The Rich Roll Podcast - Ross Edgley Is The Real Aquaman — Lessons In Fortitude From (Arguably) The Fittest Man Alive

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

To be certain, we face great challenges — global climate change, political divisiveness, mass shootings, social & economic disparity, chronic disease, addiction, racism, misogyny – the list goes on. It’s easy to fall into despair. And yet there is hope. Because heroes walk among us. Look closely and you will find no shortage of unsung angels diligently working anonymously behind the scenes to solve our collective crises. And literal superheroes who remind us that the human spirit knows no boundaries. I’ve had the good fortune to host more than a few such specimens on this podcast – people like Alex Honnold. James Lawrence who completed 50 ironmans in 50 states in 50 days. And Colin O’Brady, who, as we speak, is attempting to be the first person to cross Antarctica unaided. And then, there’s Ross Edgley – a gentle, beautiful beast of a man who recently became the very person to swim the entire circumference of Great Britain without once stepping on land. It's a journey that took him 1,792 miles over 157 days, eclipsing several world records in the process – including the world’s longest staged sea swim. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real Aquaman. And yet this just the latest feat for Ross, a UK-based strongman and adventure athlete of otherworldly grit and determination whose insane feats of strength and endurance include: * climbing the height of Everest on a rope in one sitting; * completing a marathon while dragging a Mini Cooper behind him; * completing a triathlon with a 100 pound tree on his back; and * swimming 100km in the Caribbean whilst pulling a 100 pound log behind him – which he completed in just 32 hours. Ross has chronicled his adventures as a fitness expert for magazines like Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, GQ, The Daily Telegraph and Men's Fitness and is a Sunday Times Bestselling Author of the aptly titled, The World’s Fittest Book*. I have both followed and admired Ross for many years. The Universe finally conspired to bring us together. And this conversation is everything I hoped it would be. Today we focus on the lessons Ross learned during his 5-month swim-circumnavigation of Great Britain. We explore the importance of purpose. Why you must succinctly understand what drives you — because if you cant explain what you’re preparing for in one sentence, it’s not clear enough. We talk about what it means to build work capacity. How to make peace with pain. And why strength and endurance need not be mutually exclusive pursuits. Ross’ achievements are an exploration of the outer limits of fortitude. We tap that well through the prism of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to better understand how mere survival can catalyze new horizons of human possibility. And we discuss Ross’ ongoing guinea pig ‘n of 1” experiment in human adaptability – the incredible ability he believes we all have to develop superhuman durability and it’s applicability beyond sport to literally anything. But more than anything, I wanted to know what compels this modern day Jack LaLane / Aquaman — and what it all means. Final note: this conversation took place in the midst of the Woolsey Fire a few weeks back. We were evacuated from my home and studio on the interview date thus we were not able to capture this conversation on video. Given the chaos, I'm just happy we could make it work at all. Special thanks to my friends Matthew Wilder and Tamara Dunn for allowing us use of their studio in Venice. Enjoy! Rich

I wouldn't recommend my life to most people. Like, you know, the Great British Swim, it's not a mass participation sport. I don't recommend it. But what I hope is people who watch the series, it just helps them move their personal barometer, even just one degree of what they think was possible. So I would like people to just look and say, that's an extreme example.

I wouldn't do that. I don't like jellyfish. I want to keep my tongue look and say that's an extreme example I wouldn't do that I don't like jellyfish I want to keep my tongue intact and that's fine but just know that the the principles are the same that that Sunday morning run whether it's you know that to-do list that you're putting off you know maybe maybe it's even just something you always wanted to write a book you know something like that but you've just never really got around to it because of your habitual level. You wanted to just break out of that. That's what would be nice.

If people look at the Great British Swimmers and experiment in that and actually not even consider it a swimming adventure as such, it became a little bit more than that. Oh, I certainly felt so. That's Ross Edgley. And this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing? What's happening? Are you doing okay? I hope so. My name is Rich help bring clean water to those most in need. We're closing in on about $50,000 raised,

which is incredible. Thank you so much. But here's the thing. I think we can do better people. Come on, help me out. To learn more and to donate, go to mycharitywater.org forward slash richroll. Every penny counts and thank you in advance.

So here's the thing. I think that we live in incredible times. Yes, we face great challenges, global climate change, political divisiveness, mass shootings, economic disparity, chronic disease, addiction, nationalism, racism, misogyny, the list goes on and on and on. And it's easy to fall into despair.

And yet there is also hope. Why? Because heroes walk among us. Unsung angels, people who are working hard behind the scenes to solve our collective crises, and literal superheroes that remind us that adventure runs thick in our blood and that human capability is unlimited. And I've had the good fortune to host more than a handful of such specimens. People like Alex Honnold, who as you probably know, scaled El Capitan without a rope. The Iron Cowboy, James Lawrence, who completed 50 Ironmans in 50 states in 50 days.

How about Colin O'Brady? This guy right now is attempting to be the first person to cross Antarctica unaided, which is unbelievable. And then there's Ross Adjali. How do I describe this guy? Ross is like this beast of a man, but he's like this gentle, beautiful beast of a man who recently became the very first person to swim the entire circumference of Great Britain. Let that sink in for a minute. The entire circumference of Great Britain, 1,792 miles over something like 157, 152 days, something like that, without once

stepping on land and along the way breaking several world records in the process, including the world's longest staged sea swim. This guy is unbelievable. And this is just the latest feat for this UK-based strongman who is this insane adventure athlete of otherworldly grit and determination who has also pulled off such unbelievable stunts as climbing the height of Everest on a rope in one sitting, completing a marathon while dragging a mini Cooper behind him, completing a triathlon with a 100 pound tree on his back and swimming a hundred kilometers in the Caribbean while pulling a 100 pound log behind him, which he completed in just 32 hours. Ross has written columns as a fitness expert for magazines like Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, GQ, The Daily Telegraph and Men's Fitness.

Metropolitan, Men's Health, GQ, The Daily Telegraph, and Men's Fitness. And he is a Sunday Times bestselling author of the aptly titled The World's Fittest Book. And this is a guy that I followed and admired for years. The universe finally conspired to bring us together. And this conversation is absolutely everything I hoped it would be. everything I hoped it would be. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately,

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Okay, Ross, Ross Edgley. Oh my goodness, this guy is unbelievable. He has such good energy. I've never met anybody who can combine such insane athletic accomplishments with such a, how do I say it? Like a positive, joyous sensibility. What do we talk about? We talk about the Great British swim, of course.

We talk about his book, The World's Fittest Book, plus the world's longest rope climb. He climbed the length of Everest on a rope. We explore purpose. Why, if you can't explain what you're training for in one sentence, it's probably not clear enough. We talk about what it means to build work capacity first and how to make peace with pain. The talk about what it means to build work capacity first

and how to make peace with pain. The thing about Ross is his achievements are an experiment in fortitude. So we go deep into what that means specifically through the prism of Maslow's hierarchy of needs where the baseline is simple survival. And we discuss Ross's guinea pig and of one exploration of human

adaptability, the incredible facility he believes we all have to develop superhuman durability and its applicability beyond sport to literally anything. I love this guy. It's not just what he has done, but who he is and how he carries himself that impresses me the most. Final note, this conversation took place in the midst of the Woolsey fire a few weeks ago. We were evacuated from my home and thus we couldn't capture this one on video for you guys, but we still found a way to make it happen. So special thanks to my good friends, Matthew Wilder and Tamara Dunn for allowing us use of their studio in Venice. And with that, I give you the extraordinary and quite lovely, I might add, Ross Edgeley. You get to the point where an hour into it, you've made a mile or two, and you think,

okay, we're on a rhythm here, we're going. But it still could come to a halt at that point, and several swims did. But it's not until you get to the end of each swim that you know that you've actually made it. Or if you haven't made it, then what are you going to do to modify the plan and adapt? So that's a relentless pressure. I did genuinely think he was going to be home in like 60 days. It seems as though that's what he actually told me. And then I got the phone call to say it's going to be three months. And then I got the phone call to say,'s gonna be three months and then I got the phone call to say no it's actually gonna be five months. Ross always looks after himself and he handles

himself fine. When he gets in the water at night time that's when I worry about him just because at the end of the day he's the one in that water and it's pitch black and there's just waves crashing all over it and then all you can do is watch. That's where you feel a bit more helpless. he's crashing all over it and then all you can do is watch that's where you feel a bit more helpless let's set the stage a little bit we are in our friend's studio recording studio in venice because we're on day three of the malibu fires our family was displaced we evacuated on friday morning and have been staying downtown. And I've just been monitoring everything very closely. So far, our home is safe. I can't say the same for a lot of our friends. So it's been a gut-wrenching past 72 hours, and we're still not out of

it yet. The fires are still burning. The winds are supposed to pick up. So it's a very precarious time. But Ross, I've been wanting to meet you for a very long time. And you're here in Los Angeles. And I'm delighted to find a way to make this work, dude. So we're kind of putting this together in a different way. We're not in my studio because we can't get to our house to record it. And I thought, I just shared with you, I thought about like, well, I'll just get all these guys in my car and we can get into the evacuation zone and just do it in my house, like in the middle of the fire. But I thought maybe we'll get stuck there. It's a bad idea. I know you would have been game for it. You know I would.

So unfortunately. But anyway, we're here. We're doing it, man. I'm so psyched to meet you. I've wanted to meet you for years. I've been following your journey for a very long time. And here we are, man. So, welcome. Thank you, Rich.

And actually, yeah, to that point, and I said it earlier, but, you know, with this whole swim that I've just come, I'm still drying out. I've only been on land a week, I think. You're pulling sand out of your ears still. Still finding jellyfish tentacles in weird places. But no, I just wanted to start off by just saying, you know, thank you so much. You know, for those listening, they'll know that, you know,

I had this crazy idea to swim around Great Britain and you, I think it was two days in, you know, and that was when my tongue was falling apart, like a wetsuit chafing. And I never forget, you know, and you just said, look, you know, keep going. And if you make it out alive, we should catch up. Yes. Here we are, we're catching up. You made it out alive. Not only did you make it out alive, you completed it, you did it, you were successful. And of course, man, I was like your biggest cheerleader. I kept like retweeting, like, if you're not following this guy, like, what's wrong

with you, man? This is insane what this guy's doing. And honestly, like you have not, I don't think people realize how much that helped because it was this swimming solitary confinement, you know, so I'd be swimming for 12 hours a day. And when I'd get out of the water, sometimes just jellyfish stings, like so bad that my, my face had changed shape. So goggles wouldn't fit my face. And there were some pretty dark moments there. And just knowing that someone like yourself was retweeting and then it kind of created this community online. And yeah, I just wanted to start off by saying thank you so much. I don't think you realized quite how much you helped.

So you guys had cell service. Because were able, because there was a lot of social sharing when you weren't swimming. You guys were able to upload all of this content. Red Bull created this mini documentary series out of it. And these episodes were going live with complete regularity. And I'm like, how is, just on a pure logistical level, like, first of all, how is this even happening? Like when they're on a boat? That is a good point. And that was it. When we started the whole process, for me, it was kind of like growing up hearing stories of Captain Webb, first guy to swim the English Channel, 1875. And I thought, that's amazing. Shackleton as well.

Mallory, Hillary, Everest. Mallory, Hillary, Everest. And all of these great explorers, I thought, wouldn't it be amazing to actually document that rather than just a written journal to actually see what would happen. And that's why we were so fortunate with the vlog series with Red Bull

to actually, you know, just document it, just warts and all, you know. So are you going to take that and condense it down to like a proper two hour documentary? I think there's plans to, yeah. Yeah, you definitely should. But there was so much unseen footage as well. So, we're just kind of sitting on, you know,

all of this material and then I think we're seeing, you know, what can we do with it? How can we turn it into something else? Right. All right. Well, let's start with what the fuck were you thinking? No, I know, right? Uh-huh. Well, here's the interesting thing, just as an outside observer, watching this unfold from afar,

you had just come out with your book, World's Fittest Book. And I was like thinking, oh, well, maybe he'll come to the US and do a press tour and I can get him on the podcast. And then the book tour had barely begun. I mean, the book had been out for five minutes, and you're like, I'm going to celebrate my book by doing this crazy swim. I was like, wait, what?

Like, at least like tour around and do some press around the book, let that settle down, and then go do the event. You know? I know, I know. But I think you'll get this, because certainly with all of your work, you are like a human guinea pig. You practice what you preach. You are the living embodiment on everything that you teach. And I think there was an element of that as well that, you know, if you're going to call your book the world's fittest book, you better do something to back it up. Yeah, but you say that as if you hadn't already done plenty to establish, you know, your credentials in that arena. Right. Yeah.

We should have had this conversation before I started on the site, but no, I just, um, I just, I just felt, yeah, to, to, to do something, to prove all of the principles within it. And, and I don't know, it just, it seemed, it seemed like something like a great opportunity, you know, Great Britain and its coastline, it's kind of renowned for the tides, the weather, giant whirlpools, everything. And I just felt, should you complete it, you prove the theories within the book. Right. Well, I'm just letting that settle in for a minute. But I want to know how spontaneous was this really? Like you made this announcement,

but I have to imagine you had been planning this for quite some time because you don't just suddenly say, okay, I'm going to go do this. And then the next day you're on a boat with a bunch of people, right? Like this is a massive logistical enterprise. Yeah. Again, I'm going to be so honest with you. So how it led up to this, that point, you're right. And this is all within the book. So I started, you know, I used to swim sort of, you know, nationally and internationally, but I'm built like a hobbit. So, you know, my coach was just like, Ross, unless you're a fireplug, like you're super strong, but you don't cut the physique of the typical endurance athlete. Like you super jacked and compact like a wrestler, right? Or like an MMA fighter or something. It's true. Yeah. So my coach was just like,

look, you know, it's not going to work. You know, you're not going to make, you know, the Olympic squad certainly. So you played water polo though, primarily. So then they said, yeah, you know, like you said, you're a bit more like a wrestler. Why don't you try water polo? So I ended up doing that. But then kind of lost my way a little bit and found I wasn't really training for anything. Good friend of mine, who's absolutely fine now, he was diagnosed with cancer at the time. And the Teenage Cancer Trust were amazing. Back in the UK, for those who don't know, if you're a teenager and you're diagnosed with cancer, you're either treated in the children's ward or the elderly ward.

There's not really anywhere in between. So seeing these specialist wards that were built for certainly my friend, it was amazing seeing how it helped his rehab. So I wanted to do something to raise money. People said, look, Ross, why don't you run a marathon? I said, people have done that. And they said, okay, why don't you run two marathons?

I was like, again, people have done that. And somebody just said, why don't you run a marathon, pull in a car? And I was like, that's a great idea. So- How old were you? That was four years ago. It wasn't that long ago, yeah. 29.

