gabriel River.
Lecomte, a native of France who is married with two children, has lived in Texas for more than 25 years. He moved with his family to Round Rock about two months ago so his wife could be near her Central Texas relatives during his swim, which he estimates will take five months.
Lecomte will not be alone on the journey, which will begin late this month. He will be followed by a donated boat with a crew of six: a captain, an engineer, a deckhand and three people doing scientific research. His plan is to swim eight hours per day wearing a wetsuit, snorkel, goggles and fins, and then get on the boat to rest and chronicle his journey on the Internet.
Lecomte said he has to eat
‘I want to be the person who pushed the limits and tried to do something different to attract attention, even if I fail.’ Ben Lecomte Swimmer, Round Rock resident
8,000 calories a day to complete the feat. That includes liquids such as soup while he is swimming, canned meats and vegetables and vacuumpacked meals.
He’s tackling the Pacific this year to draw attention to the ocean’s declining health.
“We have overfished the ocean, and only 10 percent of the big fish are left,” said Lecomte, who has taken two years off his architectural career to train and do the swim.
He said he hopes his swim makes people think about conservation.
“I know I’m not going to change the world, but I think making a little contribution takes one step at a time, and I’m moving in the right direction,” he said. “I want to be the person who pushed the limits and tried to do something different to attract attention, even if I fail.”
He has timed his swim to coincide with the U.N. Conference on Climate Change in November in Paris, he said.
Organizations including the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Water Defense, the latter founded by Ruffalo, will conduct experiments on the boat on plastic trash and bacteria found in the Pacific. Lecomte also will use an echocardiograph on the boat that will take ultrasound pictures of his heart.
The results of the echocardiogram will be sent to Dr. Ben Levine, director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Health and a professor of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern in Dallas. Levine said the results will show if Lecomte shows signs of fatigue in his heart from the swimming.
The Kuroshio Current — which is warm with temperatures in the 70s — will help carry him across the Pacific until he gets close to the United States, where he will run into the cold North Pacific current with temperatures in the 50s, Lecomte said.
To keep warm when the water gets colder, he will wear several layers of wetsuits. Shark encounters will be inevitable, but Lecomte said a device attached to a line the boat will drag behind it will emit an electromagnetic field to keep them away.
His biggest challenge while swimming, he said, will be mental.
During each hour he swims, Lecomte said, he plans to focus on something different, including how to design a sus- tainable building, remembering his 18th birthday or time he spent with his father, who taught him how to swim in the Atlantic Ocean when he was 5.
In the meantime he’s training six days a week, three to five hours per day, by swimming, biking and running. He swims in the Blue Hole area of the San Gabriel River instead of a swimming pool, he said.
“The San Gabriel River has more natural light and changes every day,” he said. “It’s not controlled, and you feel closer to the environment and closer to yourself.”