#824 - Ross Edgley - 317 Miles: Breaking The Longest Non-Stop Swim Record
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Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ross Edgley. He's an endurance athlete and an author. Ross just broke the world record for the world's longest non-stop river swim. It took over two days with no sleep, no stopping or touching land. He's also swam around the entire UK and competed head-to-head with sharks. Time to find out how his mind, body and preparation works.

Expect to learn how Ross prepares for an endurance event, how you go to the bathroom when you're locked inside of a wetsuit, what 50 hours of sleep deprivation whilst exercising feels like, Ross's diet and daily routine, the scientific mindset of resilience, strategies to push yourself to your absolute limit, and much more. Ross is a beast. The guy is a complete freak, and the fact that he does it all with a smile on his face makes me so...

unbelievably suspicious and in awe of what he's been able to achieve. He genuinely is a one in a seven billion type of human and there is so much

to take away from today. Also, people of Australia and the UK, my live show is coming to you this November. Brisbane, Wednesday, the 6th of November. Melbourne, Friday, the 8th of November. And Sydney, Saturday, the 9th of November. Tickets are available right now and selling very quickly at chriswilliamson.live slash Australia. And London, the event in Apollo on Thursday, the 28th of November. Tickets are already more than 50% sold out, so you need to get yours quickly at chriswilliamson.live slash Australia.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ross Edgley.

Take me through what you've just done. What have you just completed? Yeah, yeah. So I suppose after swimming around Great Britain, so the 157 days, 1780 miles, that was the world's longest stage sea swim. So stage just means basically that you swim to a certain waypoint, you get out on the boat and then you start from that waypoint. You keep going until you go all the way around Great Britain. I

I sort of had this idea and sort of fascination with a non-stop continuous swim, which is just basically no sleeping, no touching land, no one can touch you. I don't know why. It just ignited a bit of a curiosity in me. Tried a few times in different bodies of water. Loch Ness, which didn't go entirely to plan. Go through what happened with Loch Ness and the Italian one. That's right. So Loch Ness was the first one and that was 2022.

It was all to raise awareness around ocean conservation, doing some brilliant work with talus green parley, protecting marine ecosystems around the world. We had everything set up. I mean Loch Ness is a body of water that you don't take lightly. As long as the English Channel, the way that the wind picks up as well, it's a massive funnel. So you'll just end up getting 10 foot waves. We were already pushing it into the winter and then the Queen actually died the day that we were meant to start. So obviously out of sheer respect, you know, the entire country

shut down. Then I sort of sat there knowing full well, and as a team, we're like, okay, this is now getting into the winter, which it goes from being ambitious to a little bit stupid. But with all of that said, the goal was always to raise awareness around ocean conservation. So I was like, do you know what? Not ideal conditions, but let's go. So I sort of set off knowing, not to say it was doomed to fail, but that's

The odds were stacked against us. Things are going pretty well. 53 hours in. And then it just kind of went dark. And then I remember just waking up, hospital bed, seeing my mum, my girlfriend. And I was like, oh, it's not going well, has it?

They're like, no, it's not. Hypothermia cellulitis was actually what stopped it, which is where the wetsuit was chafing. It's a bacteria infection. But basically when that gets in your lymph nodes or bloodstream, it can be fatal. So, so glad that the team sort of called it and the doctor did when they did. Fast forward another year and I thought,

you know what, let's get away from the cold. Let's go somewhere warm. Went to Italy, Tresemino. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Again, paid for the boat, paid for crew. Everybody's out there. And then an anti-cyclone from the Sahara Desert ends up in Tresemino, which is kind of this huge dome as well. So it just became a massive sauna. But because of the authorities in Italy, they basically say, if you're going to swim in that lake,

You pay for permits, organized permits. It has to happen at that time. We flew camera crews out and crew. It had to happen. So we set off, I think in the shallows, the water was like 36, 37, 40.

Celsius. In freedom units, that's 100-ish. Yeah, it was a bath. It was a jacuzzi. Which FINA, the governing body for open water swimming, so often they will cancel events where it's anywhere just over 30 because it just becomes dangerous. So I knew...

you know, that that wasn't going to be great. But again, we tried our very best to sell. And actually what's really strange is I'm really proud of that particular metric. It was a great swim. Doctors and friends of mine ever since were just like, Ross, that was rhabdo waiting to happen to where the muscles essentially break down and liquefy and end up in your bloodstream, which is something you don't want to happen. They were like, we're amazed you went as far as you did. So in a weird way, with all the data we collected around that, I remain convinced

weirdly proud of it. The human guinea pig yourself, even though you didn't achieve your goal. So how far did you go on swim one and how far on swim two? So I don't actually know on swim one because it all went dark and it all got a little bit and then people had to basically jump in and pull me out. And as soon as you do that, the swim's over. So we don't know the metrics on that one. But the 53 hour duration was something...

I'm quite proud. And then what was strange with the Tres Aminos swim, because we went between two islands. So it was basically 70 kilometers between all the islands. But with the wiggle room, it was getting up over 100. Which again, in those conditions...

I was weirdly proud of. But we then sat there, fast forward now to this year, and I just thought with all the data that we have available to us, there was this allure of a river swim, a non-stop river swim. So basically, it's called the Yukon River Quest, where people paddle and kayak down there in boats every single year. Annual event, an amazing event. I sat there with my girlfriend,

just looking on the internet one day i was like oh but if you can kayak it you you can swim it in theory reached out to the health and safety team there the organizers out there they said yeah yeah in theory if you avoid whitewater rapids bears wolves you know there's there's a chance you could do it um the team out there were incredible the way that they read the river uh

It was just insane. It was such a team event. And essentially, this was last week now, set off from Whitehorse in Canada and swam 510 kilometers over about 60 hours total expedition time and set the record for the longest non-stop river swim.

Eventually, we got one. Is that different to doing it in a lake? Have you got assistance from big streams? Is this going to be contested in some way? Oh, it's exactly that. Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. So there's different categories for different things. So this would be classed as an assisted swim. So it's very different from a lake where there's no tide or current.

But with all of that said, it then comes with its own challenges as well, because as you're kind of getting pushed down by the river, it might take you down one route where you know that's leading to whitewater rapids, a log jam. You're just going to get impaled on some rocks. So it's almost like interval sprinting for 510 kilometers because you're the boat.

So you've got to essentially have enough power to steer your... Navigate around things. Exactly. So it's very different. And I think that's the beauty of open water swimming is there's so many classifications and categories. This is just a non-stop river swim. Talk to me about preparation. You did a lot of preparation for the Great British Swim. You've got this really interesting insight about size actually being an advantage, even though people might think it's not. And then...

