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Athlete-adventurer Ross Edgley prefaces a lot of his anecdotes with: “And this is really interesting”. Usually people follow this phrase with something unbearably banal. But as the first and only person to swim around Great Britain, Edgley’s brilliantly barmy anecdotes live up to their billing.
On the day of our conversation, he’s fresh from spending six hours face down in a Scottish loch in preparation for his next challenge: circumnavigating Iceland as a swimmer. After we wrap up our interview, the Myprotein athlete will head back out for another six-hour stint. But this next expedition is more than just a physical test, he tells me.
“The Great British swim was very much done for records, like Captain Webb being the first to swim the English Channel in 1875,” Edgley says.
“For this challenge we’re working with the University of Iceland and various scientists to collect environmental DNA samples, so that’s more of the focus. Although it is still a world record. I’m just the first person stupid enough to swim around Iceland,” he jokes, before segueing back to the science.
“It was amazing speaking to scientists because they said if someone is stupid and stubborn enough to swim around Iceland and collect samples, that would be incredible for creating this entire picture of biodiversity. I was like, ‘Hold my beer’.”
The swim will see Edgley cover more than 30km per day as he chips away at the 1,610km total. And the journey is unlikely to be plain sailing.
Between 100ft waves, 100mph winds, sub-zero temperatures and sharing the water with orcas (an animal unnervingly nicknamed “the killer whale”), Edgley has more to contend with than exhaustion.
“I’m told the wildlife will be friendly,” he says. “There’s never been a reported case of an orca attacking a human, they’re that intelligent, so I think they’ll just come over and go, ‘What are you doing in the Arctic Circle? You’re not a seal, so we’ll just leave you alone’.”
“I think the main challenge will be how bleak and beautiful the landscape is. It’s interesting because around Great Britain you pretty much always had a harbour, but around certain parts of Iceland there are just sheer cliff faces. If a storm rolls, I’m hiding in a tiny crack in a mountain and hoping for it to pass.”
As far as sports science is concerned, this is uncharted territory, so how does one train to swim 1,000 miles while surviving the elements and evading would-be predators? With great grit, effort and attention to detail, it transpires.
A typical week ahead of the Big Icelandic Swim
Training: “I want to be as fat as possible but as fit as possible, very much like an orca”
The overarching goal of Edgley’s training for the Big Icelandic Swim was to get “fatter and fitter”.
“It’s basic physiology – body fat is insulating and muscle mass is thermic,” he says. “It sounds really counterintuitive for a swimmer to want to be as big as possible, but I’m taking swimming and moving outside the realms of conventional sports science.”
“That’s why I want to be as fat as possible but as fit as possible, very much like an orca. They’re these huge animals, then they’re just poetic in the water.”
To do this, Edgley inhaled food (more on this below). He also headed up to Ullapool in Scotland for a cold-weather training camp, and spent a large chunk of it partially submerged.
“The training is really simple in theory but brutal in reality,” Edgley explains. “In Iceland I’ll be working with the tide for six hours, resting, going with the tide for another six hours, then resting again. It’s a biphasic sleep pattern, and you’re looking at a total of 12 hours of swimming per day, so that’s what we’ve built up to in training.”
He also did roughly three strength training sessions each week to support his efforts in the water. But the focus wasn’t on mirror muscles.
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“So often people think about strength training as something you do to build muscles, but I’m looking more at the ligaments, tendons and connective tissue,” says Edgley.
“When you’re swimming, particularly in waves, your whole body is contorting and your ligaments, tendons and connective tissues are all straining.”
“But there have been so many studies recently showing the benefits of strength training for endurance sports. It’s called mechanotransduction; the idea that by applying stress and stimuli to a joint, it [the composite tissues] actually responds as well.”
Edgley uses strength training to bulletproof his joints so they can handle Icelandic seas. This involves a lot of work with Therabands and cables, as well as exercises hanging from a pull-up bar.
He also uses compound moves to strengthen the muscles in his back largely responsible for propelling him through the water. His workouts are efficient too – they have to be.
“People think of workouts as an hour in the gym, but I have to habituate 12 hours of swimming a day,” he says. “I don’t often have time for a full hour, so sometimes I’ll be in and out [of the gym] in 30 minutes.
“I do a lot of stuff that is very specific, hammering pull-ups and bent-over rows. Then there’s a lot of Theraband work, isometrics, eccentric work and putting the shoulder joint in weird places where it might experience those stress stimuli out at sea.
“There’s a lot of hanging work and cables as well. It looks so odd; I would almost have to demonstrate them to you. I train in my garage because I swear if I did half of this stuff in a commercial gym I would get kicked out.”