And how long after you kind of wrapped your water polo career? About five years. So there was that period of five years where I found I was training in the gym with no specific purpose. You know, I was kind of, I was training, I was fit, but there wasn't really that, you know, driving. And training other people. Yeah. Yeah. Which I enjoyed. And I almost was trying to help them fulfill their purpose. Um, I was really lucky as well. And this was kind of the, the principles of the book in that I was kind of bouncing around like this sporting nomad. I'd go down to Brunel University and train a speed with Linford Christie, you know,

a hundred meter Olympic champion. And then I would then go back to Brunel University and train uh speed with Linford Christie you know 100 meter Olympic champion then I would then go back to Lincolnshire I'd train strength with with Jeff Capes two times world's strongest man and then up to Leeds and I'd train with Andy Bolton first guy to deadlift a thousand pounds so I was bouncing around and then I kind of thought to myself what would be amazing is is if you applied the the speed principles of of Linford Christie, the plyometric training, and then took the strength training of Andy Bolton and Jeff Capes to produce this hybrid, powerful athlete. And when you look, going off on a slight tangent here, but when you look at Andy Bolton, first time he ever deadlifted a thousand pounds, you'll notice that he kind of

performs three bends with his knees before he actually deadlifts. And I remember I quizzed him. I said, Andy, why, why do you do that? Is it a ritual? Is it a superstition? And he said, no, you familiar with Verkhoshansky's depth jump. I said, yeah, but what does that have to do with this? And again, for those listening, Verkhoshansky, one of the greatest strength and conditioning coaches ever, he found, this is during the sort of Soviet Union strength and conditioning days ever he found this is during the sort of soviet union strength and conditioning days he found that um jumping from a platform landing so there's an eccentric contraction in the legs would then produce a more powerful concentric contraction basically if me and you now rich said okay what's your best box jump and you just jumped

concentric contraction jumped onto the box um He found that by landing first and then jumping, there's that storage of elastic energy, that kinetic energy that you can jump higher. Andy was essentially doing that when he was lifting the bar on a deadlift. So those knee bends was the same speed principles that Verkhoshansky was using for some of his speed-based athletes. So Andy Bolton had taken a speed principle but applied it to strength right and it was just muddying the water in this this hybrid approach

and um i suppose to come back to the world's strongest marathon that was almost the theory behind that that i sort of sat there wanting to do something for charity but at the same time so many people said strength and stamina can't coexist so So this goes back to Robert Hickson's theory on concurrent training that you basically if you if you try and train for two things in the same session, you dilute the potency of the stimuli. So what he means by that is you're not really sending a clear cellular signal to your body to adapt to either strength or speed. Your body says, well, give us a clear adaptation here. And that was why I wanted to kind of prove that strength and stamina, so pulling a 1.4 ton car

could be done under these endurance conditions. Right, so you have these principles around strength, principles around speed, you're merging them. But the big question mark is now you got to throw endurance into that equation too. And traditional conventional wisdom would dictate that you're either an endurance athlete or you're a strength athlete. Certainly we're all on the spectrum, you know, in between those two things, anybody who's an athlete. But you're going to find your

specialty, you know, on one end of that spectrum or the other. And what's unique and different about you is you're incredibly strong, but you're also able to do these ultra endurance feats that I think put you in a very unique original place as an athlete. Yeah, I think it is. But also I think a lot of people are capable of that. And that was certainly what I wanted to make clear in the book. You're in a word to almost debunk this idea. Yeah. That you're one or the other. as ever to exist he was he was a rugby player incredibly strong i remember uh back at the english institute of sport when they first basically if you had a sport and you weren't probably quite gonna make it they'd say hey you know rich you're a certain build like come over

here and try this sport and they'd sort of juggle you around and that's what they did with steve redgrave they said you know you're really strong and you've got this amazing vo2 you know you can row like a horse but you're not that good at rugby so just this is a rowing machine come over here and try this and again steve ingham who's a friend of mine head of physiology at the institute of sport at the time says he never forgets that the very first time he taught steve redgrave to to olympic lift and they said okay this is this is a clean and jerk okay so you there disappear under the bar, speed of movement. And he basically just upright rode, you know, like 160 and just went like that. And they were like, well, no, that's wrong, but you're that strong.

And I think he then went on to prove that, yes, strength and stamina can coexist. But even looking at strongman training, Bill Kazmaier, powerlifter huge advocate of of cardiovascular training certainly for capillary density recovery you start looking at um current uh strongman as well brian shaw uh was a basketball player uh jeff capes people don't understand that he was a decent fell runner as well at 24 stone he was fell running um so when you start looking at maris pudzianowski as well martial arts background uh karate if i'm not mistaken so when you start looking at Mariusz Pudzianowski as well, martial arts background, karate, if I'm not mistaken. So when you start looking through back through time, you actually start to understand. And it's really nice when people say, oh, Ross, it's quite unique what you're doing.

I'm like, no, because, you know, history and success leaves clues and you only have to look back to go, wow. Oh, OK. It's something that the strongest men in the world realize the benefit of of cardio, respiratory training, muscular endurance training. But somewhere along the line, and I believe we talk about it in the book, but Nassim Taleb, a famous economist, nothing to do with fitness. But he said, you know, as humans facing limited knowledge, always resort to prescribed ideas and narratives. And what he means by that is we like to look at people and say, OK, you're an endurance athlete. Okay. You, you're short and stocky. Okay. You're a strength athlete, but we don't like it when those worlds merge. Cause you know, we, we know what, what box am I going to put you in now? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. But I look at you and I go, well, if you spent a year, like losing a lot of your mass, you might've had an easier time with this swim. You

know what I mean? Like I, I, I would imagine you're cramping up in the shoulders and then the lats in a way that you might've avoided if you were, if you were a little bit leaner. And that, that's, what's interesting. So I took the argument and this is all theory, this is all theory, but on the great British swim, to use that as an example, a lot of people said that, you know, just lose some muscle mass. You're going to have a nicer time through the water. And I was like, yes. I gotta go now. I don't have two swim to use that as an example um a lot of people said that you know just lose some muscle mass you're gonna have a nicer time through the water and i gotta go now i don't have two years to do that and i was like look i understand what you're saying and that's that's conventional sports science completely understand that um but no one's ever swum around great britain so we don't know what the ideal body type is. And then I started to say things like, so for instance,

um, and, and, and, and worth noting, I mean, I've got many friends who are amazing swimmers. I mean, I know, you know, that was your background. I've seen you swim you as an example for those listening, you know, when you swim, it looks like a dolphin. It's, it's perfect. Again, Liam Tankock, friend of mine, 50 meter world record on a backstroke. He's it's, he just cuts through the water. Me, you know, I look like a chubby, hairy whale, you know, and I'm kind of swimming and people are like, that doesn't look quite right. But I always say my superpower, I suppose, my swimming superpower is in 157 days, I never had a single day off. I wasn't sick. I could swim, you know, 12 hours a day was fine. And even eating as well, people said,

you're gonna turn up looking like Tom Hanks from Castaway. It doesn't work that way though. No, and that was it. I started 92 kilos, finished 102. Well, because also with the cold water, all the signals to the body are, you're trying to kill me and I need to survive, so it's gonna hold on to all of that.

And you look at the best cold water, open water swimmers and they all put on tons of weight. They look, you know, they have to be, you have to have that subcutaneous fat to keep you warm. Like if you leaned out too much, that could have buried you. You would have froze to death. Absolutely. And I think as well, even then looking at, yes, when you start looking at weight-bearing sports and you look at your power-to-weight ratio, because running is essentially just a bodyweight exercise. It's just a series of successive jumps. So when you look at that, and this is something we did with the Royal Marines, a lot of research there looking at weighted carries, and they found that just adding one kilo of extra weight, just in a backpack it's effect on pulmonary ventilation lactic thresholds are time to fatigue um even gait analysis how you run it no longer became a run as soon as you added one kilo of weight it started to alter everything stride pattern everything um but that's running in something like swimming and i'm actually going to pose this sort of question to you rich that could it be argued because was my theory, could it be argued that with

a higher muscle mass, if you're buoyant, if you've got a good technique, with an extra muscle mass, could it be argued that you're storing more muscle glycogen? Could it be argued that as a stronger athlete, you're able to, especially in 40 knots of wind, 10 foot waves, that you're able to hold in you know 40 knots of wind 10 foot waves that you're able to hold an efficient uh sort of movement pattern you know you're not necessarily going to get hit with waves that was my theory when started i would still like to see a quicker swimmer do it than me but that was my theory and without taking a day off from you know my shoulders were fine uh you know didn't have a day off.

If you were to miss one tide, that could be 15 miles. Right. So, you see how it didn't become about speed. It just became about resilience. Right. Perpetual motion. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's an interesting theory. I don't know. I mean, if you look at the best swimmers in the world, the 50 freestylers are 7 feet tall and 220. Yeah. And the 1,500-meter swimmers are like 135 pounds. Yeah. You know, so it's sort of nature sorts that out, but where do you meet in the middle? And certainly that doesn't necessarily apply to the kind of thing that you're doing.

And look, you're the only one who did it. So, you know what I mean? So what can we learn from that? You know, I think it's, I think, I know you've been, I want to get into like, I know you're already having all these physiological evaluations on your physique and all of that. We'll get into that in a minute, but let's work our way up to it. I mean, you mentioned the world's strongest marathon. So that was really the first thing that you did that like put you on the map where you

essentially, you like pulled a mini Cooper for a marathon. So that was really the first thing that you did that like put you on the map where you essentially, you like pulled a mini Cooper for a marathon. Yeah. I mean, what the fuck? Explain this to me. Yeah. That was, um, took 19 hours. You know, I was seven hours in thinking, what are you doing? It was, and, and and and that was actually another one as well that i just enjoy going back to what i was talking about i just enjoy having a specific goal like i think if you're training and you haven't got a clear adaptation in your mind i often say in a single tweet you know or a sentence if if you're able to say what you're doing then then again going back to hickson's theory concurrent training if you're able to say in a single sentence what you're training for then it's clear enough right but so often you can go into the gym and you can stop somebody on the treadmill and say hey what

are you training for what are you training today and they'll say okay i'm gonna do a mile on here and then my friends over there they're gonna squat and i'm gonna do leg press and then i'm gonna rover but i've just seen some uh they're doing box jumps over there so i'm gonna go do plyometric i'm like whoa that's all that's... There's no why. Exactly. Yeah. That's your body, that cellular signal that you're sending to your body is so diluted, you're not going to adapt. You know, yeah, there's the argument that, you know, nothing is better, you know, anything is better than nothing. And that is an adaptation. So if you were to turn around, but again, that would be in a single sentence, just saying, I'm working on work capacity, doing general physical preparedness, you know, something like that.

But even that's very specific. So to come back to the marathon, I think with that, it was just exploring this concept of can you do the two? And for me, it was quite fortunate because I think to run a marathon, pulling a car, you just have to run marathons, pulling cars. Like it was, it was that, it was that. Did you have a rope? Like what, what was attached? How were you? Was it a harness? What were you attached to? It was a harness. Yeah. It was a harness. And, uh, uh, my girlfriend at first, she was just sort of just in the driving seat and we were going around the countryside in, in Cheshire and England and

the farmers would just be like, oh, goes again just for training yeah yeah how do you deal with the downhills well i well this is the thing so silverstone race circuit who gave us the keys um to stowe circuit and they said look have it for as long as you need uh to do the marathon day so i was training a lot there at first i thought it flat, which I can tell you it's definitely not. I can tell you every lump at Stowe Circuit if you hit one. So if it's relatively flat, like I said, it was 1.4 tons, the car. Once you overcome that initial inertia,

it's not that bad. Right, because you have the momentum of the car. So you're not really pulling, you're not pulling the full weight of the car. It's just getting it going or anytime you hit a hill. Yeah, and then certainly just basic physics as well. So you're not really pulling, you're not pulling the full weight of the car. It's just getting it going or anytime you hit a hill. Yeah. And then certainly just basic physics as well. So I mean, I think I was up to 115 kilos, which, you know, at five foot nine, I was kind of wide as a wasp.

And it was just. You have a low center of gravity. Yeah. And it was just an eating competition. That's all it was. Yeah. And was that in the context of a race or you just set the course and went out and did it just yes set the course yeah and uh and and for me that like you said that started

everything but looking it was accidental i never intended to but looking how you would almost create the not necessarily the perfect athlete but how would you build someone's body from the ground up and one thing that i think a lot of people don't understand is that quite often you have to train to train. And what I mean by that is this idea of work capacity or certainly something the Soviet athletes of old used to do. For instance, imagine I'm the coach and I'm handed a young rich role and your parents bring you to me and then they go, right, coach him. I don't know if you're going to be tall, short. I don't know if you're going to be strong. I'm kind of looking, I'm like, I don't know. So what we do is general physical preparedness, which is just these real, like basic movement patterns. We run, we jump, we climb, things like that. We're not specializing.

The reason being you're trying to build this kind of template for what may come. Yeah, yeah, just exactly that. And work capacity as well. Your body's ability to perform and positively tolerate training of a given intensity and duration. So by doing that and giving you that base, that work capacity, all of a sudden there's this young rich girl who starts growing up and go, oh, hang on. He's getting quite tall. Oh, he seems to be quite good, quite good at endurance. Then we can start throwing, you know, five kilometer swims at you, but you have that work capacity to tolerate it. And I think with the, the world's strongest

marathon with, with the car, that was just pure work capacity. And I ended up calling it horsepower programming because it was just this idea that, you know, so often we look at the cheater, you know, being the quickest, you know, so often we look at the cheater, you know, being the quickest, you know, we look at the elephant of being the strongest. And I always think like, what about the workhorse? You know, the workhorse is going to help you plow the field. The Clydesdale or the, yeah, he gets no credit. He gets none. So that was, that was that. And I think from from that a lot of other things including that the great british swim came from that but it was work capacity that i think was the it's so often underappreciated but but that certainly helped with the great british swim

because i was able to keep getting in the water you know 12 hours a day tide after tide and it the determining factor wasn't what's my swimming technique, you know, what's my hand positioning, do I bilaterally breathe, you know, none of that, you know, it was just, do you know what, Ross, the tide's running at two knots. If you can just put your face in the water and sit in there, you know, you're going to make six miles. You just get in.

Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So after that marathon, was that around the time where you started writing for all these publications? Like, I think you reached out, we connected years ago when you were like writing for GQ and all these publications. So you kind of like got some notoriety around that and started sort of being a journalist, right, on fitness-related stuff. Yeah, like, yeah, I think a lot of people saw, you know, what I was doing and it was

an unconventional approach but then backed by a lot of science and all of these theories. Like I said, it's almost like you're, you know, this philosopher of fitness and that's certainly why, you know, I started following you in the first place, which was ages ago, you know, mutual friend of ours, Tim Chief. And that was, I met Tim actually from, I did the world's longest rope climb. And so after that, it was a- Right, climbing the elevation of Everest on a rope, right? That was such a bad idea. My hands have only just forgiven me for that one. But I met Tim at that. And that's when Tim actually later invited me to do toughest obstacle race in Sweden. Then we got a taxi across town and then ran the Stockholm marathon. And actually, you know, Tim was the one who said, look, I want you to do this.