What did you learn? Great British swim into Loch Ness, into Italy, into Canada. How did preparation change and explain what your training looked like? Yeah. I do not. I'm so glad you asked that just because I think preparation is so different for these sorts of events because people sort of think of swimming as just swimming. It's all encompassing, but it, but it's,

For me, it's so different. You couldn't compare me to Adam Peaty, for instance. Adam Peaty, a good friend of mine, greatest breaststroke of the world has ever seen. You look at him, he is a Mako shark. He's a white shark. He looks phenomenal. Broad shoulders, six foot plus. He's amazing. And in the water, he's poetic. You look at his technique.

unique. I am a chubby whale shark at best. I'm very different and they're two different disciplines. But I love that because I say so many people have like a swimming superpower. Some people are incredible. Adam Peaty is rapid. He's poetic. You look at him. I'm just stubborn. I'm stubborn. I can eat lots and I won't give up. And I think that's the sort of difference between the different disciplines. So preparation for this is

was really different because with most swimmers you'd say, "How's your technique? High elbow catch? Are you bilaterally breathing? Is it a two beat, a four beat leg kick?" All these technical things.

Whereas when you're 60 hours in, none of that makes any sense. You're just like, am I still kicking my legs? Am I still afloat? That's literally all you're concerned with. So preparation for this was like not necessarily building a faster body. It was building a more robust body because speed wasn't going to be what determined success or not. It was, is a ligament tendon going to give up?

gastrointestinal distress as well, almost training the digestive system. That's another thing as well. Studies looking at how competitive eaters, they have an adaptation in their stomachs. So now actually endurance athletes are saying, hang on, we can actually learn from competitive eaters. So all of these things actually preparing for a nonstop continuous swim, training looks very, very different to what a conventional Olympic swimmer would be.

How are you preparing the ligaments? What does this look like from a training perspective? Strength training. Yeah, I think with all training modalities, people look at proprioception, kinesthetic awareness, agility, mobility, all these sorts of things. Whereas strength as a training modality, it's called mechanotransduction. So people will think in terms of weights, stress and stimuli makes the muscles strong.

Yes, absolutely. That is true. But it's also the ligaments and tendons at the same time. So again, it's so counterintuitive because there's some swimmers who won't touch weights in fear it will affect their mobility, their proprioception kinesthetic in the water.

Whereas with me, it was very much just trying to build this big, robust body. I think, again, to use Adam Peaty as an example, he is a Formula One car. Everything on him is refined. It's unbelievable. It's designed to make him the fastest human in the water. I am a big...

I'm a tractor. F-150. Yeah, or John Deer tractor. Is exactly it. Yeah. Okay. What about the gastrointestinal preparation? What did that look like? Do you know what? This was my favorite prep, actually. So shout out to James Morton. He was the nutritionist for Team Sky when they won the Tour de France.

And he does some amazing research just into looking at not only the carbohydrates and or calories that you can tolerate, but the calories that you can assimilate at the same time. And that's really important because up until recently, people thought 60 to 80 grams of carbs every hour on the hour was the upper limit of what you could actually digest. Whereas there's studies looking at different osmolality, digestion of carbs,

We found that we've been able to push that to 120 grams of carbohydrates every hour on the hour. But what we were doing with James Morton, and this was fascinating, I found it helped so much, is when you're looking at just marginal gains, is we did that 120 grams of carbs every hour on the hour, but then also on top of that used MCTs, so medium-chain triglycerides that are very different to long-chain triglycerides because they act...

more like a carbohydrate. So essentially what we're doing is just trying to take the digestive system and say, how much can we put through every single hour without actually it sort of detrimental, you know, the sort of digestive system imploding as it were. And on that note, you know, for anyone sort of wanting to trial it, MCTs are something that you have to train the digestive system. There are stories of people having, you know, too many during- Explosive.

repercussions you said it chris yeah genuinely yeah people will literally just shit themselves yes yeah yeah yeah okay so uh

Kit, what are you wearing? Specially designed wetsuit of some kind? Yeah. Okay. You know, since we're on the topic of toilets as well, I might as well start with this story. Is there a butt flap? Is there a special butt flap in your wetsuit? How does it work? There was a butt flap. Yeah. There is, but to this day...

I'm unsure if my bum hole is in the wrong place or the flap was in the wrong place. Okay, right, yeah. I'm five hours in to what was a 60-hour swim. Sure enough, signal to the team. I was like, guys, I just went like that. T, as in I'm going to the toilet. They were like, cool. Everybody sort of turned their back to give me my dignity. Went to the toilet. Let's just say it didn't work. It didn't evacuate what it was. Right. So I'm then nursing.

what I was trying to get rid of in my wetsuit for what was essentially, yeah, what, 55 hours in the sun. So honestly, Chris, it was so bad. I knew as well, like this...

This is the thing. I'm just sitting there and I'm swimming. I'm just going, this is disgusting. But no one said this will be easy. We got it done, but it wasn't until the end. And again, the team were amazing. It was just made up of just big, hardy, manly Canadians. The sort of men you'd want if you go on to war, like in a hunt. These are big men.

And as they're cutting the wetsuit off me because of compression and chafing, I just said, guys, I... Heads up. Forewarning. I've fermented something. Indeed, I'm so sorry. And they went, no, no, no, it's fine. We've seen all sorts. They cut it off. What was interesting is Dr. Tom, very good friend of mine, he said it didn't actually smell like feces at all. He said it was more akin to a burning flesh.

I couldn't smell anything. You churned it into butter or whatever. It's essentially it. He said it was like a grey powder that had come. How that happened, I don't know. But sorry, like I said, the big Canadians, some of them just had to excuse themselves. They've seen it. They will gut a bear. They will behead a wolf. But you, after 55 hours swimming...

slowly mashing poo into your own wetsuit. They just said, I'm sorry, I've got to go. I was like, no, not for me, mate. All right. So tell me, tell me the story of the, of the swim.