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Diet: “Essentially you have a calzone pizza baguette – it’s amazing”
Putting on weight when you’re swimming in a nippy Scottish loch for most of your waking hours is no mean feat. The key is consuming roughly 10,000 calories per day.
“People say never eat and swim, but that’s all I do’; my training is like an eating competition with a bit of swimming,” Edgley laughs. “It’s really cool how we’re challenging long-held beliefs of sports nutrition.”
“I’m swimming for 12 hours per day, trying to hit 120g of carbs every hour, on the hour, because that’s the upper limit of what the human digestive system can absorb, assimilate and use.
“And I have my tow float that’s just full of MyPro energy gels and electrofuel, so I’m constantly chugging those as people in nearby cruise ships watch on.”
Edgley also aims for 1.7g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day, (”That’s the International Olympic Committee consensus on sports nutrition, which I’ve always found works really well”) and supplements his diet with the likes of medium chain triglycerides and Myprotein green superfoods to fill his micronutrient needs.
However, it’s at this point that things get a little bit weird.
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“I’m trying to make up the calories as cleanly as possible,” Edgley says. “But it’s incredibly difficult to eat 10,000 calories cleanly. At some point you just have to start making it up [with foods that are] a little bit dirtier. And if I don’t, because of my high calorie expenditure, I’ll lose weight.
“I have weight gain shakes. Then a particular favourite meal of mine, which I’ve refined since the Great British swim, is a 12in baguette rolled up inside a pizza. Essentially you have a calzone pizza baguette – it’s amazing.”
To aid the bulking up process, Edgley also enlisted help of a couple of experts: elite strongman athletes Luke and Tom Stoltman.
“Tom is 175kg at the moment, which he says is very lean and svelte for him,” Edgley says. “It’s been awesome taking principles of strongman and applying them to swimming – two sports you think would never actually meet.’
“I went for a swim with them, and I’m pretty decent in the cold, but I ended up getting out and reaching for my woolly hat and DryRobe. I asked if they wanted to get in the car and have some gloves, and they were just walking around in their trunks going, ‘Nah, nah, we’re fine’. Steam was coming off them, like bison in the winter. It’s amazing witnessing how resilient they are to the cold because of their physiology, so that’s something I’ve been trying to replicate.”
The heavyweight trio went out for a meal during their time together and, needless to say, their table drew a few confused looks.
“We each sat there with burgers [plural], milkshakes and fries with cheese, then we also had our multivitamins, supergreens and glutamine,” Edgley says.
“People think that looks like such an oxymoron of a diet, but under very unique circumstances, when you want to get fatter and fitter, it is actually the optimal diet for what I’m trying to achieve. I wouldn’t recommend it for 99.99 per cent of people, but for me it’s working.”
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Recovery: “My body will wonder what I’m doing”
Edgley enjoys pushing the boundaries of sports science, but he also stresses the importance of nailing the basics when attempting any physical feat. For this reason, sleep remains his go-to recovery tool.
“Through my challenges, sleeping is something I’ve become so good at,” he says. “What’s going to be especially interesting is the biphasic sleep – sleeping twice per day – and getting into that routine.”
Cycling six-hour stints in the water and in bed is sure to discombobulate his circadian rhythm – our internal 24-hour body clock which tells us to be alert in the day and wind back at night. Edgley is using supplements in an attempt to combat this messaging.
“That could mean looking at zinc, magnesium and cherry extract to try to boost the body’s production of melatonin [to aid sleep]. Anything that can almost biohack my circadian rhythm. My body will wonder what I’m doing because I’m swimming when I should be asleep, so I’m saying, ‘Here, have some ZMA, stay alert’.”|
“I know I’m going to ask my body for so much, so any supplement support that can make the process a bit kinder is something I’m going to try to use.”
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What’s next: “Storms of snow and sand and volcanic ash”
Final preparations aside, the next thing on Edgley’s agenda is to hop in the Icelandic water and start swimming.
“We’re looking at May 16 as the start date,” he says. “I’m doing it with Clipper Ventures. Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the first guy to go solo around the world, it’s his company – he’s a legend. They’ve told me, ‘On May 16 we’ll look out at Reykjavik, and barring an absolutely wild storm we’ll set sail and gun it around clockwise’.”
But with Iceland’s climate, adverse weather isn’t out of the question, and Edgley will be hoping for amenable conditions.
“It’s obviously called the land of fire and ice, and people have been talking about these storms of snow and sand and volcanic ash – that’s nuts,” he says with another characteristic grin.
Edgley gives the distinct impression that he’s a foreigner to fear and nervousness. Both appear to have been displaced by a generous helping of enthusiasm. And it’s this keenness for adventure, twinned with sports science principles – and a 12in baguette wrapped in a pizza – that stands to help him expand his impressive (if bizarre) list of achievements in Iceland.
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