If you don't mind, because you know how sort of empathetic and kind Tim was. Tim was like, I would love it if you did it vegan, if you did it plant-based. And, um, and again, that was something that once led me down that route, you know, and, and it was something where I took that even on, on the Great British Swim. Now I can't claim to be a vegan, but certainly throughout the Great British Swim, I mean, the, the record I'm most proud of 649 bananas. Yeah. That's a lot of bananas. Well, you're not going to be able to throw down cheeseburgers, you know? No, this is it. So it was, it's, it's like I said, accidentally, I seem to have picked up these tools and tips and tricks and techniques

that led me to the Great British Swim. And yeah, I think starting with work capacity, even enhanced, I think, with the world's longest rope climb, when you start looking at what that taught me is just- How did that work? Like you were just, so you were in a climbing gym or you just had a rope inside a indoor facility and you just-

Well, it was outdoor. That was the mistake. So yeah, it was outdoor at Hertfordshire, so North London. And again, it was around 19 hours that one took. And what that taught me, though, was just incredibly efficient biomechanics when considering an endurance event. And I think so often that's overlooked, that if you want to move faster or further, you have to move more efficiently. Certainly with the rope climb if i was too

reliant on my biceps like you see a lot of people a lot of uh you know people learning whether it's crossfit rock climbing you'll understand that that all of a sudden i mean you're gonna tear something and it was uh that that really taught me to to just move more efficiently if you're going to sustain that sort of work capacity over that long, long time. And that was something I think with the world's strongest marathon, I was able to almost just get through on a mild amount of strength and a lot of stubbornness. Whereas I realized with the world's longest rope climb, you can be the most stubborn guy in the world, but, but something could tear, you know, a tendon will give up. So yeah, that was the progression from that I felt.

Yeah, because so much strength is involved. I mean, when you're looking at swimming, like in the great British swim, it's all about efficiency. It's all about modulating your effort. Like you can't go too hard, but you can't go too easy and you gotta ride the currents and look at the tides and make sure that all of that is dialed in. And it's about exerting yourself

to the least extent possible while getting the maximum amount of distance covered every day. That is exactly it. Pulling yourself up on a rope is very anaerobic. Yeah. Yeah. And that was it. It was trying. The same with the swim. And this is, yeah, it's been purely, this is like therapy. Thanks for the expression. I've only just heard that. Though we were saying beforehand, I was like, you just finished this swim and you immediately went to see Brian Rose at London Real the next day.

You're doing BBC and there's all this press. And I was like, you haven't had five minutes. But you get to process it because you don't have an objective perspective on what you've accomplished because it was literally a couple of days ago that you were in the water. Yeah. And I think that's it just speaking to you now. It is, yeah, it is dawning on me that that was the accidental route that almost took me, took me to the great British swim in some ways. And I think had I not done the, the events before, would I have had the

work capacity of the world's strongest marathon? Probably not. If I hadn't done the, the rope climb, would I have understood movement efficiency? I don't know. So there was all those things that I ended up picking up along the way. Yeah. And it's not like you just jumped in and did this swim. I mean, you worked up to it. You did a number of swims where you're pulling trees and logs and you had this swim where you attempted to swim from, what was it, Martinique to St. Lucia? That was right, yeah. Yeah. That was a fun idea. Pulling a tree, you know, and you did this triathlon with a tree, right?

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you were cutting your teeth along the way to get ready for something like this. Yeah, yeah. That's how it felt. And that, again, came from Nevis, which is going to become uh certainly has ambitions to become one of the world's first carbon neutral islands and they got in contact and said you know look we saw what you did with the the world's strongest marathon and you seem to have a strange skill for sort of strength and stamina um would you come out here and do something we

have an amazing triathlon you would love it by the way it was amazing and uh they said would you just carry something heavy somebody around the dinner table just said, what about a tree? I said- Yeah, well, the Mini Cooper will probably sink, so that's not gonna work. This is it. So someone said, look, you know, what about a tree?

I went, triathlon. Everyone was like, that's genius, it's stuck. So a few months later, I'm there at the start line of this triathlon, figuring out how to attach a tree to my trunks. The gun went, the race started. And I found I was not bad because obviously, you know, the tree floats. There's drag, but it floats. And I actually found I was not bad. I ended up overtaking a few people. The competitive sort of element in me kicked in. I remember

looking going, you've got this ross you're on for a podium finish so i started swimming my friends are going slow down slow down and then i got out and everybody overtook me on the bike and the ride i was awful how did you drag a tree while you're riding a bike interesting so honestly this was really because i didn't know i was trying to put it down my like trousers i was like putting it down my top and then the uh i was with the royal marines and they said to me why don't you top flat it and i said what what's top flatting and they just said that's how we carry our missiles so if you imagine like there's the there's the kind of bag and then you just put the the tree through like that and you just

flap the top of the bag over the top if that makes makes sense. And then you just tie it. And then, so that's, so while everyone was on the transition on the bike, I was tying up the tree to a marine backpack and, um, and then, and then, and then off I went and then the run was just kind of, okay. The, the bike was, there was a few moments. How did you not wipe out? I don't know. It wasn't until afterwards they said, you have no idea how close you were to buses and things. Right. Well, and then you're like, this tree thing's got legs. Where else can I take this? Right? And then the idea was you were going to try to swim the English Channel with a tree trunk.

That was true. Yeah. So, it was Kerry M. Payne, a friend of mine, she's a double world champ, 10K swimmer. And she and she said look you're quite good at the swim with the tree why don't we just use this tree swim thing there's something going on here she did so honestly so i was like okay yeah no i think you're right i think that's my i think that's my niche and then she was like okay let's run with this so we did uh i rung up the the english channel obviously it has certain sort of notoriety for any english swimmers i'm gonna swim the english channel with a tree. And you're right. I rang up the Doverport authority and I said, Hey guys, I'm just wondering if I can swim across the

English channel. And they said, absolutely. No problem. We'll send you the, the paperwork. I said, fantastic, fantastic. Thank you. Oh, just one thing before you go. And they said, Oh, what's that? And I wish I'd recorded this conversation. And I said, what's that? And I said, Oh, I, I, I want to do it with a tree attached to my trunks. And the guy on the other end of the phone just went, well, no, you're not allowed to. And I was like, well, why not? And he said, because you're not a registered vessel. And I said, oh, well, how do I become a registered vessel? And then he hung up the phone on me. So I still don't know how to become a registered vessel. They lock that stuff down, right? You can't just show up with a boat and a crew and just do it. I mean, would they just like arrest you or like, why can't you just

go and say, all right, well, that's fine. I'm outside of your registration process, but I'm going to do it anyway. This is it. but no, it's real. I mean, Dover's so busy. And again, I was so naive. I was like, okay, fine, fine. And then the Caribbean has more relaxed rules about tree-based sports. And they said, come out here. So I was like, okay. Martinique, St. Lucia, 40 kilometers. And you're right. So attempted being the main word there. It was 40 kilometers from point to point from St. Lucia to Martinique. So I tried swimming with the, I set off with the tree. And I was five kilometers from there. I could see the lights.

I could see cars on the road. That's how close I was. And then the currents turned and I ended up going backwards and it was just a real lesson a real humbling in in the laws of the ocean I mean there was there was one moment where I just thought I'm gonna swim I'm gonna swim hard I had my head down and they said look Ross you're in a really bad current you've got to swim hard to get out of that I said okay no problem I swam hard for three hours just shoulders burning full of light to swim as hard as I can and then I popped my head up and I said, guys, how are we doing? And they just said, Ross, like, you haven't moved.

You've been in the same spot. And that right there in that moment, I realized, again, work capacity from the pulling cars around race circuits. And then car-based sports. And then rope-based sports taught me movement efficiency. And then I thought, I've got this all dialed in. And then I did the triathlon, so I knew how to attach a tree to my trunks. So I was like, look, I've got this. And then it was just this final lesson that I felt I almost had to learn.

Yeah, that nature always wins. And I would imagine going into the Great British Swim, you're thinking, well, there's going to be instances where I'm going to be stuck in a current like that. And what if it doesn't change? How is that going to affect what you're doing? And suddenly you're doing everything in your power and you're doing nothing but moving backwards. There's a lot of that. And I think that was really nice of the whole Great British Swim, the way that we documented it on the entire vlog series. And certainly on social media, we had two storms this summer and a lot of people were saying,

oh yeah, get out there and show the storm who's boss and go and swim through it. Yeah, and I was like, yeah, yeah, okay, we're gonna go and try and swim through a storm and everyone was like, yeah, yeah, you're a beast, you're a beast. But I was like, no, no, no, but you don't swim through a storm. The way that you beat a storm is everyone's like yeah yeah you're a beast you're a beast but i was like no no no but you don't swim through a storm the way that you beat a storm is you hide you hide hope that you

know it maybe lets you for a brief moment and if it lets you then you go out and you're allowed to swim you don't beat a storm and i think that was really quite nice because with the great british swim it took the the sport of swimming and ended up taking it somewhere else in the certainly cape roth around the the top of scotland i mean you you don't take boats around there in a storm you just it's uh there's certain areas that the giant whirlpool um sunk so many ships so there was this the entire way around having learned my lesson from saint lucia i just had this sheer respect that as as good as i thought i was or as good as we as a team thought we were doing it was just like the ocean can just decide that this swim ends the weather is now

starting to get more scottish we're going to be less able to swim whenever we want and more dependent on weather windows well yeah 20 to 6 so he's been swimming for yeah best part of four hours mostly in the dark raining miserable and and not that warm tonight's a really good example of why the night swims are so important yeah that respect is humility. There's no way you're going to conquer the elements. You have to sort of surf them and adapt to them. But if you go into it thinking you're going to do battle and win, you're going to get crushed. And the greatest athletes that I've had the opportunity to spend time with as a result of this podcast have a deep, profound respect and humility when it comes to the elements, whether it's Alex Honnold. I just

had Killian Jornet do the podcast a couple days ago. And both of those guys who are, you know, in my mind, two of the greatest athletes walking the planet right now. I mean, what they're capable of doing is just mind-blowing, but they're so humble and they're so grounded because they spend so much time in the elements where nature is the deciding factor and whether they live or die, the only way to be successful and to do what they do is to be profoundly humble about what they're attempting to accomplish. Yeah. I missed Killing. He did his Bob Graham. That's right. And Beat, you know, for those who don't know the- Explain the Bob Graham round,

because it's pretty epic. He just did that recently. Yeah. I mean, I was at sea, but all of my friends are fell runners. So there was just all over my social media and everyone was just saying it was incredible how, for those who don't know, the graham is a famous fell race in the lake district in keswick and it's so hard to explain but there's a there's a a hall in keswick so this really english you know northern town is it's called moot hall and if you're standing there and you're in your running uh you know gear and you're looking at your watch and you're you've got one hand on moot hall and you've got another one looking at your watch, runners will know that you're about to do your Bob Graham. People will come over, people will sort of tip their cap

to you. People will come over, they'll shake your hand and just, they'll know what you're about to go through. And then they'll say, good luck. And there's just this. Well, there's all this proper British etiquette that surrounds it. Essentially, it's a very long running race that takes you all over all of these fells, which are basically mountains in the countryside. And the rules dictate that if you're gonna do it, you have to have people accompany you on each fell. And at least I think one of the people has to be somebody who's already done the whole Bob Graham.

Like it's all vetted and like there's all this stuff that gets packed into it. Yeah, that's exactly it. And this guy said this stuff that gets packed into it yeah right yeah that's exactly it and this guy said this did it in 19 i don't know 30 or 13 or something very long time ago yeah right billy bland yeah and no one has got because you could be the greatest runner fell running is completely different and you just touched upon it there rich which is just like you could be the best runner but unless you know on a descent instance, you could take completely the wrong route, but there might be a sheep trail just to your right.

And if you know that sheep trail, then that's going to be a minute you make up or scree running where you just, you basically like, you ski down slate. You know, you could make a hundred meters in three seconds if you know what you're doing there. And yeah, this record had stood for so long and the thing with fell running as well is is there's just this deep sense of respect

you know and tradition so much tradition yeah yeah and it all started when bob graham who uh who lived in keswick just sort of turned around to all of his friends he said you know i think i can do i believe don't quote me on this but it's 44 peaks in keswick i can do 44 peaks in under 24 hours and everyone said no that's impossible he said i think i can do it and he did it in something like 23 hours so to do your bob graham you have to do the course in 24 hours if you don't you haven't done the bob graham basically so that's that element of touching moot hall and when you leave that you must be back at moot hall all that you go for 44 peaks you know and you have to be back at um you know, midnight if you start at midnight. And Killian did it.

And there was just, like you said, such a profound respect from him for tradition and the way he did it. And even Billy, actually, Bland, so his record. Billy was there. He shook his hand afterwards. And that was amazing. And he broke the record by like an hour. Yeah. Yeah. It was incredible. But that respect for nature, for sport, for tradition.

Yeah. Just to echo what you said about Killian and Alex Honnold, which I need to watch his film actually coming out. I've missed all of this at sea. It'll blow your mind. I know. You were at sea. And I was in London when you were in the early days of the swim, I was bummed because I wanted to meet you. And I was trying to figure out a way if there was a way that I could get out to the boat, but I was like, I was juggling too many things. But anyway, all right.

So you do this, you have this attempt in the Caribbean, you fall short, but you know, there's still unfinished business. You go off, you write this book, world's fittest book. And this idea of circumnavigating Great Britain by yourself in the water starts to percolate up. Yeah. Yeah. That was, it came around after the St. Lucia Martinique. I finished, around after the Saint Lucia Martinique, I finished, I just wanted to know that outside of the variables of nature, what could I do? Something just intrinsic. I just needed to almost prove something to myself. And so I rung up friends of mine at the Royal Marines

down in Devon, south of England. And I just said, guys, I need to just, I can't explain it. I just need to come and swim for 48 hours i just need to i just need to see what i can swim in 48 hours non-stop and they got it and they just sort of went okay fine ross come down this weekend we'll all camp out on the side of the pool because you need a lifeguard we'll take it in turns uh and stay up all night and do shifts and you can swim for 48 hours i was like thanks guys so i turned up i put all my food on the side this huge picnic and i just swam for 48 hours um i got out i can't remember what i did 150 160 where was this uh this was at the raw marines training base uh down in limestone and i finished you know i got out i had uh i had trench foot because basically i've been in the

water for so long and then i was sitting there and I remember a good friend of mine, Ollie, and one of the other officers came over to me and they just said to me, uh, what are you doing? Uh, one of the old guys, amazing mustache. And he looks at me and he just goes, you boy. I was like, hello. He goes, uh, what are you doing? I went, I've just finished a swim. And he goes, what are you training for? And I didn't know at the time I was still searching for that. That's something. And I said, I don't know. I said, I might, I might train for the world's longest current neutral swim or maybe. And he just paused and he sipped his tea. And then he looked at me and he just goes, that just sounds a bit lame. I was like, oh, thanks. He goes, do you know what you need to do? He goes,

you just need to man up and swim around Great Britain. That's what you need to do. So I was like, all right, fine. I ended up speaking to a few people, you know, putting the fillers out there in the sailing community. You know, Red Bull, who had been amazing on the St. Lucia swim, said, you know, look, if you're serious about this, then we could look at documenting it. And before I knew it, June the 1st came. And actually to go back to what you asked before, how long was this in the planning? I'll be 100% honest with you. Not that long. It was, I spoke to some people in the sailing community, Matt, the captain, who was amazing. He said, look, I've always wanted to sail around Great Britain. You know,

maybe this is a unique opportunity to to merge the two we spoke to the met office we looked at like weather reports and again for those who don't know like britain is renowned for having very short windows of a summer it's like the weather's so unpredictable and i think most people know that oh yeah right it's just so we we kind of sat there and we just thought, it's saying that we're going to have a good summer. And that's- If there's a possibility of this going down, like this is the moment.