Yeah, so what, from start to finish? Yes, please. Leaving out the mashed up. That can include. We'll revisit that. So yeah, it started off, and I think what was really interesting, it was my first river swim as well. So I was completely listening to the team. I think I tried to swim it as hard as I could as a swimmer, whereas what's very apparent

apparent, and I found this on the GB swim, is you need to treat it like a sailor, like a boat expert, like an adventurer. You need to treat your body like a vessel, like a ship. So I was trying to find the path of least resistance or the path of most assistance. So it was constantly weaving our way down the river. I think one of the biggest things as well was just the toll it took on the shoulders as well with like

The Yukon would ask so much from you. We were 24 hours in and we came to Five Finger Rapids. So you're 24 hours in. And for anyone listening as well, it's kind of like, imagine sort of running a marathon. And then at some point someone just turns around and says, whether you like it or not, you have to sprint.

you know, it's just like, but I am fatigued, depleted of muscle glycogen. It's like, no, no, no, the river doesn't care. Sprint or you will drown. So I think throwing curveballs in like that was pretty bad. Um, picked a fight with some rapids as well. Lost, um, started bleeding. I posted on Instagram, a picture of my legs, uh, which was a weird injury to pick up. And that was sort of a combination of the rocks and also chafing, but

From that, what was really strange is there was then a direct correlation with that and the number of wildlife taking an interest in me. So the first one was this massive eagle. And I've never seen them before. It was a pterodactyl. It was huge. And it's hopping from tree to tree while looking at me. And I turned to the guys on the boat and I said, what's going on? And they said, oh, well...

It knows you're too small to be a bear, too big to be a salmon. But what they typically do is wait for the salmon to exhaust themselves and stop flapping and then it will come down. So it's waiting for you to stop flapping. So sure enough, I never stopped flapping. Just carried on swimming. That was weird. Just being circled. You could have been an eagle's dinner. Exactly.

Saw a few black bears, saw mooses crossing as well. Moose are massive. Did not realise that. And then also as well, what was amazing is just catching up with all the stories with the guys on the boat. They obviously had to go to the toilet in the woods with a bucket. And quite often you'd see them sort of sheepishly running out of the woods, having seen wolf tracks. So it was...

It was an interesting swimming pool, basically, to say the least. Yeah, it got a bit weird. Well, you're in the wilderness for sure, and you're surrounded by all of these different animals, and if you're bleeding...

I mean, yeah, how much stuff bleeds for 300 miles and just spreads itself along the Yukon? Very few animals. I didn't really think about it like that. It's a big, you know, like an ice cream truck going by. You're the smell equivalent of that. Just advertising your sweet British flesh to all of the animals around.

around you I'm glad we didn't have this conversation before yeah that's that is true I was an ice cream van wasn't I you were yeah just playing your tune as loud as possible through the through the scent I just got back

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Each different, do you think about the swim from a mental perspective, 60 hours, 60 hours exactly? No, that was total expedition time. So I can't see, I think it was maybe like 54, 55. I count that because we had to get into position as well. Understood. Okay. So 54 hours of actual swimming. That's no sleep. That's not touching land. That's not touching a boat. Food is being thrown at you. Launched at me. Used with a net. I saw the Great British Swim. Yeah.

Talk to me about how you think of the fatigue part chunked. Is it the first 24, 36? How do you think about that? It changes so much. I think one of the biggest things I've learned from all athletic adventures is you

You have to outsource common sense. Like you can't trust your own brain. And it's so weird. I know Tim Noakes talks about central governor theory, you know, this idea or psychobiological model of fatigue that, you know, you're so much more powerful than your own mind allows you to believe. And essentially what's happening is your brain is a hypochondriac.

And it's picking up all of these signals from the body going, oh, Ross, you're kind of depleted muscle glycogen or neurotransmitters, chemicals, signals in the brain, not quite firing. You know, it's giving you all of this and it's basically trying to get you to pull that physiological handbrake. Again, people listening, they'll understand that, you know, if we ran a marathon or something 18 miles in, you hit the

wall you can't go on your legs are burning your lungs are on fire you can't go on and then what happens all of a sudden at 24 miles you see your family and friends everyone starts cheering you goose step and you're sprinting to the end it's like hang on wait you said you were done at 18 miles and that's essentially the same it's the same principle but just kind of extended over a longer period of time and

and it's knowing that that you can't trust your own brain it's a hypochondriac and then more to that point your brain as well will find any weakness and it's so strange speaking like this because it's almost like you're removing yourself from your brain but it's

If we were in the middle of the Yukon and we were doing this, all of a sudden it would be going, oh, Chris, what are you doing here? You shouldn't be in the Yukon. Have you trained enough? Did you eat enough? Didn't really sleep last night. How's that shoulder? You know, you've had that shoulder injury for a while. And all of a sudden you get these voices in your head. Isn't it funny how the...

way that the brain delivers these concerns is through a narrative, is through a story. It's personifying all of the worry and the concern because it could just be pain, right? It could just deliver just straight up pain to you, but it's being like a press secretary and it's

creating this sort of weird narrative and it's spinning things at you and, well, you've gone far enough. That's far enough. What if you drown? What would your parents think? What about the bear? What about that eagle? That eagle is still following you. All of those different things. It's so funny how it uses the very competitive advantage that we have as brains to use theory of mind, to have an internal dialogue. It uses that as the governor.

It's exactly that, yeah. And I think it gets really strange. I mean, I read a lot of Eckhart Tolle as well. And I think my mind even goes to that sort of place, sort of like identifying the ego, identifying these different voices in your head. And I think it's so interesting that when that happens, a very good friend of mine, actually, Benny Gordon, who's the drummer of Partway Drive, a rock band, amazing. I was wearing their T-shirt only here a couple of weeks. Aussie guy. Yeah, yeah. Whereas Benny, I remember he essentially...

gave me this perspective on things and I love this I've always I've used it ever since but a lot of people sometimes will when that voice comes up they'll shout back at it you know they'll say oh you know man up uh you know grit your teeth get through this and that can definitely work for a marathon I've found that can work for an iron man as well 12 13 14 15 hours can work it gets quite tiring to

54, 55 hours in. And so Benny always taught me, it's almost like if you sort of sit there, shut your eyes, and he said, your thoughts are like clouds that come into this clear sky. And at the start of the swim,

The sky is very clear. You know, the sun is shining in that head of yours. And then all of a sudden these dark clouds just coming and every cloud that comes across is just a new thought. And your job is just to observe it. Don't have to react to it. Just observe it. So as it comes in and it pops in your hair, just like, oh, Ross, have you done enough training? Just go. Yeah, I have. Thanks. Yeah. Disappears. And then all of a sudden 12 hours pass.

Ross, sun's going down, hypothermia is going to set in. Remember Loch Ness? Remember how bad that was? I don't want to do that again. Now I've got this. And it just keeps going past. Every cloud, it's just your job is just to observe it, not necessarily to react to it. It's very hard to do, especially when sleep deprived. But that's been one of the biggest things. It's like mindful resilience, as opposed to the Goggins, Jocko, sort of lean in, punch it in the face type.

type approach. Very interesting. So what were you, are you sort of embodying a curiosity there? Like, isn't that interesting? That's an interesting thought that comes through. And goodbye.

