Swimming
How Ross Edgley swam the Caribbean while dragging a 100lb tree
The British athlete reveals all about his insane Strongman Swimming project.
Swimming 40km in open water pulling a 100lb tree.
It's the type of concept that only someone who'd ran a marathon dragging a Mini behind them, or who'd rope climbed the height of Mount Everest in one go, could come up with. But that's exactly the challenge that Ross Edgley, one of the world's most hardcore athletes and a leading fitness and nutrition expert, set himself at the end of 2017.
Swimming for 40km between the Caribbean islands of Martinique and St Lucia, Ross planned to drag a 100lb log behind him, navigating his way through waters populated by jellyfish, sharks and large, spirit-assaulting waves. With a 15,000-calorie-a-day diet to keep him going (NHS guidelines recommend 2,500 per day for adult males) and empowered by a training regime that involved being pushed to his physical and mental limits by the Royal Marines, Ross embarked on his epic adventure.
Click here to see how Ross got on in the four-part video series, then read on to hear about Ross' training, find out why he ended up swimming over 100km, how he discovered the joys of jelly baby pancakes and where the project ranks on Ross' own crazy project barometer.
Ross, Strongman Swimming must have been tricky to train for – how did you prep for this challenge?
Based on research from the Journal of Sports Medicine, the drag of the log and lack of swimming efficiency meant this was almost an entirely different sport to swimming. I was burning more calories, moving slower and would sometimes have to use my feet to just check where the log was. All of this meant that the only way to get good at swimming with a tree was to actually swim with a tree!
Obviously I couldn't just take a tree to my local pool, so instead I went to Keswick in the Lake District, where I'd swim for hours with my friends rowing alongside me, feeding me chocolate, flapjacks and sweets whenever I needed them. People from Keswick were so supportive, and by the end of the summer, some of the locals didn't even bat an eyelid when they saw me walking down to Derwent Water with a tree on my shoulder!
It's also worth noting that I had to eat a lot – Strongman Swimming was really just an eating competition with a little bit of swimming to fuel the insane hours needed to become good at it!
Ross getting trained by the Marines
© Harvey Gibson
Why did you choose to do it in the Caribbean specifically?
Two main reasons. The first is because that was the birthplace of Strongman Swimming, when I completed an Olympic Distance triathlon carrying a 100lb tree on the island of Nevis in November 2016 to raise awareness for their eco-friendly projects and mission to become the world's first completely carbon neutral island by 2020. So it only felt right to take the sport back to where it all began. But it was also logistics, since I did originally speak to the Coastguards about crossing the English Channel, but was told that, because I was carrying a tree, I was neither a swimmer nor a "registered vessel". But thanks to the heroes at The Body Holiday, a lot of the paperwork and red tape was sorted, so I swum the Caribbean Channel instead – as a registered vessel!
How did the attempt go compared to how you’d envisaged it beforehand?
I knew it would be tough, but even the captain of the boat who'd been sailing those waters for 20 years said he hadn't seen 5-6ft waves like that for a while – possibly because we were just feeling the effects of the insane hurricanes that hit the Caribbean a few months earlier. But also the currents were so unpredictable.
That said, there were so many things I never envisioned that I was so grateful and privileged to witness, from the dolphins swimming with me for 10km, to the flying fish jumping over the log to the shooting stars flying overhead during the night shift of the swim. Just incredible.
How tough was this, both mentally and physically?
Obviously swimming over 100km with a 100lb tree is hard, and just being in the saltwater for 32 hours gave me 'salt mouth', meaning my throat began to close up. My face also took a battering, since during the attempt we were swimming into the waves, meaning I got punched in the face by a 5-6ft wave, repeatedly, for 19 hours and 61km!
At first it didn't hurt, but after a while it took away the first layer of skin on my face just below the goggles through this constant, mild abrasion – it was like salty sandpaper! But I was so well trained, having prepped all year for this; the body felt great and I didn't actually mind the sensory deprivation either when swimming at night and not being able to see or hear anything. I just let my mind wander and would start to daydream, often swimming 1km and not even realising it. I think if you can keep the mind occupied through this type of 'moving meditation', it's amazing how far you can go without realising it.
How did you fuel yourself before and during the attempt?
On an inhumane amount of food! I honestly think many unofficial records were set across the Caribbean that day. We had a plan going into each swim, from foods, eating times, hydration strategies. But all of that goes out the window when your tongue is swollen from saltwater, you're sleep deprived and you're swimming so hard into the current to battle your way out.
All I could do was eat intuitively, asking myself what I could eat to move another 1km. The support boat were amazing and would get equally as creative; at one point I fuelled 10km on jelly baby pancakes alone because my tastebuds were just so confused from all the salt. But other than this, bananas, fruit, rice pudding, homemade energy bars, coconut water, fruit loaf, chocolate – we even made giant-sized energels from food bags and put curry and rice pudding in, since normal-sized energies weren't enough.
How long did it take you to recover?
As soon as my face healed and me and my tastebuds were cooperating again, I was ready to go again. I had trained so hard for this, my body felt fine and I've since returned home only to find 200km swim weeks are easy without waves, tides, currents and a tree!
Where would you rank this in terms of the crazy challenges you’ve attempted?
At the time I created this concept, I thought it was pretty crazy. I always want to challenge conventional sports science and see what the human body is truly capable of, and so swimming 40km with a 100lb tree seemed like a monumental challenge. But the weird thing was, I ended up swimming over 100km with that 100lb tree – which means the original 40km was probably not crazy enough! Now, looking ahead to 2018, I've had to rethink just what my body is truly capable of and, as a result, I'm going to set out to not only break some long-standing swimming world records – but smash them!