It's exactly it. And I forget who said it now, but there was one of my favorite quotes is just jump and build your wings on the way down. And there was definitely an element of that, that I just said, look, you know, how do you train for this? Well, you don't train for swimming 12 hours a day for 157 days. You just go for it and you adapt whilst you go along. A friend of mine, actually, Charlie, who held the solo Atlantic rowing record, I spoke to him about it as well. I said, do you train for this? Like, do you have to start

practicing biphasic sleep where you do six hours on, six hours off? And he just, he kind of laughed at me and he said, no. And I said, why? And why and he said well you don't practice that you don't you know and it always resonated he said it's like if if you're pregnant you don't practice sleep deprivation you wait till the baby arrives and then you do it then and that was really you know the deciding factor i was just like yeah you when am i going to be ready for this i I have the work capacity, you know, from the car, car marathon, from the rope climb. I now understand and have a deep, profound respect for the laws of the ocean. And Matt was incredible, the captain. So I was now speaking to the right people. And, you know, with the Royal Marines and Loughborough University, everything was in place. So I just thought you can plan, you can do this for it, but you might not get the summer.

We then ended up having the best summer in britain that we have for 40 years that was kind of what everyone was saying we haven't had a summer like this in 40 years and even arriving in scotland you know scotland is renowned like i said giant whirlpools cape rough renowned as like this crazy headland that you won't get boats around if if it doesn't want you to pass and um we just we managed to just sneak around i remember the once we went past after um storms like 50 knot winds just going into the side of west scotland so we just sneaked around and even at that point when everyone said wow you've done the south coast and now you've done one side we knew it was far from over um because we still had so far to go and then we still had two storms to survive. So,

it was just the whole way around. It was just... It's so bananas. I mean, I remember on social media when you guys were celebrating when you reached the top of Scotland and thinking like, you know, it was this massive accomplishment. And I'm like, this dude's halfway done, he's only halfway done. You know? Yeah. In psychological terms, you know, there's Land's End with a massive hurdle, that was kind of like, okay, we're a quarter of the way there.

But yeah, getting around this one, this pretty much marks a halfway mark in my mind. So how does it feel, Mr. Reggie? Weird. We were just saying that, weren't we, Matt? That we've been talking about Mulligan Tide like since, oh my God, since Sidma, since Lime Bay. You know, yesterday, our first proper gale of the trip.

You know, severe gale force 9 in the forecast. We got scuttled off to Hyde for a night. And then this morning it was kind of completely shrouded in mist. On the whole Great British Swim it just feels like, just getting slammed by wind and waves. And we were just seeking refuge out in the harbour and then we've kind of come out today thought right we need to get to Mulliken Tyre, we need to get to halfway and in a weird way clouds are cleared sunshine's come out it's like somebody's going there you go well done guys well done Mulliken Tyre. You know when it sunk in for me? It was actually bang on halfway.

So it was Mull of Kintyre, so going into Scotland. We worked out it was about halfway. And then we went through the Inner Hebrides, which is stunning. But it's this Corrie of Echin that I spoke about before. It's a giant whirlpool. And this really, this was the moment where I realised it's just, I'm going to have to fight the whole way around and there's no easy miles i remember matt the captain turned to me and there

was just this sense everyone was so serious on the boat and they're all brilliant sailors matt's been sailing 40 years and we always joke and we try and keep a good sense of humor but this one particular swim there was just silence on the boat and everyone was just a bit like wow okay this is this particular swim this particular tide is different and i turned to matt and matt said to me look um i'm going to be honest with you korea vecan giant whirlpool and it got like he even got a bit weird we're speaking to local fishermen and they were saying yeah the korea vecan that's that's renowned the hag goddess governs the the korea vecan i was like what vacuum i mean the hag goddess it's like harry

potter honestly yeah and then we're gonna watch out for the kelpie i was like what is that kelpie it's a water spirit but he told me so and he was telling me about like kelpies that like kind of a shapeshifters like mermaids and they'll lure you to like sailors to their death so i'm kind of like what okay fine so we're there and matt says okay uh hag goddesses and kelpie aside let's get through the quarry beckham he said i'm gonna need you i know you've been swimming for 70 days up until this point you know i know you're chafing i know you're in a bad way but i need you to swim like this is a race i need you to just swim for six hours come out of the blocks i want you to treat this like the english channel we need like 20 miles you

need to just get clear how far offshore were you um we were from either side we're probably i don't know it's quite narrow that bit probably 10 miles yeah but it was more if something went wrong and i was disappearing down the plug hole that was the curry so there's no way you could go around it no no i mean that would have added so many more miles to it so that was the risk it was like look and also as well we knew that the summer was kind of ending. So if we went the long way around, we wouldn't get around the top of Cape Roth. There's all these things to consider.

And he said to me, okay, Ross, I need you to swim hard for it. I said, okay, fine. And the sports scientist in me was like, okay, pacing strategies, nutritional strategies, recovery strategies. Mother nature in the ocean doesn't care about that. I need to swim around this giant whirlpool. So I did. And I swam six hours as hard as I could i was swimming and then i remember about three hours

in i got stung by a jellyfish but this particular sting it just felt different it was just like searing into my skin and i couldn't explain it but i knew that the whirlpool was there so i saw i had another three hours to swim i looked and i was swimming i was swimming swimming as hard as i could and this this pain like my left side of my face just went completely numb. My nose fell out with a few of the jellyfish yesterday that I accidentally swam into, or they swam into me. An entire team of jellyfish. My face was numb.

It was stinging so bad. It was just throbbing. Jellyfish. Really the pain is the best case scenario. Worst case scenario are itching as the toxins basically go around your body. They start attacking your nervous system. If it got you in the mouth, your airways can actually sort of start to close up which makes breathing a little bit difficult.

And also as well, just kind of muscles going into spasm and that's really where you have to sit there and assess whether it's kind of hospital type stings or you can carry on stinging it's just a little bit painful stings my feud with the jellyfish continues and i'm told i've got the giant jellyfish of scotland to look forward to as well and i managed to swim for another two hours until it was unbearable and I popped my head up and I looked at Matt and I just said, Matt, I'm so sorry it's just like my face is killing, this jellyfish thing is different, it's searing into my skin. And Matt just looked down at me from the boat and he said, yes I know because the tentacles still

wrapped around your face and it had looped into my goggles. So I've been swimming for two hours wearing a jellyfish tentacle i pulled it off unthreaded it but then and i'll show you a picture later rich but my face was so swollen that my goggles wouldn't fit back to my face so i ended up putting them on but to seal the water i basically punched myself in the eyes so it would embed in my face oh my god so that that whole thing punched into my face get out get onto the boat exhausted shoulders in pieces like jellyfish stings and it was at that moment i remember i thought i'm only just over halfway and the tide changes in six hours and i've got to go and do that all over

again and that that was the reality that i think a lot of people looking on the the red bull tracker where people would see the progress they're like like, oh, you're doing amazing halfway. I'm like, oh, you don't know what that. You just had to get through. Those last 60 miles, last that. And then actually, and then after that, the next six miles, sorry, the next six hours was going to be a night swim as well.

So where you just keep getting stung by jellyfish because you can't see them. So it was that relentless. Are you going to keep getting in the water is what I mean about the determining factor wasn't leg kick, stroke rate, bilateral breathing. It was just like- Survival. Yeah. Survival is the best word. Yeah.

Was that the hardest part? What was the lowest moment? I think that was pretty low, but some of the things we couldn't even capture on camera, wetsuit chafing, for instance. Well, that like, all right, just pause for a second here, because that started to happen on your neck, like literally day one. Yeah. And you were sharing on social media what your neck looked like, and it was hamburger meat back there. And I was like, he's not going to make it. I mean, that will just bury you.

Yeah. How is he, because there's no way that you can recover from that. It's never gonna heal. You're right, yeah, you are right. I mean, you're gonna have, yeah, you must have a big scar back there. It's not too bad, can you see there? Like sort of a little bit on the side.

But that was, I mean, that was no small thing. It wasn't just like wetsuit rash. No. No. No. And I was like, you're on day one and you didn't figure out a way to sort this out. This is going to be a huge problem. My neck just kind of was basically bleeding. I was so stubborn. I just plowed on. I showed Matt. Matt starts hacking up the wetsuit and the team's looking going, oh my God, this is an Al Rinter.

It was a dark, dark moment, that start. Yeah, you're right. And that was it. I was very open about this as well, just saying I was very naive at the start, very naive. And then there was an element where it was taking an hour just to get me in the water. So it was like cream, Vaseline cream vaseline tape plaster wrapping it around my neck around my neck and then even we were putting a bin liner over the top and salataping

that to my neck just to try and keep it watertight it looked like you just duct taped the whole thing we went through so much duct tape in the end and but even the duct tape was tearing my skin because we were putting on you know twice a day you know so it was um looking back i mean it was we look back now and we laugh about it but at the time it was there was even times when you saw the swim and it was like having an open wound on your neck and you know that for 12 hours a day you've basically got to swim it's like kind of rubbing sandpaper into that open wound. And that's what you had to make peace with. But some of the stuff that wasn't even caught on camera was

trying to go to bed and sleep became so critical. But when I was trying to sleep, I'd wake up in the morning and the bedsheets would have fused to my neck. So I then had to just rip it off before I could then get back in the water. So it was, you're right. It was, it was so rough. That was, that was a dark moment, mainly because it was so early in. We managed to nurse it back to health. And I don't know how you did that. Just relentless. Like I said, it was taking an hour each time just to get in the water. And actually we were sacrificing swimming speed and mobility because I was swimming, you know,

with my neck completely taped up. So I could barely move my arms conventionally like I was trying to do just to swim. And again, it just became about, you're just in the trenches, Ross. This is like war. This isn't swimming. You just said it best there actually, Rich.

It was survival. It wasn't swimming. You just said it best there, actually, Rich. It was survival. It wasn't swimming like most people would think. We should probably explain what exactly this Great British Swim is so people can really wrap their heads around it. Essentially, I mean, how many miles is it or kilometers? 2000 miles of coastline, yeah. Essentially you're swimming the English Channel every single day for close to six months, basically.

That's the easiest way to describe it. But having to battle all kinds of crazy currents in order to succeed, you have a six-hour window each day where the tides are in your favor. And so you have to, basically, that's your window. So you got to make rain when the tides are in your favor. You get in and you swim six hours and then you sleep and then you get back in for another six hours. So you're doing this biphasic sleep situation where you're swimming in two six hour increments each day. Yeah. Is that right?

That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. And then that was all the theory, but then there were so many other variables, jellyfish, sighting, waves where the currents weren't necessarily so you're right there in theory uh six hours on six hours off where the currents are with you but across the bristol channel you're essentially swimming in a giant riptide where the currents are going across you so we had to zigzag all the way across to make it um to from from england to wales um and that was the thing that all theory just went out the window. And, and, and one thing that always resonated with me was again, actually with the Royal Marines before I left. And they said to me, Ross, you're an athlete. So you train to perform at your best

when you feel at your best, uh, we're Royal Marines. So we train to perform at our best when we feel at our worst. And it always stuck with me because never during the whole 157 days did I think I feel great I I feel I'm you know I'm not ill you know my shoulders feel good you know there was chafing there was you know salt tongue um that just there was always something wrong but ultimately you had to say am I going to get in the water or not and you really when you were so fatigued you know you have the cognitive functioning of like a five-year-old you literally just so for me it just constantly became about what was the limiting factor each day and and it really stripped you back to something quite primitive in that you would say, what is my limiting factor?

Are you cold? Yes. Are my feet blue? And they went a funny color. Yes. Are they going to fall off? No, I don't think so. Okay. Then you can get in and make two miles. And that was every day. What's your tongue like today, Ross? Parts of it are falling off because of salt water exposure. Okay. Is it going to kill you? No. Will it heal? I think so. Then get in the water.

That's exactly what Killian Jornet said when he was explaining his two runs up Everest. The first time he went up, he got diarrhea and he had some kind of food poisoning and he was throwing up and he just said, well, it's super uncomfortable, but am I going to die? No, I'm not going to die. So I'm just going to keep going. Yeah. You know, that like acclimation to discomfort. I mean, it's as simple as, you know, learning how to be comfortable while being uncomfortable.

Yeah, yeah. Comfort and discomfort, but at the highest level. Yeah. Comfort and discomfort, but at the highest level. Yeah. But I think most people are capable of that. And I posted, there was nothing more to do than think. So I was thinking about this the whole way around, that really this isn't a swimming competition.

It's just pure mental and physical fortitude. And that was what became great, certainly in the vlog series, that people saw this was an experiment in fortitude and not really swimming as such but it was that that in complete exhaustion i do think you you find the most honest version of yourself and i almost a liken to to expand upon what killian said there i almost like a liken it to like a feral dog you know like a dog will just fight to the bitter end when it knows you know that it's really up against it and i think so often when sports psychologists talk and they say you know where oh when you have to really dig deep think about your family and i'm like and then you think about your loved ones you know and i and i would argue that looking at almost maslow's hierarchy of needs where you look at warmth sleep food and then you move up and you start looking at almost Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where you look at warmth, sleep, food, and then

you move up and you start looking at, you know, social interactions, health, well-being, and you start to move up that hierarchy. It's almost like a sporting version of that in that, like, what's motivating you at that point? And, you know, I wasn't necessarily at some of those moments thinking about my family. It was like what Killian was saying. He's just like, all I'm concerned about right now is my bowels. You know, when he had diarrhea. Survival. Yeah. And I think it was the same with me. It was just like, what do I want right now? Do I want to make my family happy? And I was like, no, like, I just like, as much as I hope they don't listen to this, but I was just I just want food like I want warmth it was so like

I said primitive it strips you back to something incredibly feral you know and and it can be really powerful if you if you allow it but the moment when you're in that moment like with Killian and certainly with myself with the great resume if you start thinking about you know loved ones or you know how can you think make things are these the right goggles? Should I have picked the red ones? No, you don't care about that. It's what do you need to survive? I really like what you just said that it's kind of resonating with me because it was fight or flight, basically. If you have to distinguish between the mental challenge of accomplishing this versus the physical challenge? Like, how does that balance out? What does that pie chart look like?

Yeah, I think you need, you know, the physical component is almost that hardware, but the software makes everything sort of possible. And the whole way around, I spoke quite a lot about the central governor theory, Tim Noakes, who says that fatigue is an emotionally driven state where our mind tells our body to basically pull that physiological handbrake. So we would have all experienced this, say, you know, a marathon, you know, 16 miles in, you say, I cannot go on. You know, I can't put one foot in front of the other. It's impossible. I'm done. I'm done. But then all of a sudden, if you manage to get through that phase and around, you know, 25 miles, you see the end, and everyone starts clapping, you see your family and friends, and then you'll see them sprinting. It's like, well, hang on, what happened there? You said you were done at 16 miles.