Is exactly that. Yeah. I think however I respond to it, the main thing is just making sure that it doesn't alter my biochemistry. So it's exactly that, that a thought that is like punching it in the face or say, no, you don't know me, you know, and shouting it, that is going to do nothing but spike cortisol. Your biochemistry is going to be out of whack. It's fine. Again, you can do that, I think for a marathon or 12 hours, but I've found personally, and it does work for some people. I mean, you know, Yoko Goggins, incredibly successful biologist.

I found it doesn't work for me. And whether that is sort of nature versus nurture, obviously they have an incredible military background. I am a country bumpkin. You're more sensitive to cortisol? Yeah, yeah. And just a country bumpkin, you know, sort of swims around Cheshire in the countryside. You know, I'm a hobbit, you know, whereas they are very much, you know, they are Spartans, they are warriors. I am not, you know, so I found that, you know, maybe a bit more

Courtney, who I'm a massive fan of as well. I'm maybe more that. You see her just in the pain cave, smashing sweets, having the best time. And I think I look to her and I go, oh, that's a bit more me. Yeah. I've found that approach works a bit more. What is being awake and in water for?

From a fatigue tiredness standpoint, like what happens when you get 24, 48, 54 hours in? Yeah. What's so interesting is it's not a steady decline. You know, it's an absolutely drop off a cliff, you know, so from anywhere from 24 hours from then.

Perceptual distortions, hallucinations, just straight up. And that was something I was so familiar with, with the GB swim. And you just kind of become really comfortable with it. So Chris Morgan, really good friend of mine, Olympic coach, Olympic swim coach, he kayaked hundreds,

hundreds of miles in support of me on this and equally did not sleep. And I want to say, I think we were like, um, probably like 40 hours in, I remember Chris is just kayaking next to me and, uh, he just pulls up to my side. I'm eating a banana on a break. And he just said, Ross, can I be honest with you? I said, yeah, no, please do mate. He goes, I am tripping. I went, oh, good. This is what you're seeing. And he goes, seven dwarves just over there.

They seem happy enough. I went, cool. He goes, what about you? I went, oh yeah, let the show begin. I just put my goggles on and started singing. And that's what it was. You just, again, rather than being like, no, get out of my hair. I just put my goggles on and just went, oh, it's good.

It's going to be a fun night. The original Apple VR Pro. Exactly. I remember on the Loch Ness swim, you were dogs. Weren't you asking, like, who's are those dogs over there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought dogs... To this day, I swear, dogs were swimming with me. One of the main ones as well. Again, actually, how sort of encouraging it could be, though. Like, for those who have seen Loch Ness, it's just a long sort of stretch of water and it's surrounded by trees. And at night...

You just see the silhouette of these trees, these branches, huge trees. And I remember looking up at a banana break. I'm just eating a banana. Everyone's checking on me. I'm like, you know, 45 hours in.

And to this day, I swear, it looked like a cruise ship because you can imagine the tree line looking like a cruise ship. I remember thinking, that's so weird. Like, why is there a cruise ship? Like the Titanic. I was like, why is there a cruise ship on Loch Ness? I said, regardless, I hugely appreciate them just stopping off and showing their support. So I start talking to the trees, thinking it's a cruise ship. And then all of a sudden the branches start waving as well. And it looks like people have come to the side of the cruise ship to wave.

And my girlfriend and my brother and my mum are watching as I'm there going, thank you so much for your support. I'm getting choked up. I'm going, thank you for your support. Don't forget we're protecting marine ecosystems. And they're like, oh yeah, he's talking to the trees.

But it was also, on that note, I think what's really interesting is they know it's going to happen. My girlfriend's amazing. I've been with her 12 years. She knows it's going to happen. Very good friends of mine, like Chris Morgan, like my brother, they're like, oh, he's going to go a bit crazy. Let him. That's fine. But we know when to pull the plug. They've learned to not deny the delusion. Exactly. Yeah. They know when to pull the plug, which is, you know, hypothermia, cellulitis and various other things. But...

if I'm talking to trees or seeing dogs a lot he's fine Goldilocks zone this is exact we've got him right where we want him he's good what's the longest you've been without sleep by the way I mean

I think there's certainly been a bunch of days I've done 24 hours, you know, back in the day when I was running nightclubs. There was one particular day I remember I flew, I got up at 4am, flew to London, ran a Tough Mudder for Purcell or Aerial. I think I remember seeing that. It was a bunch of influencers back in the day. So I did that and then got back on a plane, flew back to Newcastle and then ran one of our events and got in at four in the morning. So that was a full 24 hours. So that was busy.

I don't know, man. I mean, I've been...

My energy, my capacity to be able to deal with sleep deprivation now as I get into my 30s is just so poor. I do feel like I kind of tap the tank driving back from Manchester at 2.30 in the morning after having run a club night. So I feel like all of my late nights, I just front-loaded them into my 20s and I've got none left. I think Donald Trump believes that there's a number of heartbeats that you've got in your entire lifetime. And if you do too much exercise, they happen more quickly. So it's kind of the same as that. But yeah, I...

I don't know, man. Thinking about you being in, just being in water, just treading water, because while you're eating, talk to me about that. I was talking to a friend about this yesterday. The digestive discomfort that I have, even if I just lie down too quickly after I've had a meal, you know, because vertically being upright allows gravity to help the digestive tract to get things from mouth, esophagus, down, all the way through. What are some of the unique challenges and how do you get around that? That,

it's strange that of all of the tests that have been done on me at Liverpool John Moores University and Loughborough University, that was one of the biggest things that they came away with, that they were just like, when you look at Michael Phelps, Cam McAvoy, one of the fastest sprinters ever, Ben Proud, they all have amazing superpowers. Going back to that swimming superpower, whether that is hyperextension, Michael Phelps' ability to tolerate lactic, Cam McAvoy, crazy strong sprinting,

It just feels that when they were handing out superpowers, they just went, Ross can eat. That was it, genuinely. So when people say, you know, how do you eat and how do you... I'm like, that's literally all I do. I've never... And when you say, I can eat, that means I can consume a good amount of food with minimal digestive discomfort and also absorb it and use it.

Exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. And then not only that, actually, I think what became really interesting on this particular swim is eating became a way of making sure we sort of staved off hypothermia at the same time as well, because you just that thermic effect of feeding, just making sure just warm porridge oats, just you were being warm from the inside out. What were you eating?

At that point, we just hammered the warm porridge oats. And what was really interesting actually about this is, and I hope no one ever finds themselves in this dilemma, we were so cold on the second morning. The sun wasn't coming up for ages. It was behind the mountains. Water was so cold. Like I said, it was eight, nine degrees.

