site.btaMarathon Swimmer Petar Stoychev Completes All Oceans Seven Open Water Straits within 173 Days, Breaks World Record

Bulgarian swimmer Petar Stoychev set a new world record on Monday after swimming the seven most difficult open water straits Oceans Seven in the shortest period of time. He completed the feat in 173 days, more than twice faster than the previous record held by Scottish-Australian Andrew Donaldson (355 days).

In the last six months he has swam the Cook Strait, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Molokai Channel, the Catalina Channel, the North Channel and Tsugaru Strait. On Monday he completed the last strait, the English Channel, for the third time in his career to set the record.

"Most of the time I swam in the dark, in strong wind and big waves. The waves reached over 2 meters and made swimming very difficult. In the final part to France there were also a lot of jellyfish. Despite everything, my swim was successful," he wrote on Facebook.

On August 14, Stoychev became the first Bulgarian and only the 32st person in the world to swim the Oceans Seven. He completed the achievement by swimming the Tsugaru Strait in Japan.