I believe a person who knows how to swim (i.e. can create a rhythmic pattern of body motion to propel in water) can, after adjusting to the initial tempo, swim until their body entirely exhausts. This limit of exhaustion is primarily psychological.

With this nut-theory of mine, I got into a discussion with my roommate. His perspective is that you cannot go beyond a certain degree of laps that you do occasionally. For instance, a person who swims 20 laps during one swim workout would be very much unlikely to exceed beyond 30 on a given position. Going from 20 to 30 would require him to gradually build upon his performance.

In light of the two conflicting points-of-view, we designed a challenge to put these theories to test. The challenge was for me complete 50 laps (2,500 yards) of continuous swimming. My personal best had been 32 laps over 6 months ago. Hence, this challenge seemed the perfect test for the theory.

Therefore, I went in to the try this out. I kept going and going, counting my laps, thinking about the most random-est of things… till I actually made it. I completed 50 laps!

Although it took me a whole hour to do it, I guess it turned out that this phenomenon does work. So, this was the important conclusion I reached this past week.