And the team started to increase my feeding as well. So it was rather than every 30, 35, 40 minutes, it was every 15 to 20 minutes just regularly. And it was piping hot porridge oats. And what was so interesting is Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that sort of pyramid, outstripped

At that point, all I wanted was warmth. That was it. So as you go up Maslow's hierarchy at the base, you've got sleep, warmth, food, shelter. As you move up, friends, family. As you move up, job security. As you move up, feelings of prestige, accomplishment. Until you get to the very top, philanthropy, self-actualization. I was so low down on that pyramid. In that moment, you could have offered me...

A brand new car, a million pounds. Just one hot water bottle. Yeah. I'd want the sun to come up over that mountain. That is all I wanted. And I think what was so interesting is,

In that point, I knew I wasn't going to give up. I didn't want to end up in hospital and I didn't want to give up. So faced with that, the only option was basically just to swim like crazy to heat the body up. And during feeding strategies, they were basically saying, how hot do you want it? And I was like, it needs to be as hot as tolerable. So sat there in the middle of the Yukon, I'm just there basically...

basically just drinking scalding hot porridge oats as I can feel it burning the tissue as it goes down but I would rather that than the hypothermia and it was a weird position to be in now sitting here in the comfort of the studio like

hand me something like a burning hot cup of coffee. I'd be like, oh Chris, it's too warm. But in that moment, I think it shows like humans are really capable of amazing things. I mean, that was very small. I'm talking, you know, when you hear stories of Everest and, you know, these incredible stories, that was very small, but it gave me a glimpse into what humans, you know, could potentially do, what you can endure with a greater goal. Hot porridge, bananas is one of your

It really is. So what else are you doing in order to hit? And have you got any idea of macronutrient intake across the whole time or caloric intake? Not really. I'm sure that the dude that was throwing the bananas at you can probably reverse engineer it. Yeah, yeah. We've got a long list. And then also as well, just shout out to my sponsors as well, PhD Nutrition, because just gels, electrons, they have something called beta fuel where it's just a really nice blend of sucrose and fructose. So you're basically not trying to throw whatever

one form of carbohydrate through the digestive tract, they have different digestive sort of speeds. So that again, we made up a lot of that as well. And then things got a little bit more creative when the sun came up and I could actually enjoy it a little bit more. A lot of the guys were having bison burgers, mousse soup,

Things got a little bit more creative. And also I could then enjoy it a little bit more, but there were certain periods, and especially as well in Canada and the Yukon, the sun never really goes down. So even like your circadian rhythm is all over the place. Is that good, given that you're not supposed to sleep?

I felt it was. And then also as well, what's interesting is a lot of the team didn't sleep at all as well. My medic, Dr. Tom, was amazing. Chris Morgan, kayak, Joe Kennedy as well, expedition leader, amazing. But in some ways, I'd say it was harder for them to not sleep because my face was constantly in water and it was eight degrees. Like it hurt every time I put my face in. It was just pins and needles to the face. So what was really interesting is

I actually found it easier to combat sleep deprivation. You're being woken up with a splash of water in the face. Exactly. Yeah. Which is really weird. Like I said, yeah, sure. It was harder swimming, but I would say it was harder for them in the really nice warm sun on a boat. That's kind of like rocket. It was harder for them to stay awake than it was me. The sleep deprivation, I didn't actually find that bad until immediately afterwards.

There's video footage as well. We're going to release a whole YouTube series on it. It's amazing. But the doctor's talking to me just how me and you are talking now, Chris. And literally, I would just be like that in between sentences. They were like, how do you feel? I'm like, yeah, I'm not pretty. It's so bad. What about other supplementation? Caffeine, any nootropics, beta-alanine, any other spicy stuff? What do you use? So much, yeah. Caffeine, we were just literally talking about this as well because we got into the Grams.

people dealing milligrams. I think the upper limit is 400 milligrams, you know, right? Yeah. So that's a really strong pre-workout. We were getting into the grams. Yeah. So over, well over a thousand milligrams. And then what was interesting, I'm glad you picked up on that because

At a certain point, the body kind of goes, what more do you want from us? Like, you know, there's no neurotransmitters left. You've completely depleted them. Alpha-GPC I found really works quite well. Yeah, we've got an activated version of that in Nutanix. Cognizant is activated alpha-GPC. Exactly. And I love that because, and I don't know if anyone else has used it when swimming, but I found, like, it just makes you...

happier staring at the bottom of a river or a sea and instead of swimming i don't know if this is true of running but certainly for swimming i found i'm happy for 10 hours and as i'm pulling through the water i'm like how's my high elbow catch oh that's a good feel for the water as i'm swimming i'm just more content with the process caffeine has always done that i've always responded really well to caffeine but alpha gpc specifically and i hammered it for these three days usually i

As per the teachings of Huberman, I'll sort of go on and off and sort of cycle it. But for this, we just went all out for those three days. And then immediately afterwards, like, yeah, I mean, the calm down. There's an awful lot of substances going through you. Okay, so you're using alpha-GPC, you're using caffeine. What else was in the mix? And that was pretty much it, to be fair, just because...

you didn't want to spike anything too much. You didn't want to, it was trying to make sure that the entire event was kept like this. You didn't need any adaptogens? You didn't think that that would be useful or interesting? No, not having trialled it in training. We always say no debuts come race day, you know, and we didn't have time, you know, to trial any of them. I think, worth stating is, this has just kind of ignited a curiosity in me for other stuff. And also as well, even Liverpool John Moores University, they were making some fantastic suggestions as well. They were talking about like even, um,

on swims where the sun does go down, just punching light into your retina, you know, literally. Oh, how fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe a couple of little red light things on the back of the knee attached to the wetsuit. You know what I mean? Like exactly. So interesting. Yeah. It's, it's cool that you've done the whole thing, uh, from a supplementation pharmacological standpoint on, uh, caffeine and basically cytokines, like it just get a cholinergic into you

make sure that you feel good in the brain, but you're not spiking anything too much. Yeah. I do think, you know, I think the most I've had of, of new tonic is maybe five in a day when I've been doing just back to back to back to back to back episodes somewhere. And, um,

The come down off the back of that is relatively gentle, but there are certain compounds that you could throw in that would just fucking destroy it. And I guess you're thinking as well about digestive discomfort. How is this mixing with the other things that I'm eating? That's a really good point. Yeah. That's why it was just trying to keep it like this the entire time. And also I think as well, as it went on, I found I was just metabolizing it so quickly. So initially half-life caffeine, eight hours.