And again, central government theory, it's this inbuilt self-preservation mechanism, which we all have, because our bodies like homeostasis, our habitual level, it's trying to protect us. you know our bodies like homeostasis how habitual level it's trying to protect us um but when you acknowledge that and you say look i you know this mind body connection when you say look to your mind i understand you're telling my body to to pull that physiological handbrake to keep us safe and stop us from doing damage to ourselves but like with killian that that same thing look you've got diarrhea you you know, your bowels. Killian was, that was going on there. Was that self-preservation mechanism? You know, and he's gone, look, I know you're hurting, but it's okay.

I'm going to override. Yeah, overriding that self-governing mechanism. And you see this with, for example, somebody who's doing an extended fast, like our friend Tim just did, you know, people in the early days of that kind of self-experimentation will have hunger pangs and think, I can't go another day without eating. But then there's a breakthrough and you're on the other side of it and you're past it. You hear the same thing with free divers when they're going down and down and down, that self-governing will take over and say, I have to breathe, I have to breathe, it becomes overpowering, but they've trained themselves to be able to understand that that's not necessarily

true and they keep going down and then it goes away. Like they overcome it. And then there's sort of the ability to go deeper and further without oxygen. So understanding when you're truly at peril versus just your physiological impulse to pull back, pull on that brake. But I find as well, sometimes where the variables are slightly out of your control. So free diving, you're calm and you're trying to override that. But, and I almost want to ask you this, like say, you know, mid Ironman or something where the pace isn't necessarily dictated by you. And if someone else is saying, come on, Rich, I'm on your back wheels here. You know, I'm trying to overtake. It's that element

of trying to override it. And it's your pitting your will against someone else. Have you found that where you've kind of gone, I know you're maybe fitter than me, but I'm going to override that self-governing theory more than you. Have you found that? I think it's a little more nuanced than that because for me, I never get caught up in what other people are doing because it's about self-understanding. It's about knowing what you're capable of. And if you're responding to what somebody else is doing, then you're being reactive rather than proactive. And I'm not saying that that doesn't have its place in certain kind of racing,

but for me, especially the longer it is, I know what I'm trying to do. I know what needs to be done to do that. And I can't make those decisions based on what somebody else is doing. That can be a motivation for me, somebody passing me. And sometimes it's just, well, if I get into a higher gear and try to

overcome them, I'm going to pay for it later. Or I'm just going to bide my time because I know five or six hours later, I'm going to pass them. I just can't do it right now. Right, right. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, it goes back to efficiency and economy and knowing like, okay, what's my race plan and having confidence in your strategy and also the preparation that brought you there. Have you seen that you have perhaps, regardless of pacing strategies aside,

have you found that you have beat people that might be perceived as having a better VO2, lactic threshold? Have you beat someone who you're like, you're a better athlete, but I'm going to beat you because I'm prepared to suffer more. Have you found that? I mean, probably. I haven't put a lot of thought into that. I mean, I don't think, you know, in some of the super long stuff, the VO2 max thing, you know, I don't know how relevant that truly is. But I think what you're getting at is where does the mental game supersede physical preparation? You know, and I think, And I think in many instances, it does. If you look at somebody like David Goggins, he places himself in these crazy ultra runs where there are much more gifted runners than him. But his mental game is so dialed in and so on point that he's going to outlast every single person. You know, he can overcome whatever physical, you know, natural, you know, gifts that he has or doesn't have to place himself higher than somebody would have thought or that somebody would have sort of suspected, I think.

And I think that's it with the Great British Swim that even looking at, should I try? And I'm not going to try it again everyone was telling me to do a second lap i was like no but when people said like you played your man card on that one yeah but i i just sort of said it would be interesting to see if if i do something similar or if somebody else tries it because i just know those the depths that you have to go to, you know, and there was. But this is the beautiful, natural progression of sport. Now that you've done this, you've established that it can be done. And at some point, somebody else is going to do it,

and they're going to do it faster. And that's something to be celebrated. That's exactly it. And that was it, I think, just in terms of, you know, and I went back, it had the feeling of Captain Webb. You know, 1875, people said, you can't cross the English Channel. It's the water's too cold. It's too treacherous. The tides are too strong. And and he said, no, you know, I think I can do it. And then what I love about this is, you know, I think he did it in about 23 hours and on a of of brandy and beef broth and he did it breaststroke because i quote front crawl was ungentlemanly like yes that is so british right so it's so undercut so i think the current record is something like you know six hours so you know people have like

absolutely you know more than halved it but at the time it was just let's let's see what's possible let's let's move the goalpost let's raise the bar and as a result collectively we can all see what's possible and I think I certainly hope that that people see the Great British Swim and and it it doesn't even have to be swimming but people go wow okay and collectively it it just gets everybody to be swimming, but people go, wow, okay. And collectively it just gets everybody to just think differently. And I said this before, quite like Tim, Tim Sheaf as well, like in that, you know, I'm a huge fan of Tim and so much of what he does is brilliant. And he uses himself kind of like me as a guinea pig, you know, and probably like Tim, I say to a

lot of people, please, like, I wouldn't recommend my life to most people. Like, you know, the Great British Swim, it's not a mass participation sport. I don't recommend it. But what I hope is people who watch the series, it just helps them move their personal barometer, even just one degree of what they think was possible. personal barometer, even just one degree of what they think was possible. And if it does that, I will consider it a sort of five months well spent. Right. Well, I think it definitely will and has done that and more so. But what's interesting is that what people seem most fascinated about this whole thing and the moment, if there was a viral moment and all of this it was all about like your tongue disintegrating right it was like the headline that

traveled around the world so what was going on with your tongue my tongue has now fallen out with the salt water yeah so salt water exposure being in the water for 12 hours a day um i was aware of this i didn't know how severe it would become um it's fine now i can see you looking right yeah it's okay now but um i basically it dehydrates the tongue and then i it was one morning i woke up and and you know i think the line that that you know went went around the world, like you said, was I woke up with chunks of my tongue on my pillow. Like what do you mean specifically? Like it was flaking off? Like probably, and you can see the video that was used was pretty graphic.

But I mean, what was on my pillow was probably a bit more graphic. But it was like, it's so hard to explain. It's like if you were eating like, like I don't know like a carrot or something like that or like cabbage or probably even like there's something like meat based like you know like a beef stroganoff or something like that it was kind of like you hadn't finished eating it so I like looked in my mouth and then there was just chunks of something I was like what was I eating last night and then but then I realized quickly realized it was my tongue and then so I went to the mirror in the cabin,

and I was just like peeling strips off. But they were so thick, you could actually see the taste buds on them. It was really taking. Yeah, so a few people, like salt tongue, you're right. Usually it's kind of like the shedding of a snake skin. It takes the first layer off. But this was a real deep sort of salt tongue you know that i ended up yeah pulling chunks of my tongue off so then you know prevention is better than cure so i was i was

trying to just not let any water in my mouth when swimming in the end it was it was coconut oil actually that that worked in every single swim every tide um it was just coconut oil just basically swilling it around my mouth to form a barrier right and that just about saved well i would say it saved my tongue yeah i don't think you could do it otherwise how long into the swim were you when those chunks came off rich that was the same as as the the chafing i was on my neck that was real honestly like a weekend you know and that's why i always come back to when you sent me that that tweet you know obviously you didn't realize quite how bad it was but I was probably reading your tweet with chunks of my tongue on my pillow and like no and I was um and that was the thing I think so many people were really behind it and uh but it was it was just this yeah dark moment but again almost

to come back to the teachings of the book you know we know and this is probably worth pointing out actually a lot of people were really worried very sweet and they were saying ross please stop um we don't want to see you do any long-term damage to yourself and and i really really appreciate that but i almost i started reading chapters of the book to people to try and help them understand that there was method to the madness so you you look at, you know, Selja in 1936, Hungarian physician, and he came up with the general adaptation syndrome. So he found that in a lab full of rats, if he gave them a lethal dose of poison that they'd kill over and die. And then he found by giving them a little bit of poison, a little bit more, a little bit more, that they'd build up an intolerance to this poison. He then discovered general adaptation syndrome that stress and stimuli was the key to adaptation.

And these rats were like indestructible lab rats. It wasn't long before the strength and conditioning community cottoned onto this. And they started to see that through progressive overload and training variables that stress and stimuli can be applied to the body to cause it to adapt. And the reason I was saying that is because yes, although people were seeing my neck and my tongue and my face was swelling up because of the salt water, I was like, I believe there's going to be an adaptation. And if I ride this out, then I think, at the time I was saying, I think and I theorize that the human body is incredibly durable and incredibly adaptable. And I do believe that within a few weeks, by the end of Land's End, so the whole of the South Coast, I will be one of those indestructible lab rats. And then by Land's End, I remember I reached Land's End and I said, you know, I've now got really rough skin around my neck so it doesn't chafe anymore.

Coconut oil so my tongue's okay. I can now cope with 12 hours swimming a day. And at that point, I knew that if everything stayed as it did, I would swim all the way around Great Britain. I knew that that wouldn't be the case and Mother Nature could still call a halt to it. But for me, even at that point, at least I'd proved the law of adaptation, which we cover within the book. And I think that was quite nice. Yeah, that's super interesting. I completely agree with you. The human machine is unbelievably adaptable. And when you throw this crazy stimulus at it, at first, it's just scrambling, trying to figure out what's going on.

And there will be those external manifestations that don't look so good, whether it's a welt on the back of your neck or your tongue falling apart. But it is amazing how it's sort of over time, it kind of goes, okay, like I kind of have a sense of what's happening here. I'm going to put these other systems into play and like, we're going to be okay. And you can't control mother nature, of course, and there's going to be days harder than other days, but just the simple process of swimming six hours, sleeping, swimming six hours, like that becomes controllable. Yeah. Yeah. You shift your habitual level, you know, what you're used to doing. That just becomes, you know, normal. You find normality in abnormal places. You become comfortable being uncomfortable. And I think that

was one of the best lessons that I think, you know, irrespective of your sport, you can look at that. And I think for me, that was a great lesson because certainly where fitness is going, the industry is becoming quite minimalistic in that there's, you know, marketing led. So there's, you know, get fit in five easy steps or, you know, you know, get lose five stone in two weeks. And, and I always said that the real book that will work is get fit in eight months of stress and stimuli, you know, but that's not going to sell. The biohacking community is not going to embrace that. No, no. And I think that's, that's what was great about, um, the Great British Swim that it just, it was so honest, you know, that people saw how bad things were, but it was

like, this is the, this is the honest truth that if you want to swim around Great Britain, you have to go through this adaptation. And it's a large-scale experiment, but please know the same applies to you. If you're sitting on your couch at home thinking, I want to run my first 5K, yeah, the first time you go for that park run, it's going to hurt. You know, DOMS afterwards, Delayed Onset Muscle Swimmers, you're going to, your body... Stop trying to avoid that, though. Yeah, yeah, DOMS afterwards, delayed onset muscle soreness, your body- Stop trying to avoid that though. Yeah. Yeah. But people do, right? Do you think? Well, everybody wants the secret sauce or the shortcut. They want the result, but they want to find the easiest way to get there. And the thing that I keep trying to stress

and repeat is it's not about the result. It's about the journey towards it. And you can run a marathon on a very limited training plan and cross the finish line, but how do you want to feel when you cross that finish line? And there's something special that you experience when you know that you did everything in your power to get the best result out of yourself. So it's not traversing the distance and it's not the amount of time it took you to do that or whatever hurdles or barriers

you were required to overcome to get there. It's about the experience, the comprehensive experience from beginning to end of the preparation. And when you think back on your swim, of course, you know, climbing out of the water at the end at Mar, it's Margate, right? Where you finished was epic and cool to see and will be seared in your memory forever. But I would suspect that 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now, what you're really going to be

remembering is, you know, battling that whirlpool and like how you overcame the tongue situation and like all, that's where the value is. That's the heart of the whole experience. So it's not about circumventing those. It's about how you behave in the face of those that reveals character and what you're really all about and gives you that strength to tackle other, you know, obstacles that come in your way for the rest of your life.

I love what you just said there as well about just thinking how you'll feel afterwards, because that only dawned on me, again, halfway around, probably Corrie Vecan around that time. And I remember just thinking how bad it was. And I actually questioned myself, um, on the boat in the cabin. And I was saying, you know, are you doing this for all the right reasons? You've got, you've got so long to think about it. And I was, I was thinking, what, what do I want from this? How do I want to finish this? And, uh, it became about, you know, being extrinsically motivated versus intrinsically. So again, I touched upon one of the reasons for this was, yeah, you know, great British explorers of old, Captain Webb.

I also spoke about, you know, the book, proving my theories within the book. They were all factors that motivated me at the start, but by the Corrie of Vecan, tongue just about intact, neck just about healed, I remember just thinking, like, are you still doing this for the right reasons? What are the reasons? And only just now when you said that, this for the right reasons what are the reasons and

only just now when you said that this really is like a psychiatrist that i um i thought to myself if you finish this or if you don't finish it for whatever reason uh what will you be happy with and i remember in that moment i thought if i arrive in margate or don't and i get a pizza with my mom my dad my girlfriend girlfriend, my brothers, and I talk about jellyfish and everything, we go home, will that still be okay? And the answer was yes. I was like, yeah, that would still be okay with me and I'll be able to talk about everything. But if the answer was no, I wouldn't have carried on. And it was at that point I thought to myself, you have to be doing it for the right reasons. I think for a lot of people you're probably listening to this and thinking of their own

adventures and what they want to train for you just really sit down and think am I doing it for the right reasons or I love what you just said there you know what how do you want to feel what do you want to feel at the end so what is the why behind it I I mean, what, why were you doing it? And what was driving all of this? It changed so much throughout. And I think I still, I still love collectively pushing forward what we think is possible. So just, and the only way I know how to do that is to turn myself into a human guinea pig, you know, to do that. So I think, and also as well, I just, I love writing, but it's like, do I, do I go on adventures also as well, I just, I love writing, but, um, it's like, do I, do I go on adventures to write or do I write to go on adventures? It was just this kind of,

and, um, Henry Theroux, I think it was, but, uh, they said, how dare you sit down and write when you haven't stood up and lived. And after I wrote the world's fittest book, everyone was saying it was, oh, it was really good. Like, are you going to write another one? I said, no, like that's everything. It's taken me 10 years to write. I have nothing left to offer. That is everything I have from Loughborough University, from traveling around the world, living as a cowboy in Ecuador,

to take an ayahuasca in the Amazon. I have nothing left. That's everything. And then it wasn't until this swim that I thought, I suppose it was really great to delve into the mental realm of things, which we didn't necessarily in the book. The book was me thinking as an athlete. You know, it was very much, like I said, Lymphed Christie, Jeff Capes, Andy Bolton. So how do you make yourself faster, stronger, quicker?

You know, and then it wasn't until this really where i started to think more as an adventurer and and i think that was probably evident that when i set off on the great british swim i said 100 days i'm going to be done in 100 days margate round great britain done completed it and then i set off and i was like oh this is not going to be 100 days and things happen birthdays happened um you know things back on land with my family and friends and loads of things happen where i had to start thinking more as an adventurer and again you just said it best i think the two best examples are alex honnold and killian jornet that they they are athletes unbelievable athletes but they also have this profound respect where they are you know adventurers as well in that they work with nature.

