#1200 - Ross Edgley

Joe Rogan (0:03)

Four, three, two, one. Dude.

First of all, what possessed you to want to swim around the entire UK? How many thousands of miles is that?

Ross Edgley (0:20)

Yeah, 2,000 miles altogether.

Joe Rogan (0:23)

2,000 miles of swimming.

Ross Edgley (0:25)

Yeah, yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time. And then halfway around, I realized how big Great Britain was.

Joe Rogan (0:32)

You've done some long swims before, but nothing even remotely. What's the longest swim you did before this?

Ross Edgley (0:40)

Yeah, I did. This is a bit of a strange story. I tried to swim between St. Lucia and Martinique, two Caribbean islands. It's only 40 kilometers from point to point.

And for charity, I was trying to swim from point to point with a 100-pound tree attached to my trunks.

So I was pulling the 100-pound tree, six-foot waves crashing down. And I actually didn't make it from point to point. I was like five kilometers from the end. And when I didn't make it, I decided to swim back the other way. So I ended up swimming over 100 kilometers with a 100-pound tree. It took me 32 hours, but still didn't make it.

Joe Rogan (1:17)

So what went wrong where you didn't make it?

Ross Edgley (1:20)

Tides, currents, you know, and I...

Joe Rogan (1:22)

Oh, you just got swept away?

SPEAKER_3 (1:23)

Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:24)

Especially attached to a tree, right?

SPEAKER_3 (1:26)

How big was this tree?

Ross Edgley (1:28)

So 100 pounds, but it floats, but it was more the drag.

So if there's any influence from tides or currents and it's pulling you in one direction... I mean, I was basically going to miss Martinique, so I was heading to Cuba, you know, or somewhere like that, and then on the way back down, they turned to me again and they said, like, you're going to miss St. Lucia, you're going to end up in, I don't know, whatever's further south than St. Lucia.

And I think I realized as physically fit as you are, the ocean just doesn't care, you know, it just doesn't care. And so after that, this was last year, this was November last year, kind of felt I had unfinished business with the ocean.

Came back to England, rung up friends of mine at the Royal Marines. I said, guys, look, this is going to sound so, so strange. I said, but I just, I need to get out my system. I just need to see how far I can swim in 48 hours. So I swam 40 hours. I can't remember what it was in there. I think it was 160 kilometers, something like that. And I finished, and I had basically trench foot. So where your feet and your hands are so kind of, I've got so much water in there, it's almost going moldy.

Yeah, so I had trench foot, and I'm sort of sitting there nursing my feet. And one of the officers, a good friend of mine, and they came over and they just said, they went, you know, real English, real marine. They said, you boy. And I said, yes. And they said, what are you training for? And I said, oh, I'm training for potentially attempting the world's longest current neutral swim. And then he just paused and he sipped his cup of tea. And he looked me up and down. He just goes, that just sounds a bit lame.

SPEAKER_4 (3:03)

I was like, okay, what do you want me to do?

Ross Edgley (3:06)

And he pauses and he says, you just need to man up. You need to man up and swim around Great Britain.

SPEAKER_4 (3:11)

And I was like, whoa.

Ross Edgley (3:13)

And I can't, I couldn't say no once the idea.

Joe Rogan (3:15)

I should have said, why don't you swim with me, bitch?

I'll do it if you do it, motherfucker. That's a crazy thing for somebody to be asking you to do.

Ross Edgley (3:24)

No, I know, right? So I said fine. Once the idea stuck with me, I mean, we've got this real history and heritage of British eccentric explorers.

And for me, growing up, there's a story of Captain Webb, so the first guy to swim across the English Channel. And for those who don't know English Channel, the tides they believed were too strong. The water was too cold. They said, you just can't make it across the English Channel, it's impossible.

But Captain Webb refused to listen and 1875 August, across the English Channel, and this is the part I love, on a diet of beef broth and brandy in a woolen wetsuit, he swam, I think it was 23 hours, breaststroke with his head out the water because, and I quote, front crawl was ungentlemanly like.