I would certainly feel the effects if I had 200 milligrams in the early stages of the swim. I could probably feel that for four hours, you know, feel pretty good, powerfully pulling through the water, improving the ionic environment within the working muscles, neurotransmitters, chemicals in the brain, felt all of that. Going into the second day, two hours towards the end, you know, over that 48 hour period,

It was just... Endless amount. Yeah, it was just like, yeah. So it was just, I suppose, if we were to draw a graph, it was like initially wee, and then it just went like this. Doesn't matter how much more you put in the front. Did not matter. You haven't mentioned much about protein. What is the role of protein intra-workout in an endurance event like this? I'm glad you asked because we didn't. I try and force so much through the digestive system.

It was fats and carbs, you know, so it was really just trying to look at anything that would give you an energy substrate. So protein at that particular point, less important, like on the GB swim when it was a stage swim, so much more important. You had to have your protein. So you're going to break everything down over. Exactly, exactly. Whereas I think for this, it was almost like,

catabolic breakdown of the body. You were just asking so much of the body. It was going to be a mess. And immediately afterwards, shout out to the guys at Dawson Hospital. I rocked up. Kidneys were good, actually, surprisingly. We thought they would have taken a battering. What from? Just from, well, dehydration, essentially, from not trying to get much in. Because it was weird. I touched upon that a little bit now. I got...

sunburn with hypothermia which you mentioned rare blend they were excited oh this is fantastic we've never seen this before but it was amazing how much i was sweating and my skin was taking a toll when they got me out i was red i was burning up despite being in eight degree water for what was 55 54 hours so it was weird how that was all kind of going on um

Rabdo, again, they couldn't test for that because they couldn't test for creatine kinase. I reckon it was through the roof. Were you taking creatine throughout this actually? No, never used that. It was just, again, for what was going to be a 60-hour swim, it's not quite the same as a 50, 100-meter sprint. I sort of sat there and was like, it's not going to be that useful. I think that was the thing. That was the thing, stripping back all of my supplementation as well to know that when you're on the boat,

Whatever you're using is there. Do you know what I mean? So you have a very sort of narrow band. Yeah. Okay, so you get to the hospital. A little bit of rhabdo or a lot of rhabdo? I think there's probably a lot of rhabdo. Yeah. A lot of rhabdo. Hypothermia.

With sunburn. Sunburn. Anything else? I think that was, oh, and then cuts to the back of the leg. Yeah. Explain that. Yeah. So that was really weird. It was, we put like Vaseline and I think it's called lanolin, I think. Yes. Yeah. We put that. Breastfeeding women use that to fix their skin. Which is amazing. I put that all around my neck and that actually was pretty good.

Even put it down my bum crack to make sure that was all okay as well as no shaving. Brilliant. Like completely apart from the toilet mishap was perfect. But the one place was the back of the legs because when treading water, so sort of like a breaststroke leg kick or egg beater leg kick for those who play water polo, it was sort of riding up and in the crease of the back of the leg.

So that was the weirdest injury that I took. I just never thought. It looks deep. The image on Instagram is not. How is it now? It's pretty good. I mean, I'll take down my trousers if you want me to. Get them down. Let's have a look. Come on. Show me. Show me. This is what the people are here for. That does not look good. No, that's healed. Can we bring up a picture of before? Yeah, that's true. That's good. Oh, dude.

Wow, that's fucking gnarly. That's actually healed. I showed Rich, Rich Roll, and he was like, yeah, that's pretty good. Okay, well, still. What was that photo of your hand? Oh, yeah. Well, I think it was like, one of the things that doctors were most concerned with is the compression for so long. Like, if you saw a picture of my face,

my cheeks I looked like a hamster because that was the only thing that was kind of like protruding out of the wetsuit so that just kind of went like this and then I think my hands my hands were just damp and cold for what was a

Well, eight degree water, you know, 55 hours. So the hands are just turned like sponge-like. And yeah, that was that. But they've recovered. Look, absolutely fine. Normal hands. Yeah, it looks like a weird prosthetic rubber glove. It was. In that image that you put through. It was.

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Across all of the swims, you mentioned that sort of interesting perspective you have on resilience. You wrote a great book, Art of Resilience. Give me your overview of resilience and how you've come to think about it from a human standpoint. Yeah, I say in the book that resilience is suffering strategically managed. And what I mean by that is, you know, so often I think people think in terms of gritting your teeth, manning up.

you know and and for me it just wasn't quite right to sort of say that that's not that's not an approach that i found works it's like me and you go for a run right now um if we're 5k into the run and we're going to run a marathon you turn to me and say ross i've got a pebble in my shoe i won't go resilience man up run with it and wear it down no i'm like just let's stop and take the pebble out chris you know it's it's suffering strategically managed and i think um

Especially with the latest swim as well, with the Yukon, it is really nice if people say, oh, Ross is really tough. He's really resilient. I'm like, no, no, it's just suffering strategically managed. Neurotransmitters, chemicals in the brain, caffeine. Depleted muscle glycogen, carbs.

I need more than that MCTs I'm getting cold make sure that the porridge oats are turned up do you know me it's anything that's going on limiting limitations and I think to go off on a little bit of a tangent it's kind of what I love the heroic age of Antarctic exploration you're with admins and Robert Falcon Scott Shackleton and when Robert Falcon Scott

And Admanson, the Norwegian, Falcon Scott being the British guy, when they were racing to the South Pole, it was so interesting that Admanson with Norwegian efficiency, you know, he turned up. His guys were trained Olympic skiers. There was an Olympic skier in his team as well who led from the front. Everybody was made to practice in skis. Not only that as well, they turned up with dogs. This is something that you learn when going to the Arctic Circle as well from the indigenous people there. So he knew that if he got to the South Pole with this number of dogs,

that on the way back, he could eat a certain number of dogs for sustenance. And the British at the time were like, oh, that's ungentlemanly, like eating dogs, that's terrible. And then equally, when you look at the British expedition, they brought ponies that ended up falling through the ice and they had to feed them to the orcas. They brought mechanical skis that just broke down, tins of food that were just completely useless and poisonous as soon as they arrived.

And I think it was so interesting that learning from that, I was very much Scotty of the Antarctic when it came to Loch Ness and Tres Amino. You know, I turned up and it was like, right, let's give this a good go. Whereas for the Yukon, I was very much trying to be Admanson, you know, this Norwegian efficiency. And that's one of the biggest things to come back. If I was to add a chapter to the art of resilience, it would probably be that story.