Well, and they're on the cutting edge of what's possible for the human being, you know? And I think what's really cool and beautiful about your experience is that it is in the great tradition of Great British explorers. Like, what is it with great Britain and explorers? I mean, talk about a tradition. Yeah. I don't, I don't,

I honestly don't know what it is, but I just think, you know, you know, Mallory, when, when he said, you know,

because it's there, why, why climb Everest? And they seriously said it. And he famously said, because it's there. And I think there was, there was there

was an element to that when people said why why swim around great britain i was like because it's there it's just it's people have swum around people sorry people have ran around cycle around no one's swum around it's just one of those things there's not many great adventures left where people would say you know we've conquered that mountain we've done that you know right and and this was one that i felt was just, yeah. Well, Benoit Leconte is about to like swim the Pacific, right? Yeah, yeah. We saw a video yesterday.

He's having a rough time. So where is he right now? I think he's 140 days in. Is he? I think. Yeah, I mean, but he's like, he was battling, I think the hurricanes across the Pacific. like this was like 40 days in. He's in a monohull boat as well.

So like seasickness is no joke. People don't, you know, they think. I just can't even wrap my head around that. No. And this is, we just, yesterday was at the World Open Water Swimming Awards. And it was just amazing seeing seeing just within that one sport and i called it like swimming superpowers that that everyone now within swimming is doing you know they're sort of different things and their own and you're right you know great britain that was that that thing and and you know what what ben's doing it's just and lewis pew was he there i'm sure he was there

yeah yeah yeah no we shared a table explain who lewis is because he's done some really amazing yeah and that's that's the thing with lewis so he uh i just missed him actually i went past him um but he was swimming the south coast the other direction as i was so he swam the entire south coast of england um it was amazing it was this this um basically campaigning for uh marine conservation around the coast of Great Britain. It was incredible what he did. But you're right, he's renowned. The thing, the sports scientist in me loves it because he just has this insane ability and resistance to the cold. So he swam.

He swims in incredibly cold water. North Pole, you know, Antarctic. Yeah, he's done some crazy ice swims. Is he South African or is he British? Both. Yeah yeah he's he's done some crazy ice swims is he he's south african or is he british both yeah yeah he's both yeah and sort of bounced between the two so that's why he's got an accent but he's sort of british at the same time but yeah yeah and then it's the same same with ben so he he swims in skin so his resistance to the cold i would say is just incredible i think you know ben his the thing that I found hardest

was just not seeing land as well. And that like boredom, at least I could see like land sometimes and stuff. So with what Ben's doing, he's got a snorkel and flippers, but that boredom, like just putting your face in the water for the amount of times that he does,

it's like so that's his it's like being in solitary confinement yeah that superpower of of yeah that is is incredible and seasickness as well and then i you know i i was saying and in no way am i self-deprecating with my swimming superpower i just i can eat a lot and I float in the right direction. And that was the, honestly, I think that's kind of my niche. That it's just, and so I think we're at a really great time at the moment with open water swimming. I think, you know, people are doing some amazing things, you know, in their own way, on their own terms. And it's kind of diverse. It's really exciting.

It's cool. Yeah. I was just thinking about Benoit. I'm thinking thinking all right so like a frozen like imagine being in solitary confinement but it's actually like uh like an ice cabinet and you have food poisoning and you're just doing push-ups for like 10 hours a day yeah right yeah it's honestly it just and again, when you start to move into the mental realms, it's just that, like what I call sometimes adversity training. So, you know, not a lot of people, McAvoy actually.

So I know he's, oh. Guy's the best. A huge fan. You guys got to team up and do something together. Oh my God, huge fan of him, huge. Have you guys met in person? No, but he was another one who from day one. He was supporting you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Honestly, it could be two o'clock in the morning and he would just be retweeting just saying right like keep going and oh yeah he's amazing but what he was doing you know in in a you know whatever it was three meter by three meter a prison cell just breaking records on a rowing machine it's just like from whether he knew it or not, that's like, that is adversity training. I know, I know it's rowing, but like, what, where do you have to go to in a, in a headspace to do that? So him as an athlete, I'm like, you are unique. That is amazing. Uh, or, and for me, it's almost, you know, Emil Zatopek-esque, you know, the, the, you know, Emil Zatopek, you know, won two golds, Helsinki Olympics, I believe.

And, you know, his training, when people talk about interval training, he was doing 100, 400 meter sprints. And his, I always love when you look at his technique, not necessarily Kipchoge, not necessarily crisp and perfect, but just like if he would take that to places, that mental fortitude that, oh, yeah. Put your head down and just get it done and get it done for hour after hour after hour. Yeah. When I was swimming at Stanford, there was a guy called Jeff Kostoff who was one of the premier distance swimmers of that time. one of the premier distance swimmers of that time. And every year on New Year's Day, he'd do five 5,000s on the 50 minutes.

Oh. Five 5,000 yards on the 50 minutes, which means just to make the interval, you have to hold minutes per hundred, and he would get minutes of rest every time. But that was his annual workout. And it's like, I don't, there are very few people on planet earth that could do that.

How would he finish that? Was he just in pieces on the side? No, he'd be, I mean, yeah, he'd be tired, but it wasn't like, I mean, he was just made for it. I've never seen anyone train something like this guy. I love that. It's insane what people can do, right? In the right conditions.

But here's the thing about you that I think is a huge, maybe underappreciated factor in your success and your ability to weather, not just discomfort, but all the, you know, 8 billion obstacles that get thrown in your direction when you're trying to accomplish, you know, this great bird to swim, which is you're a very affable guy. Like you have a very positive, bright, shiny disposition, right? Like you're a happy dude, you know? And like, even in watching the series, even when things were brutal,

like you're laughing and you've got a smile on your face, like you're positive by nature. I have to think that that had a huge, you know, impact on your ability to just kind of process things as they come, like all the difficult things. Like I have a hard time envisioning you like screaming at your crew for screwing something up. Maybe that happened. I don't know. But like, you're not, like you didn't seem to really get too dark ever. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, you know, but like, you're not like, you didn't seem to really get too dark ever. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you know what? That's kind of you to say that there definitely was some dark moments. Like, and I think a lot of people said, oh, wow, it's amazing. You know, that you're always so cheerful. I was like, no, no, no, no. Like there's been some, and sometimes I suppose I was, I was very conscious all the way around that this wasn't a marathon. It wasn't an Ironman. You can't grit your teeth, get angry, finish. No, this is 157 days. So if you are swimming angry,

your body's this complex biochemical organism, cortisol levels, stress hormones, spite, inflammation, your immune system, adrenal adrenal fatigue neurotransmitters chemical signals in the brain all sorts is going to happen if you swim angry um so for me it was about finding normality in abnormal places in that you know it all everything wasn't like you had a fire in your belly it was just like you had this simmering kind of these coals and everything had to just be done on a level so when i was like trying to smile and everything yeah inside it was I was hurting stuff I was almost trying to convince myself you know that that you know it's okay smile for it swim with a smile as I was constantly trying to say the very fact that I've got over 100 days to survive around

the great British coast means I really can't afford a day to be ill so when a lot of people see me being very smiley and then sort of, that's one, I think it's important for motivation, but two, just in terms of your physiology, that biochemical reactions going on inside the body, studies show it's better to swim with a smile. I wasn't ill in all of 157 days, or I didn't take a day off ill. I wouldn't say I wasn't ill. You know, I certainly wasn't feeling. Yeah, we should say you didn't take a single rest day. No, no, no.

But that's not like I said, that's not to say I wasn't ill. But yeah, I didn't take a single didn't miss a single swim. Did you ever just lose your shit, though? No, I know. And I think the reason for that, though, is I was constantly reminded that the crew were amazing the hours that they were working was insane tempers there was times yeah when as a crew we're all you know but i was the one who had asked them to be there i'd the one who said i was going to swim around so for me to shout like no one's asking me to do this and i think there was always that element that i'm like

if you're going gonna shout at people like they don't have to be here you know and so that was that was one thing that I was very aware of and actually even before I left my dad who he had been on the boat both ways from Martinique to St Lucia battling seasickness stuff so he was there for sport with my mom and my girlfriend and so my dad had saw what went wrong with the tides and currents and when i left for the great british swim my dad said to me you know remember your place on the boat he said you are very low down in the pecking order do you know what you are the bottom of the hierarchy and i remember laughing but i was like no dad i get it i get it and and

and so that's why when matt the captain said get, get in and swim, I swam. When people said, eat this, I ate that. And when people said, you know, stop posting on social media, go to bed, I went to bed. And I think there was having that element of just like sheer respect that other people were doing their job. My job was just to swim. Yeah. It is kind of funny and ironic that of all the people on the boat, you're the guy who knows the least about any of it, right? Like the currents, the conditions, all of that. Yeah. Especially when swimming. I mean, you have no idea if you're moving, going forward. There was times at Penland Firth, I always remember I did 8.5 knots around there. So that's, you know, getting up to dolphin speed uh i didn't swim 8.5 the tides and currents were so strong but what was amazing is i felt no different from when one time i almost

went backwards because the tides were so strong i had no concept of whether i was moving forward or back and so that's why exactly what you said i was always relying on other people you know constant shouting with with matt saying yeah good speed speed, not good speed. Shall I have a banana? Shall I not have a banana? And, um, yeah, so to go back to why I was always trying to swim with a smile, I think it was, it was very aware that only just now really we're understanding, you know, how your psychology interacts with your immune system. And I knew again, that this had gone from being an athletic competition. I wasn't racing to get a hundred days. I wasn't gritting my teeth. I wasn't like it, none of that. It was, this has to be a way of life. And also, and this really stuck with me that, that, um, again,

it was with the, one of the psychologists, sports psychologists, they said, Ross, you need to just focus on the process. The moment you start thinking of the outcome, how long is it till Margate? How many more miles have we got to go? That can put you in a dangerous headspace because you're wishing things away. So you just need to be solely focused with the process. You need to, every single stroke, you need to make efficient as possible and put one arm in front of the other. So whilst I was doing that, it was just knowing that that was my job and the outcome would be inevitable as long as I kept thinking of the process. And I think too often people can do

that regardless of the sport or anything. You just have to think day in, day out, I'm going to keep doing this process with a smile on my face as long as it takes to finish. Yeah. Just be in the moment, be present for what is actually happening. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. How did the biphasic sleep work for you? Good. I mean, there was times where I was so exhausted, you just went into it. And so everything that Charlie, the ocean row had told me just saying, do you practice biphasic sleep? No, that Charlie, the ocean row had told me just saying, um, do you practice biphasic sleep? No,

you'll be so exhausted. You know, so by day two, you know, I was, I was just sleeping, you know, like a baby. Yeah. And that was the thing. It became recovery was so important to me, you know, ligaments, tendons, inflammation in my shoulders, everything like that would all be solved with a good night's sleep. But the reality was, is I never had that deep, you know, growth hormone inducing, neurotransmitter replenishing sleep. It was always five hours max would be a good sleep. So I never really slept that much.

And I think that was the thing that it became about nursing the body all the way around. And again, it just didn't become about the swim. It became about something completely different. And all, and, and I said at the end, and in no way is this me self-deprecating, but you know, it just was my job to eat and float, you know, and, and everybody else, it was a huge team sport. Although they said it was a great British swim, as soon as I was, you know, handed the microphone at the end, I just wanted everybody in the media and everyone into attendance.

And I got the whole team up because I said, please, please know that I'm only here because everybody you see did their job properly. That's the only reason. You couldn't do it on your own. Yeah. The responsibility of the crew for something like that is unbelievable. I mean, those people must have just worked day and night. Yeah. And that goes back to never falling out, or certainly on my part, that you just, as a team, you couldn't have asked any more from them.

There was times when we were going through. So with the boat, we had this huge sort of catamaran, but there was times when the wind was so strong, that was being pushed faster than I could go. So we had a smaller motorized rib no bigger than this sofa really and there was times through the night in huge swells and 10 foot waves and stuff that the crew were doing our shifts on and off right so they were sitting there as it was pitch black wearing glow sticks so i could sight off them as the rain came down as water was coming into the boat so they're in there they're ripped trying to like throw buckets of water out just so we could get through the night another six hours just to make 15 miles so we could get around cape roth

before the winter came in and so when the team was doing that i'm just like you know i can't complain they can't do any more sleeping uh swimming at night would freak me like, you know, I can't complain. They can't do any more. Swimming at night would freak me out. It's got to be weird. Yeah, I posted about this, though. And I think it was Martin Luther King who said, you know, remember, you can only see the stars at night. You know, and there were some amazing setting. I mean, certainly around Scotland where there's barely any pollution. The moon was so clear.

Sometimes it was almost like kind of daylight, kind of not but but then having said that you are right I mean west Scotland 200 meters um was was what one of the largest depths I think about 200 meters and uh I remember uh I turned to Matt the uh the captain and I was eating a banana I was treading water and we were chatting I said how we doing the tide's good he said yeah yeah you got another like hour of tide basically so we could get another like you know few miles in I went okay fantastic and then um as I'm treading water like it's completely pitch black my my leg like that I was doing eggbeater leg kick so I'll turn a breaststroke leg kick it was light rich I was I was standing on this floor right now and I went I looked at matt i said matt

um just be a bit careful around here it's quite um it's quite shallow you might want to move the boat over that way and matt checked he goes we're at 200 meters uh uh depth i said well i'm not and he said what do you mean and with that honestly rich i stood like that like i'm standing now i put my hands out the water and i went i'm standing on something and matt looked at me when um i don't know what you're standing on but it's definitely not the ground because we're at 200 meters and i went oh okay i said like hallucinating hallucinating felt like you were standing on solid ground we to this day we still don't know what it was he said it could have been a whale i was like that was a pretty sturdy whale if it was and it was still i was hitting it as well so i was if it was a whale it didn't mind me basically stamping on his head we thought it might have been a ship

container that had maybe fallen off um but around west scotland like this there's not really it's not like the east coast where you know aberdeen um to this day i don't know what i was standing on but for the next hour I swam quick to get away yeah well you had like one whale encounter for sure right oh that was and that was amazing I think I always say this with the media it's so easy to talk about salt town and chafing um but yeah it was so from North Devon there's an island Lundy which is an area of marine conservation just amazing because you and this was I was so grateful for the vlog series because we started to show what happens to nature when we don't just let it survive, it thrives. And it's amazing.

The fish are so vibrant. So the birds come in, the sea life, the seals. Today, we went past one of the largest colonies of seals in Scotland. And they were all just popping their heads up trying to figure me out you know coming a little bit closer but then it was going across there the Bristol Channel and I was swimming in a minke whale so probably about maybe three four meters long breached right next to me I panic I look at Matt and I say Matt like am I okay should I keep swimming?

