Your 56-year-old mother tells you she plans to swim 2,100 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, from the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast to Barbados. She will swim behind a sailboat, in a giant cage to ward off sharks. She figures she'll be in the water six to eight hours a day, which means it will take her just over two months to fulfill her mission.

She'll dive in Dec. 1 and reach her destination sometime in early February 2009.

Your reaction?

If you're race-car driver Alex Figge, you smile, shrug your shoulders, and say: ``Way to go, Mom. Be careful out there. We'll miss you at Christmas.''

Jennifer Figge has been doing multistage endurance events since her only son was in elementary school in Davenport, Iowa, so he was ''not shocked at all'' when she told him of her latest intention. ''I know it sounds weird, but everyone in our family expects stuff like this from my mom,'' said Alex, 27, who races in the LeMans series. ``I'd be surprised if she wasn't doing something extreme.''

Her first challenge was a 300-mile, 12-day run across Iowa in 1989. Alex's third-grade teacher put up a map in the classroom that read: ''Where is Mrs. Figge today?'' The children moved pushpins across the map to chart her course.

It would take many, many pushpins to chronicle Figge's adventures since. She has run 400 miles across France, 350 miles across Romania, 450 miles across India, 576 miles across South America, 300 miles across Thailand (north to south), 300 miles across Iceland, and 180 miles across Mexico (the final 60 miles in a leg cast). She swam across the Straits of Gibraltar, from Tahiti to Moorea, from Turkey to Greece, across the Cozumel Channel, and through the heads of Sydney Harbor. Last year, she battled eight-foot-swells as she swam 52 miles from Cay Sal Bank in the Bahamas to Marathon in the Keys.

In all, she has traversed more than 3,300 miles on land, and done roughly 25 channel crossings by sea. But nothing she has done compares with her latest endeavor, a stunt that, as far as anyone knows, has been conquered by only two people, and never by a woman.

Guy Delage, a Frenchman, claims to have swum the same route from Cape Verde to the Barbados with the help of a kickboard in 1994, but the swim was unsupervised and its authenticity has been questioned. In 1998, Frenchman Benoit Lecomte, who lived in Austin at the time, swam 3,716 miles from Cape Cod to Brittany to raise money for cancer research in the name of his father, who died of colon cancer. It took him 73 days, and he stopped along the way at the Azores Islands.

When Figge, who lives in Aspen, first approached Miami-based captain Bill Ray about helping her cross the Atlantic, he thought she was kidding. He soon realized she was dead serious.

What would compel a human being to attempt such a feat? Why would someone choose to swim through rough water, among sharks and jellyfish? What's the fun in breathing diesel fumes, and battling nausea and dehydration day after day?

''It does save on airfare,'' Figge said, laughing, after a training swim in Coconut Grove last week. ``I only have to buy a one-way ticket to Cape Verde Island. The cost of fuel today is getting very expensive.''

And then she got serious. Well, as serious as this gregarious woman gets, anyway.

''If someone gave me 60 days to accomplish something, and I had the help and means to do it, this is what I would choose to do,'' she said. ``In my life, I haven't really had many challenges, so I challenge myself. I like being out there. I feel a sense of calm in the ocean, like the sound you hear in a conch shell. I feed off the inspiration of people who have had real challenges. My father died of throat cancer. My uncle was an amputee. I had a cousin critically burned in a plane crash. Those people keep me going.''

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