The Teenager Who Hates Swimming Just Swam for 24 Hours

Sam Flannery is 19, and by his own admission he doesn’t like swimming. This weekend he swam for 24 hours straight.

Starting at 10 a.m. on Saturday at the University of Queensland, Sam spent a full day, a full night and the start of another day in a 50-metre pool, stopping only very briefly to eat. When it was over, he had covered 55,550 metres, or about 55.5 kilometres.

The numbers

The stats from the swim show how steady he stayed:

• Distance: 55,550 m
• Time: 24 hours
• Average pace: 2:35 per 100 m
• Average heart rate: 132 bpm
• Stroke rate: 23 strokes per minute
• Energy burned: 12,720 calories

That pace is the most telling number. Holding 2:35 per 100 metres across a whole day and night, with only brief stops to eat, means he barely slowed. A heart rate of 132 bpm shows he kept the effort sustainable instead of burning out early. His distance sits within the 55 to 65 kilometre range he predicted before the swim, and it’s further than the roughly 34 kilometres across the English Channel at its narrowest.

A swimmer who didn’t want to swim

What makes this story unusual is where it started. Sam came up with the idea about six months before the swim, and his first attempt at training went badly. “I hate swimming, to be honest,” he told 9News. He didn’t want to get up early, and he didn’t want to get in the water.

About a month in, he realised he had to get off the couch and actually train. That began roughly five months of consistent work, and it paid off on the day. He didn’t turn into a natural swimmer. He turned up, again and again, for something he didn’t enjoy.

From dragging a car to staring at a black line

This wasn’t Sam’s first unusual endurance test. Earlier this year he set a record by pulling a 1,300 kg sedan for a full marathon. His father’s public posts say he has also run 160 km in a single day from Brisbane to Byron, and that he has raised almost $60,000 over two years for people experiencing homelessness and young people facing mental health challenges.

But he saw the swim as a different kind of challenge. The car pull was about physical strength, with training aimed at making sure his muscles could endure that weight for so long. The swim, he said, was “largely just a mental challenge.”

He was upfront about what that meant. He wasn’t going anywhere for 24 hours, just doing laps and staring at a black line on the pool floor, with nothing to stimulate his mind. Yet he saw that as the point. “You find out so much about yourself when you continuously overcome the challenge,” he said, and the lesson comes from continuing to push through.

Why he did it

Sam did the swim as part of Nedd’s Uncomfortable Challenge, where people take on a 10-day or one-day challenge that scares them or makes them uncomfortable, all for a greater purpose. The purpose here is raising money for homelessness in Australia.

He wanted people to look beyond what we see on the streets, because there is also hidden homelessness. The funds are being directed through We Are Mobilised so they reach the people who need them most. In Sam’s words, the swim was the vehicle for creating awareness.

That gives the 24 hours a meaning beyond the numbers. Every lap was a small act of discomfort chosen on purpose, in support of people who face a much harder kind of discomfort without choosing it.

What 24 hours in the water asks of a body

It’s hard to picture what the 12,720 calories means in practice. Spread over the swim, it works out to roughly 530 calories burned every hour, for a full day, while eating only in brief stops. Add the cold-and-warm cycle of a night in the water and the fatigue of a body that never gets to lie down, and the physical cost is clear.

Yet it was the mental side Sam kept coming back to. A 50-metre pool offers no scenery and no change of pace. There are no landmarks to count down. It is a lane, a line, and the next length. Getting through a night of that, and then a morning, is a different test from anything in a gym.

The takeaway

Sam Flannery’s swim doesn’t fit the usual sporting story. He wasn’t a swimmer, he didn’t enjoy the training, and nobody was paying him to do it. He chose something uncomfortable, trained for it consistently, and finished 55.5 kilometres later, with a cause attached.

For anyone sitting on a challenge they’ve been putting off, it’s an easy story to take something from. You don’t have to love the thing. You have to keep turning up for it.