And I said, no, no, no, it's absolutely fine. It's absolutely fine. It's a minky well. They're fine. They're fine. But it was really quite sort of playful, but also like very animated. And I was like, you know, I like Ram you just to play. Yeah. That's it. It had a feeling. I was like, it's not mating season or anything. Is it, is there anything I need to be aware of? No, no, no, no, no. It's absolutely fine. It's absolutely fine. So I was like, all right, right cool so I carried on swimming and and honestly one of the best experiences for the next five miles the minke whale just was circling me swimming around me swimming up breaching I said to Matt eventually I said what do you think's going on and he said

look I think it's a female and I think that she thinks that you're an injured seal so she's guiding you to shallower water. And then sure enough, we got to Wales where the water gets a little bit shallower. And this whale sort of breached one more time as if to sort of say, you know, you're safe now. There you go. And that was the last time. It's pretty cool. It was amazing.

And I think for all of the hardship, you would only get those experiences from being in the water for 12 hours a day, because I'm under no illusion that that whale was probably watching me across the Bristol channel, which was that riptide. So we spent a lot of time in the Bristol channel and a lot of time in the water trying to get across. So that whale was probably watching me saying, you know, is it okay? Is it not? And after watching me for so long, it was clearly like, okay, this is okay. I'm going to get a little bit closer. Same with the dolphins. I ended up sort of, it was on like okay this is okay i'm gonna get a little bit closer same with the dolphins i ended up sort of it was on camera i ended up they were so close and so playful um i was swimming with them i was trying to race them and as i started to race them i mean no way

you know they were going four times quicker than me when i started racing but they knew what i was trying to do and they thought it was hilarious so they were swimming under me around me at one time when i started to sprint one played like a game of chicken and just swam straight at me you know they were just taunting me but it was amazing and and again that was only because i think they saw you know that i was in the water for that long you know and that i was safe so it's um it's it's it's very easy to talk about the hardship and everything, but even, and actually on that note, the East coast of Scotland and certainly England, the hospitality there. And this is because, and you touched upon it earlier when you mentioned surfing, because I think once you take

the Great British Swim, it takes swimming outside of conventional sport and it turns into something completely different because surfers really had a profound respect for what was going on because they were saying oh you swam past thurso which is quite a renowned sort of surfing area they were like the waves are big there so they get that and then the sailors and the local fishermen as well were sort of saying you went through the penland firth and it was like yeah and they were like did you get it right and i was like yeah i was doing 8.7 knots and they were like because if you got that wrong you'd have been going back at 8.7 knots as well so they started to understand that it doesn't matter if you're swimming or you're in a boat you are surviving to use your data just at sea

that's all you're doing and it doesn't matter what you're in um and the hospitality that we got down that east coast i'll never forget because we went across the moray firth this huge kind of bay um from the top where we spoke about actually so um from uh jonah groats across the moray firth which was about 60 miles and it was tied on tied off because the boat couldn't go anywhere until we'd got across and we needed to get across before a storm hits we got across and i got into a town called fraserborough um just completely my shoulders were in pieces and i managed i crawled in there and um the hospitality because those coastal villages rely on the sea and and actually it was later explained to me that as a town they'd'd seen loved ones actually sort of lost at sea there, like literally sort of smashed into the coast and they were unable to do anything. They just had to watch.

So that's why they understood what we were trying to do with the Great British Swim. So as soon as we came in, it was just, you know, what do you need? What can we get you? That was one thing that constantly resonated with me. People didn't say, oh, hey, how are you? Can we get a selfie? You know, I'll be following. The first thing they always said was, have you got everything that you need? That was, and I was just like, yeah, no, thank you so much. And just so no one's confused, you're not going on land. You never went on land the whole time. So how are you interfacing with these people? Are they coming out to the boat? Are you getting like supplies? Are boats coming out to you? Yeah, yeah. So we could go into a few

harbors. I never set foot on them for a few reasons. One, I just felt it needed to be done with a sense of adventure, you know, that maybe that's the British eccentric in me talking like you said, but I was just, I don't want to touch land. I want to leave Margate. I don't want to see land until I come back. Also, you know, you just were up in San Francisco at the Open Water Awards. Like, they're very particular about these rules. Yeah. You know, it happened with Diana Nyad.

There's all this controversy, like what you can and can't do in order to sort of, whether it becomes, you know, a legit record versus just the general kind of respect from the community. You're right. You are right. I think once you've laid the rules out and you've stated them, you do it. And that was always interesting because even when we halved the Land's End to John O'Groats record,

everyone's like, that's amazing. That's amazing. It was like, yeah, but none of that counts if I don't get back to Margate because it would go down as a DNF. I did not finish. If you state that you're doing a swim from point to point and you don't reach that point, you didn't do it. down as a DNF and did not finish. If you state that you're doing a swim from point to point and

you don't reach that point, you didn't do it. So, you set like a Guinness record on route to accomplishing the greater task. Yeah. Just explain that so people understand. That's right. So, the goal was always to swim around Great Britain, but in the process, we were the first and fastest person to do the South Coast. We set a record for the longest, the world's longest stage to sea swim. We halved the record from Land's End to John O'Groats, which was I think it was 138 days and we did it in 60. But none of that counted for anything. And that was what was so strange that at John O'Groats, the media turned up and they were like, oh, fantastic. And there was all the cameras there.

And it was at that point to go back to what you spoke about, which was what feeling do you want? And when all the cameras were there, had I not asked myself the same question, am I doing it for the right reasons? It could have been quite dangerous because at John O'Groats, the cameras were there. Everyone was saying, you're amazing. amazing you know you've had the record and if you were extrinsically motivated and you you love the cameras you'd be like yeah yeah you're then going to be brought back down to earth pretty sharpish as soon as you come across the moray firth it was a darkness like i'd never seen i couldn't see the hand in front of my face um we were constantly on alert for killer whales as well that would come down from Iceland. And it was cold.

I mean, autumn was coming in as well. And all of a sudden you're like, where are all the cameras? You know, where is everybody telling me we've done a good job? And if you're doing it for the wrong reasons, it's during those moments where I think it's you're mentally more fragile. But by that point, you know, this was now about 30 days after the Corrie Vecan incident, I felt mentally more robust or certainly more robust than when I started. Maybe to come back to sell you in that indestructible lab rat physically, but as well as mentally by having

so much stress and stimuli by that point i was kind of i just i don't care i'm finishing this now and uh it was that same sort of look um i remember i was fortunate enough to go and see uh visit the raw marines when uh there was there was guys and they were 31 weeks into their 32 weeks training so you've got to think they've had every form of stress and stimuli thrown at them and they were a week away from getting their green beret the the proudest thing that they've been training you know throughout these 30 to 1 weeks that this is all they wanted i remember looking at them and they were gaunt in the face they were chiseled they were sleep deprived you see the whites of their eyes but you just thought wow like tomorrow you do a commando course you do a 30 mile yomp with 50 kilos on your back

and you looked around the room in all of their eyes and you were like not one of you is going to break okay they were just like that and it was that look in their eyes that i was like wow and that was when he said you you know, you're an athlete, you train to perform at your best when you feel at your best. And we're Royal Marines, we train to perform at our best when we feel at our worst. And he said that to me when he was 31 weeks into his training. I remember looking at him going, it was real powerful.

I was like, wow. And it was, yeah, like I said, Moray Firth. It was when I suppose I was trying to think, you know, I hope I have a similar look to what I saw in him. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And I love that it's called Moray Firth. It's like, it's so British, you know, it's like, what, where did that name come from? You know? All right. So you do this thing, you accomplish it. I loved watching you finish the swim you invited the public to join you all these people turned up

super cool I got so excited when I saw everybody and the music was playing I tried to run in and then I almost stacked it and there's that moment of you coming up on shore

and wondering whether your legs are going to support you. It's like it's a weird thing because in swimming, you're not really using your legs. You're dangling them behind you. They're just big buoys in your wetsuit. And then you're getting on this boat and you're sitting down. So with the exception of occasionally standing up for short periods of time, you really hadn't used your legs in half a year. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, and that is, and it's great to speak to you about this now, because I think for all of the kind of, you know, the media and the, you know, the bright lights and everyone

saying, oh, it's amazing. It's amazing. There is a darker element, you know, that afterwards, yeah, you might be those indestructible rats when it comes to swimming, but, you know, specific, you know, said principles, specific adaptation to impose demands, you get really, really good at what you continually practice. So for me, when afterwards everybody's saying, oh, you swam around Great Britain, you're so fit.

It's like, whoa, no, no, let me stop you there. Because fitness is such an ambiguous term. Yes, components of fitness, strength, speed, cardio, respiratory endurance. But there's no definition of fitness. And I think when people saw me emerging from the water and they were like, oh, wow, you have this big beard, tentacles, got a big beard. It's like Baywatch meets Aquaman, Poseidon. You had the trident and the whole thing. Right. But I was really, really good at swimming for 12 hours a day.

And even now, I'm good at swimming for 12 hours a day. But I was walking around London doing media. And I never forget, I stopped halfway up the stairs. And my legs were just, I couldn't get up the stairs. I remember she was really sweet. She must've been about 60 or 70, this sweet lady. She put her arm on my shoulder and she went, are you okay, dear? And I was like, yeah, I'm just taking a breather before I carry on. You know, my legs were that bad. The arches in my feet, you know, collapsed. So I'm really working on them, you know, now.

And just even, you know, the smaller, like, people say, oh, you know, you skip leg day for 157 days. And I'm like, yeah, no, but it's more. Your body was literally horizontal for half a year. Yeah. Like, just what is that? What's the impact of that versus being vertical most of the time? You know, like simple things. To go back to that, that idea of like, you know, horsepower programming, but the smaller ligaments, tendons, you know, your Achilles heel,

all of these things, they respond to stress, stimuli, and load. So you're walking around every single day and those muscles and those tendons, they like load. And for me to remove that, it was just pure atrophy, the shrinking of these and the usage of these muscles. It really became something like probably astronauts experience as well. So again, I joked about it saying I was worried I was going to face plant the floor at the beach. But since I've had to work really hard on sensory feedback as well. So now when running and walking, I'm trying to engage my big toe as well when running. And you can actually see my feet when I'm doing some of these exercises, the muscles in my feet, they're flickering.

That's the best way to describe it. They're flickering because they sort of go, I remember this. I remember walking. I know what you're trying to tell us to do, but we've not done this for half a year. And it becomes really like mentally fatiguing as well. So people go, oh, you skipped leg day. Have your legs shrunk? I'm like, yeah, no, they've shrunk, but it's much more intricate than that. And it's a fatigue. It's very hard to explain. Well, it's only been like a week, too. So you're like, well, now I'm doing this and this and that.

I'm like, what, in the last week? In between talking to the BBC and flying across the world, like this story is still at the very beginning of unfolding. But I do know that you went into the lab, right? Like with the Vivo people, Vivo Barefoot people, and they were looking at your cadence and did you have your blood work done? Like, do you have a sense of where you're at with all of those biomarkers? Yeah, so they're all coming back basically next week. So it was just, I just sat there and just said, test me.

So they've done everything now. So yeah, the Vivo Barefoot guys, I mean, that's going to be interesting. I mean, just because it was, to be brutal, honestly, it was such a mess, you know, in that they were just like, run, what? And they were like, it looks like you're running, but it doesn't quite look right. You know, it was it was really and even the way I was standing.

Maybe they hooked you up to a mini Cooper. Then your form would settle. Do you think? Yeah. But that's what it was. So it's going to be it's going to be really interesting. And also just this this caution as well, because with this work capacity to go back to that, you know, I have the ability, I'm almost a little bit restless now. So when people say, oh, you know, you don't really look

that tired. I'm like, yeah, no, cause I'm kind of used to swimming 12 hours a day, but, and getting stung by jellyfish. But now, you know, I have that work capacity. So my body in its entirety is used to working for 12 hours a day you know eating 15 000 calories that's what it wants to do but the actual ligaments in my tendons they're the limiting factor here so if i just said okay i'm gonna go run for 12 hours you know something could go very badly wrong so yeah as as much as you know i i i talk about that and sometimes make light of it it's um in no uncertain terms, the Vivo Barefoot guys and the sports scientists, they were like, Ross, you're going to have to do this really systematically, really carefully because you've done something, you know, not even actually looking at. They made a great point that actually, you know, that flexion in your feet when you're swimming, that's that's not like astronauts.

You've been forcing your feet into a position that's not even like, so there was all these things that they brought up that I sort of thought, you know, yeah, I'm now paying for it, you know, and I better really be very kind to my body because it's been very kind to me to get me round. Yeah. But no, no big injuries or anything like that no like there's nothing that's nagging at you where you're like i've got to have that work no and i think that was probably most surprising and then it was one thing that me and jeff the the physio on the boat we were talking about that quite a lot when he was just sort of saying um i think you know resilience and robustness is so often overlooked.

You can have two amazing athletes, but quite often, whether it's biomechanics or just their robustness. My dad, he's so physically strong but everything is so you know runs back jams his foot and manages to get a drop shot and then he's run back but everything looks impressive he's sliding all over but you think those forces physics those forces are going to go somewhere and they're going to manifest themselves somehow um whereas federer doesn't necessarily get the credit he deserves in that people say, oh, Federer is not, they wouldn't say he's the quickest on the court. He's unbelievable. And I never forget my dad made me try to get from one side of the court to the

other in three lateral steps. And I did it without a racket, completely fresh and not even midpoint. And I tried to do it and I couldn't do it and then he played back a video and we watched Federer midpoint like you know probably three sets in effortlessly three lateral steps made an unbelievable forehand and and it was his movement efficiency efficiency that allows has probably allowed him that longevity not to break down. Again, coming back to the world's longest rope climb, I was very aware that when swimming, I had to have such efficiency because if it wasn't mother nature, yeah, impingement in the shoulder, something could go wrong where it's taken out of my hands. You could be mentally robust, but your body's just given up on you.

I'm starting to get the full picture now that I know your dad was a tennis coach and he's telling you to try to get from one side of the court to three. It's like, oh, here's where it begins. Yes. Right. Yeah. No, I said this a while, but my dad's a tennis coach. My mom was a sprinter. One of my granddad's, he was a marathon runner. Other granddad in the military, brother football player, younger brother, capoeira. Oh, wow. Capoeira.

That's cool. It's quite an eclectic mix. All these different interesting movements and disciplines that all come together in this double helix DNA that you're walking around. Right? And so that's it. Sunday dinner, big Sunday roast dinner, traditional English dinner. We all sit around and that is when I call, you know, a meeting with the family and I say, guys, I've got an idea. And my dad usually like puts his knife and fork down and he goes, go on.

