288 laps

On New Years Day, Steven went to a special swim practice.  I thought I'd signed him up for a regular practice, but I goofed and actually signed him up for the distance challenge practice.  Since he's only been swimming on the team since the end of October, and since the name of this thing was the "10,000 yard challenge", I thought it was way over his ability level to do something like this.  I emailed Coach Joe to ask if Steven would be way out of his element, but coach said that he'd have lots of "young swimmers" there and that the practice would be tailored to each swimmers' ability level.

As it turned out, there were mostly young swimmers there.  Steven ended up swimming for over 3 hours with short breaks every 20 minutes to check in with the coach and report the number of laps completed.  They did all the strokes, but mostly freestyle and butterfly.  (Butterfly is the most exhausting of the strokes!) 

Mac had gone to workout while Steven was swimming.  He came back to the pool after about 90 minutes, thinking it was a 2 hour practice.  As the practice went on and on he was amazed at all these little guys who looked exhausted but just kept going.  Eventually Mac told Coach Joe that Steven had to get out as we had things to do that day, and as Steven was tallying his last laps he realized that he was only 150 yards away from the 9 year old record for the team for the longest distance swam in one practice.  So Steven wanted to get back in and swim some more.  He did another 200 yards for good measure.  Every lap is 25 yards, and he swam 288 laps, which equals 7200 yards, or 4 miles.  Of swimming!

He was pretty exhausted after all that!  But he really gained a lot of confidence from the whole experience and is so proud of the long distance record he now holds.