I read it. I think I messaged you about this, but I snapped. I ruptured my Achilles playing cricket, the most British way to do it, four years ago at the end of COVID. And I put together, and this is the same, if anybody is going through good for physical stuff, probably also all right for emotional stuff, Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, Art of Resilience by yourself on Audible, I think. Go Audible because that's cool. And then...

resurfaced the documentary about Andy Murray is hip replacement where he gets a ball and socket it's like a steel ball and a ceramic socket hip replacement and those three that's my stack you know yours was like caffeine MCTs and

Cytokolines. Mine was those three. And that was the thing that really kind of set the tone for the rest of my recovery. But it's such a unique perspective on resilience. And I think that we are definitely in an age of...

glorification of the tough heroic man and the main reason being that it feels like something that's very absent it feels revolutionary it feels counterculture in a world which is very convenient and you go from air-conditioned house to cooled office it feels revolutionary

traditional in a sort of wholesome way to talk about just gritting your teeth and getting through it. But given the choice, I mean, what did you do for the swim? You didn't swim upstream.

When it came to what you were doing mentally, you didn't try and swim upstream. And it feels like that's kind of the philosophy that you've taken here. Yeah, I love what you said there. I never actually, I never thought about it like that. But this is why I wanted to appreciate coming on here because I'm still deconstructing the Yukon. So this is almost just like therapy. It's not podcast at all. Please tell me about your ancestral trauma. No, but that is exactly it. I didn't really think about it. But yeah, figuratively, metaphorically, yeah, it was very much...

trying to uh work with the river this is going to sound so strange as well but but it it really is like quite spiritual when you do and that's the only way i can describe it for want of a better term but with the yukon it just it almost provided everything that we needed so this is the glacial milks the glacial lakes they're melting which made sure that we had like a stronger current uh we had a brief window of those two days where the sun actually came out uh

It just felt like the Yukon was like, you know what? Like, if you're crazy enough to come and try this, we'll guide you. Well, after the first two attempts that you've done for this, you would owe something. Mother Nature was like, all right, I've kicked you in the dick twice. Here we go. I'll give you a nice little helping hand. Explain to me where your mind is. You know, you're doing six hours on, six hours off. If it was Great British Swim, you're doing 15 minutes or half an hour of 45s.

What are you doing with your mind for that long? The biggest thing that I've taken away is solely focusing on the process. And this is something I actually learned from the Royal Marines because, and anyone listening will be able to understand, when you're focusing on the outcome, you're not actually focusing on the process. So if you are...

rowing, you're on a treadmill, whatever it is. If you're looking at the gym clock and be like, how much longer have I got? Oh my God, I've only done 15 minutes. No, no, no, no. You're focusing on the outcome. You're not focusing on the process. If you're running on a treadmill, focus, am I forefoot striking? Am I heel striking? How's my cadence? That's what you should be focusing on. When I'm swimming, how's my high elbow catch? Am I catching it? Am I finishing my stroke? What's my leg kick doing? That's the process.

The moment I immediately turn to the boat and start saying, how much further have we got? How far have we gone? Those metrics are important. But if you keep on asking that, you're not focusing on the process. If you're not focusing on the process, you're not focusing on the outcome. But the weird thing is by just solely focusing on the process, the outcome becomes inevitable.

How do you avoid tapping into dopamine's a hell of a drug and the, where am I? Where was I? How far have I gone? Oh, this is exciting. That's something that fuels motivation. And for a lot of people, that's a temptation now. Is there a mantra that when that voice comes into your head, say, why don't we just ask? I'll just, and you know that it's going to rip you out of this process driven mentality that you say is optimal. Is there something that you do to bring yourself back to that? No.

Not necessarily. I think it's just really blindly and stubbornly thinking of the process. It was actually, I love Huberman. He talked about, there was a study, and I hope I don't butcher this, but he was talking about how there was a study where they had people on a treadmill and they had them run into kind of this kind of like corridor. And in this corridor, they said, you run as fast as you want. So they did.

And as they're running in this corridor, the sort of pillars going past them were either sped up or slowed down. And what it was showing... They were in VR of some kind. Exactly that, exactly that. And he was sort of saying how they were manipulating the columns moving fast. So if the columns are going faster, they think they're running faster. If they go slow, they're like, oh my God, is that as fast as I'm running?

And that's one of the biggest things that I took away, one from the GB swim and this. Certainly on the GB swim, because when you're swimming across like the Moray Firth, for instance, there's no land, there's no landmark, you can't see anything. Also, not only that, say it was kind of like completely overcast, you've not even got the moon, so it is pitch, but you're swimming in a black hole.

And you're like, am I even moving? Like what is going on? And I've even seen that. I remember in St. Lucia once I did a swim and got caught in a bad counter current and I swam as hard as I could for four hours. This was after an 18 hour swim and I did not move for those four hours. I was swimming as hard as I could to stay on the same spot.

So that's like running a marathon, well, an ultra marathon for 18 hours and somebody just putting a treadmill in the middle of the road and going, I'll just run on that for four hours. And then I remember stopping, turning to the captain and said, how are we doing? He said, Ross, I'm so sorry. We've not made any progress for four hours. I remember turning. I won't repeat quite what I said. My language was quite colourful. I was like, what do you mean we've not moved?

I was complaining for about 20 seconds and he just said, sorry, sorry, Ross, can I just interrupt you there? I went, what? And he goes, the whole time that you've been complaining, you've gone back 200 meters. I thought,

And that in that moment really taught me the ocean does not care. But sorry, going back to the experiment I heard from Huberman, I thought that was so interesting as well because I'm just literally like those columns going past. Sometimes I'm like, don't tell me because you might turn around and go, oh, Ross, you're going really slow. Bad day. Exactly. That'll crush me. Or you're doing really well. And it's a roller coaster. I'm almost like, I don't want to know because I'm solely focused on the process. I don't want an outcome. How do you stop yourself from giving up?

Oh, that is a really good question. One thing that I found going back to Maslow's hierarchy is sometimes you're at the base of that pyramid. So how you stop yourself from giving up is by looking after your primitive needs. Water, hydration, food, warmth. That's it. So if you're running an ultramarathon in the Arctic or swimming down the Yukon River, it doesn't matter. Look after those needs.

But then one thing that I found, it gets really interesting, is sometimes you almost flip Maslow's hierarchy because sometimes you almost forgo the base of the pyramid for a higher purpose. And I think that happened a few times in the Yukon where I just had to flip it. I was looking going...

okay, hypothermia is now setting in. I wasn't just shivering from my sort of extremities. It was, it was in your core. Anyone who has ever experienced that you are shaking from your stomach. And I was like, all right, that's not good news. So I knew at that point that my base needs, those primitive needs weren't being catered for. So I just had to basically just flip and remind myself of the higher goal. And what's that?