And, you know, with the rope climb, I told him and he immediately pulls out a calculator and he started to work out. And he said, you know, you need to do 10 meters on the minute every minute, you know, with 30 seconds rest in between. So he's very dialed in. He starts thinking like that. He's already thinking of the logistics. So I'm like, OK, cool. And then my mom, she's wondering, you know, if she can get a Sunday roast dinner out to me while I'm doing the rope climb, you know, and then, you know, my girlfriend Hester's making sure on the Great British Swim, she was worried I had enough pants and socks. And then even it was in one of the episodes, actually,

like my two brothers, to go back to swimming with a smile. They knew that when I got into Scotland for the first time, Mull of Kintyre, so it's this really sort of industrial, honest fishing town. And all the men in there are just like big burly men and scott and craig knew that i needed picky blinders no right yeah yeah in scotland it's exactly that so they're all there on the fishing dock and then craig and scott my two brothers knew that i needed uh needed cheering up because i just got across the irc i hadn't seen anyone in in weeks and you

know i was you know really suffering so they turned up dressed as uh Poseidon and and Popeye in fancy dress and uh just got on the boat they didn't even tell me that they were coming and then they just did the whole of those like I think they did an entire weekend so two tides dressed as Poseidon and and Popeye just just to cheer me up you know so there's that element of like when people meet my family, they go, ah, now you make more sense. Of course you swim around and go, what else were you going to do? So what was that first night in a bed like?

Yeah, it was- I mean, did you still wake up like on that biphasic schedule? Were you able to just sleep? I mean, I'm sure people are like, how long is it going to take you to recover from this? Or like, how tired are you? And forget about the legs and all of that. Like, I think people think you're just super exhausted,

but the adaptation is there, right? So. Yeah, it's strange. So you're right. I am still waking up at, you know, four o'clock and the jet lag hasn't necessarily helped this time. But yeah, first night in bed, I did. I woke up at two o'clock in the morning. My girlfriend wondered what I was doing and I genuinely woke up and was thinking for just a

second, when does the tide change? You know, I was, I wouldn't say I was looking for my goggles, but I was, I was kind of going into that like automatic, you're like, where's my wetsuit? Where's my goggles? And she was just like, go back to I was like okay yeah yeah sorry um but now yeah there is I am I am wondering maybe I'll crash you know maybe you know after this interview I'm gonna fall asleep on this over and stuff but there's I just it was such a long adaptation I I do wonder what's what's gonna happen and and when people said to me at the end I do wonder what's, what's going to happen. And, and when people said to me at the end, they said like, what's next? I was kind of sitting there just thinking like, you know, now we've proven we can swim around Great Britain. I'm very swim fit at the moment. I don't, you

know, I'm not, and I'm not bored of swimming. I don't, I don't know, maybe, maybe, you know, next year you can see again, how far, how far how far you can take it I mean it was a long time to be at sea and I don't know if the crew would necessarily return my calls if I rung them and said I want to do something else but for me I feel I feel fine and I think that was quite good I always wanted to finish the whole swim fit healthy a, a good weight, you know, and just feeling sort of as living proof that it's doable. Well, you know, you don't need to know what you're going to do next, right? The media, well, everybody wants to know what's next, what's next, what's next, but you don't have to have an answer to that question. And you shouldn't have an answer to that question right now.

Do you not think? No, like, you know, you can, think? No. I think what you need, honestly, is some time to put this in perspective. You need some objectivity. And that only comes with taking a moment to reflect. You just did this, right? And I have no doubt that you'll tackle something crazy and that will come about about but you don't need to know what that is right now yeah i and we were talking about this though i again always it needs something to train for with something in the back i find it sometimes quite hard to do this kind of general physical preparedness where you're just going around things so i know that's why we were talking i said you know rich what are you doing? And I think I would like to have your sense of, you know, just being a little bit more calculated, calm.

Well, here's it here. Let me, I'll put this in your hopper. To extend your analogy, you know, what you said about Nadal and Federer, you know, as somebody who's, you know, got a few decades on you age-wise, you want longevity, right? You want to be able to continue to do this stuff. And you can't just constantly hammer it. I think those breaks are important mentally, emotionally, as much as physically. So take the time to rebuild your legs. Your goal can be as simple as I want to get my leg strength back to where it was before the swim. It doesn't need to be any more crazy or complicated than that. And as you do that, then you can reflect on the experience that you had and set the proper trajectory for you going forward. But I think if you were to just lock onto some goal right now, there's the risk that

that might not be the best goal for you or the right one, because you haven't even digested what you just accomplished. Yeah. And I think that's really important that with everybody being so kind and complimentary about the Great British Swim, I was so keen to broadcast like the good the bad and the ugly and and sort of say you know I I said at the start when people said oh you're you're you're you're such a great swimmer I was like no no no I'm not a good swimmer I said but I was naive enough to start and I'm stubborn enough to finish and and everyone kind of liked that but it was it was so true and I think even even now I'm keen to honestly document the post adventure, you know, and say, yeah, there is an element. There's always something inside where I'm like, oh, you know, I just want to do a chat.

I want to climb a mountain. I want to do something else. But here's the hardest challenge perhaps for you is can you be okay with yourself just being without having a goal? And that is where, that's where the real emotional maturity gets developed that will allow you to progress and propel you to the greatest heights. If you're always just chasing that next thing

because you have a discomfort with just sitting with yourself, then ultimately there's a blind spot there, I think, that will eventually, in the same way, you know, those quick movements come back to haunt Nadal are gonna manifest in a way that you don't want them to. So I think there's a lot of athletes that they just, they can't, you know,

they always have to be moving because there's something going on in their life that they don't wanna look at, or they don't wanna address, whether it's some kind of childhood thing or whatever. And I think to be a fully actualized human being, you have to take those moments and honor them. And I think if you do, then, you know,

then the sky's the limit, what you're able to accomplish long term. So I'd encourage you to like use this time in that way. And not just jump into the next thing. Yeah. And that comes back to what I would like to do after this, even documenting this honestly, and saying, yeah, that it is has been one after the other after the other. So maybe that is my big challenge. You know, just saying like, what are you doing this year? And then I'll go, spoke to Rich, I'm not doing anything.

Right. How does that feel? Yeah. Like, how does that feel? Like, you feel like weird, right? It feels vulnerable. It feels like, well, who am I if I'm not like chasing some crazy thing? Yeah.

And how do you cope? Well, I do this, you know, and I have kids. I've got like other things in my life, you know, that I'm balancing all of these things against. I know, I know. I'm not saying that you should have them, but I have other things that are competing for my time and my interest.

And I would say that for me now, on a personal level, it's not important how far I go, how fast I go. I love all of these endurance challenges and they make me feel alive and they're part of who I am. But what gets me excited is how can I activate other people? How can I put a message out that will energize people to look at health and fitness in new and different ways and take better care of themselves and the planet and the people they love. And some ways, a great way to carry that message

is to do a crazy challenge, because people perk up and they pay attention and they listen and it does activate them in a certain way. But if I'm doing that, then I'm probably not sitting and talking to you, right? So what is the best way for me to carry this message? Sometimes it's doing a challenge, but on a weekly basis, it's doing this, which takes a lot of my time and it's something I value and a lot of people across the world take

into their homes. So you have to, it's like a sine, or like a, what is that called? Not an asthmatode. It's a sign curve, right? You know what I mean? These things have their seasons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So next season. And I've made peace with that. So next season will be different than this season.

So next season, I have to do nothing. That's my... I'm not saying that you have to. I'm just saying, think about that. No, no, I appreciate it. Yeah, no, I do. Yeah, you have to. I'm just saying, think about that. No, no, I appreciate it. Yeah, no, I do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So what do you think,

or what is it that you want people to take from this experience that you just had? I think just, like I said, treating it like, you know, the observation of a human guinea pig and and it was it was warts and all the whole thing and i and i think just seeing that that this particular the principles that we were discussing in it whether it was central governor theory whether it was um the physical element of to it as well anything that the principles can be applied not just to swimming but just

the same principles apply so again when i say to people i don't recommend swimming around great britain but the same internal dialogue that was going through my head when i was in bed and i was warm and i was just thinking to myself you know this is my this is my nest you know this is my habitual level this is nice and then your brain saying stay in here ross this is nice i could have done but there would have been consequences if i didn't get in the water and swim every single tide there would have been consequences uh i i probably wouldn't have made it all the way around because like i said uh certainly around the top of scotland the the weather window closed on us we just made it round in time um so i i would like people to just look and say that's an extreme example i wouldn't do that i don't like jellyfish i want

to keep my tongue intact and that's fine but just know that the the principles are the same that that sunday morning run, whether it's that to-do list that you're putting off, maybe it's even just something you always wanted to write a book, something like that, but you've just never really got around to it because of your habitual level. You wanted to just break out of that. That's what would be nice. If people look at the Great British Swimmers and experiment in that and actually not even consider it a a swimming adventure as such it was it became a little bit more than that oh i certainly felt the great british swimmers turned into a community and and and i just kind of hope

like i said that that community just continues to just like share stories in a year's time i would love it if somebody said you know oh I just run my first 10k because of the Great British Swim. What happened over the 157 days wasn't a swimming lesson it was just this experiment in like I said mental and physical fortitude. It doesn't matter if you run, swim, cycle the principles are still the same but you know it it sounds cliche, nothing good ever came from your comfort zone. And I think people watching the great British swim will say, yeah, you know, if you get out of your comfort zone, you get to see minke whales, you get to

see dolphins. Yeah. You might get stung in the face by jellyfish as well. But for all of the hardship, there's also a lot of privileges as well. Yeah, well, it's super inspiring. I think the one thing I've noticed that happens, which is sort of unfortunate, is that somebody will look at what you did and just dismiss you as a freak of nature. And it doesn't matter how many times you say, look, I'm not an endurance swimmer.

I'm just a dude. Yeah, I played water polo and I'm like, I'm jacked. But like, I didn't come from like a distance swimming background or somebody who grew up surfing or even like in the ocean or cold water, right? They'll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, you're different than me. And I think it's important to point out that when that urge, like if you're listening to this and you're finding yourself in that mental state, that is your own fear resisting this truth

that Ross is trying to speak to, which is that we're all capable of so much more than we allow ourselves to believe. And when Ross goes out and does this, it's for a purpose. And I believe you're being honest in that your why is helping to inspire people to raise the ceiling on what they think is possible in their own life.

I believe that we're all capable of so much more and we are so habituated to our lives that it's just, there's so much momentum behind what we do every single day that it becomes very difficult to gain any kind of perspective on that and to shift habits around how you live on a daily basis to perhaps, you know, put yourself in a position to be uncomfortable and try something that you think currently exceeds your ability. Yeah. And I think like we said earlier, not to be scared of stress and stimuli. You know,

that is the key to adaptation. It's going to hurt, but make peace with that fact and don't listen to those people. If they tell you it's not going to hurt, then it's probably not going to adapt you as well. Yeah. And if you're trying to do it without having to hurt, like you've got to change your thinking right now. Like embrace that aspect of it. There is so much value. It is such a great teacher and you're not going to die. You will only become stronger regardless of whatever outcome.

You know? Yeah, that's exactly it. Dude, it's an absolute pleasure and honor. You're so inspiring. I'm just delighted to be able to talk to you today. Yeah, that's exactly it. Dude, it's an absolute pleasure and honor. You're so inspiring. I'm just delighted to be able to talk to you today. I just, I watched your swim. I was just riveted to it.

I'm just in awe of what you've been able to accomplish. And I have no doubt that you will not take my advice and take time off and you'll immediately go find something to do. And I look forward to seeing how that unfolds. Right? I'm right, right? You know it. No, no, no. You are going to be one of the first people I tweet if I do do something. Rich, I've got myself into another mess. Yeah, it's going to happen.

No, no, no. I do really appreciate that advice though. I really do. Because like I said, I am documenting the recovery process, but the recovery process is also mental. So what you just said to me, I'm genuinely going to hold very dearly and I'm going to really contemplate on that. So the vlog is continuing? You're going to film all this process of how you're going to reacclimate? Certainly over my own social media now. Everybody's saying like, how do you integrate back into society? You know, that you've been so feral for so long. And I think that's one thing. Yeah. That there is, even now there is an element of me, you know, it was, it was an amazing dinner yesterday. Everyone was in suits. It was very smart. The food was lovely. And I was just a little bit like,

ah, I wouldn't mind swimming, you know, across the Murray Firth. Right, exactly. Well, did you miss the Alcatraz swim? I did because we were flying out to see you. You flew, yeah. So it was Lewis Pugh and Aaron Pearsall. Did you meet Aaron? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's such a great guy. Yeah, yeah. And in your Instagram post, it was Adam Skolnick who was introducing you, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody wanted you to come up. Very good friend of yours. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't invited.

No one invited me. I didn't know anything about it. Everybody was speaking because they said, why aren't you coming tomorrow? I said, I'm going to go and see Rich. And they were like, oh, why don't you bring him down? So you had like literally an open invite. I didn't get invited. Nobody emailed me and said, come to the event.

I knew it was going on. Adam's a great guy. He's been on the podcast. he, you should read his book too. It's pretty cool about free diving. Oh, two things. One, you should definitely get an invite to the Hollywood premiere of Aquaman. You should, I don't know. If somebody's listening to this in Hollywood, get this guy a ticket to that. And the second thing is the queen should knight you. Is that going to happen? People were very sweet. I was like, people have done some very impressive things. I don't know if growing a beard and getting stung by jellyfish deserves that. Well, you're like this hybrid of like Serenofines and Jack LaLanne. That's amazing.

That's going to be on my CV now. Jack LaLanne meets Serenofines. I will claim that. I'm going to put that on a business card and quote you. All right. We got to wrap this up. But I will leave everybody by I'm going to put that on a business card and quote you. All right. We got to wrap this up. But I will leave everybody by saying check out his book, World's Fittest Book. You can watch this whole docu-series on YouTube.

Is it on the Red Bull UK channel? The Global Red Bull, yes. Global Red Bull channel. You can go back and watch this whole thing unfold in real time. There's 25 episodes now, so you need to put probably like two days aside. Yeah, cool. And more will be revealed. You're on this crazy press tour.

So by the time this comes out, you probably are already familiar with Ross's story, man. Well, you're doing Rogan tomorrow, yeah? Yeah, yeah. And then I think New York and then home. And then I'm finally going to be home where I can go to my own bed. And you got to connect with McAvoy. You guys got to do something together. Yeah. No, but this is what's so strange now is certainly over the whole swim yourself, McAvoy, there's

been a lot of people. I need to go catch up with Tim Sheaf. I've not seen him in like eight months. So there's a lot of people I need to either connect with or reconnect with now, which is exactly what I'm going to do really for the rest of the year so all right well much love brother uh i look forward to picking this conversation back up next time i see you dude oh thanks rich thank you so much thank you mate thank you peace let's we can do the next podcast in the maury firth that's a good idea the world war yeah in the Maury Firth. That's a good idea. The world floor. In the Corrie Beckett. Powerful, beautiful man, that Ross Edgley.

I love that one. I hope you guys enjoyed it as well. Do me a favor, hit Ross up on the social channels and let him know how this one landed for you guys. He is at Ross Edgley on both Twitter and Instagram. And for even more on Ross, check the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com and explore the world of the author of the world's fittest book, which you should also pick up on Amazon, links in the show notes to that.

While you're at it, lots of other links on the show notes. We put a lot of time into these show notes for each episode to help you expand your experience of the guest well beyond the conversation. So do me a favor and check that out on the episode page on my website, richroll.com. If you're looking for nutritional guidance, check out our meal planner, the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. Thousands of plant-based recipes, everything's super customized based on your personal preferences. We offer unlimited grocery lists. We have grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas. We have incredible customer service and support.

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It's a good one. Until then, peace, plants, namaste. Thank you.