Let’s try a little experiment.

Put down this newspaper and make circles with your arms. Big, sweeping, swimmer-style arcs.

Come back when you’ve done it 43,746 times.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. You weren’t gone too long.

Former Western Kentucky swimmer Mallory Mead, though, can wear that number - give or take a few hundred - like a badge of honor. Mead joined a club of less than 1,000 worldwide and all-time members on July 26, when she successfully crossed the English Channel - from Dover, England, to Cap Gris Nez, France - becoming the first known person from the Bowling Green area to achieve the feat.

Mead’s time of 10 hours, 34 minutes is well above average - she’s easily within the fastest 250 crossings in history. Perhaps equally important, she got to write her name on the wall at the White Horse Pub in Dover, a tradition reserved for Channel conquerors.

“First it was kind of anti-climactic, because you get out and you go back and take a shower and go to bed,” Mead said on Saturday, a few days after she returned to the United States from Europe. “But the next day I went to Dover ... and got to write my name on the wall. I felt like that was a much better ending to the story.”

Naturally, the Channel crossing wasn’t easy. Lots of folks have latched onto the fact that Mead - an Indiana native and recent WKU graduate - was stung twice by jellyfish, but that barely fazed the swimmer. That sort of thing happens all the time, Mead said, and in water as cold as the Channel, the pain doesn’t last.

Mead’s shoulders, though, certainly made their presence felt. For the first seven or so hours, Mead was perfectly fine. No pain, not tired, no boredom. But tens of thousands of strokes, at a pace of about 69 per minute, began to add up. First it was Mead’s elbows. Then, somewhere near the eighth hour, around the time Mead finally spotted France on the horizon, her shoulders began to scream.

“It just started to hurt more and more and more,” Mead said. “I kept thinking I was getting close ... (but) just because you see France doesn’t mean it’s close. I kept my stroke, because I still really wanted to finish as fast as possible. It got pretty excrutiating in the end.”

When she landed on France, exhausted, cut up by rocks, throat wrecked by hours of salt water exposure, she was greeted by friend and fellow swimmer Clara Bennett, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who completed her own crossing in 11 hours, 12 minutes a couple of days later. (For more detail on the pair’s experience than could fit here, visit http://swimmingthechannel.blogspot.com.)

Bleeding and beaten, it wasn’t until the following, super-sore Sunday morning that Mead began to fully appreciate her success.

Mead originally intended for the Channel crossing to be her retirement from open water swimming. But maybe not.

Boosted by confidence and competitive spirit, Mead is now considering an even rarer accomplishment - something called the Triple Crown of open water swimming. With the 21-mile Channel and a previous completion of the 28 1/2-mile Manhattan Island Marathon to her credit, Mead figures she might as well take a shot at the 21-mile Catalina Channel in southern California.

Hard to say for certain how many people have finished the Triple Crown, but Mead believes it’s no more than 20. She has no time frame yet, since she just started a new job in Indianapolis. Besides, she worked for months to prepare for the English Channel, so these things don’t happen quickly.

“I’ve gotta see where I’d go with (work) before I start thinking about more swimming,” Mead said.

— Daniel Pike is sports editor for the Daily News. He can be reached at 783-3271 or by e-mailing dpike@bgdailynews.com.