Which was the higher purpose? Which was the record? Which was contributing to sports science? It was all of those things that we all set out to do in the first place. And I think that's what gets really interesting, that if you have that higher purpose, a bigger cause...

then you can flip Maslow's hierarchy, but it takes a really big cause. It's got to be important to you. If it's not, you can't flip Maslow's hierarchy. Have you thought or have you designed a framework where you maximize your intrinsic motivation? You're not thinking about the extrinsic stuff. Is this something you did in advance? Is there a mindfulness technique? Practically, how do you do this? That's a really good question. I think I've become...

far more intrinsically motivated. I don't mind admitting that with the GB swim, I was very much inspired by Captain Webb, 1875, first guy to cross the English Channel. And he did it for records and accolades. That's what he did it for. He became a celebrity of his time. He was on matchboxes and everything. It was amazing. And I still love the story. Did it with his brother and his cousin feeding him beef broth and brandy. And he swam breaststroke all the way across because front crawl was ungentlemanly like at the time. Love that. Yeah.

But he did it for records because people said he couldn't, you know, and he made good money from it as well. You know, that was why he essentially did it. And I think I've always said the GB swim was my Captain Web moment. But after that, again, looking at Maslow's hierarchy, that was, I suppose, feelings of accomplishment and prestige and things. I found like I don't need another one of those anymore.

And actually, it would be a little bit weird. It would actually make me feel weird to just constantly go if they were solely for records and personal achievement, because you'd be like, what are you doing? And so that's why I've become a joke. I've almost become like a mercenary for charities. If there's a good cause, then I'm like wicked. I'll put my goggles on. You know, so whether that is the Loch Ness Swim with Ocean Conservation or more recently with the Shark documentary for Disney, which I know we'll come on to. It's just knowing that, yeah, there's a higher purpose and also knowing

Being intrinsically motivated for that as well, I think with Loch Ness and Tres Amino, it was really interesting how...

Back in my youth, I like to think I've matured a little bit back in the youth. It was very black and white. Did I get a record? Did I not? Success and failure. Whereas after Loch Ness and Tres Amino, I was really proud of those swims. So when a lot of people came over to me and they'd sort of go, Ross, are you okay? I'd be like, yeah. Oh, sorry. I'm like, don't be sorry. As a team, we had a great time. Got some great data, contributed that back to universities. And I was personally really happy with what we achieved.

I couldn't have said that previously. And I think that's, maybe that's maturing. There's a degree of completion and sort of validation that you got from the GB swim. Once that's done, it sort of opened you up to transcend that a little bit. I think exactly that. Yeah. Swims now are very much, did I enjoy it? Did it mean a lot to me? Did I push myself? Did I get something from it? And whether that was in Tres Aminos swimming through

a heat wave or Loch Ness and surviving 53 hours. They were all achievements that I was like, oh, that was pretty good. Yeah. And alone in and of itself. That was impressive. Yeah. Yeah. Didn't get any records, no achievements or anything like that. But personally, there are stories that I talk about quite fondly, I think, for intrinsic reasons. There's a question I've always wanted to ask you, and I've been thinking about how to put it across for a long time.

like yours, how I can ask this without trying to create too much pressure. So I'm quite fascinated by your demeanor. You're very positive, even in the face of suffering, it seems, laughing and smiling and so on and so forth. I've never seen, and it may just not make the edit or whatever, but I've never seen a darkness side of you. I've never seen...

agitation. I've never seen rage. I've never seen bitterness or resentment. I've never seen a lot of the things that typically drive very high performers and endurance athletes. And there's a degree of suspicion that I have around anybody who I don't see that dark side to.

Do you have a dark side? Yeah, you're not the first person to say that, actually. A fair few people have said that as well. Um...

I definitely think it's a sliding scale. So to sit here and say, oh no, I'm smiley all the time. No, no, no, no, no. And I can show you pictures actually of the Yukon when my face is swollen, you know, and I, you know, I'm not having a great time. With that said, I think one of the nicest things that the team in Canada said was, it was a great swim, Ross, but what we were most impressed with is you were still saying thank you when we were throwing you bananas 50 hours in. And like, oh, like I can talk about it now and not get so choked up.

But that would have made my dad so proud. And I think the thing is, is...

If anyone had met my dad, they would probably understand why. And for those who don't know, I talk about it in The Art of Resilience, and I can talk about it now and not cry, I hope, touch wood. When I was swimming around Cape Britain, it was going around Cape Roth, and my dad was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And I was like, that's it, I'm done. I'm just going to go on land. I just want to give him a hug. I want to be with the family. And he said to me, no, no, no, Ross, you can come home.

and you can give me a hug, but it's gotta be via Margate. You have to finish the swim.

So that's why at the end of the GB swim, when people see you, you see my dad in a wheelchair as well. Cause it was, it was sort of, the cancer was pretty bad at that time. The tumors were so bad. They couldn't walk. And doctors said, there's no way you can be around crowds. Like you have no immune system, Richard, like you can't be there. And he's looked all the doctors dead in the eye. And he was, he was always so polite, always handled himself like so well. He just said, I appreciate the medical advice. I really do. Yeah.

I don't want to go against it, but I will be there on the beach when my son swims around Great Britain, you know, and that's why he was there. And I think it was his just, I don't know what it's called, humility, whatever. But even when he was diagnosed with cancer and they got really bad. I remember we went to go and visit him in hospital and he cut up all of his face because he's a tennis coach.

And he cut up all his face because he fell on the tennis court and he went for a point. And we all went in, me, my brothers, my mum, and he's there and his face is like all bloody. And I was like, dad, what happened? And the tumours had got so bad, he couldn't run basically. And then he just goes, oh, I just had a bit of a fall. I was like, oh, dad. And he goes, no, no, I'm fine. Everyone's, you know, making too much of a fuss. And there was a silence. And then I went.

Did you win the point? Dad went, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone burst out laughing. That was very quickly followed by the doctor saying, Richard, you know, this is terminal. You're not going to be able to walk again. And he said, that's absolutely fine. And the very next day, he took to the tennis court in a wheelchair and just started teaching wheelchair tennis. You know, he just, growing up with that,

that's one of the reasons I'll always say thank you if you give me a banana and I've got cellulitis and hypothermia and I'm 50 hours into a swim because ultimately my dad when faced with stage four cancer did not batter an eyelid and just went that's absolutely fine I'll just coach from a wheelchair and just went straight back out there and it's that if you if you understand that that's the first time I've really told that story and that's the biggest thing that I think um oh this is going off on a complete tangent I'm sorry but it's you know you know they talk about you

you just inherit certain genes and stuff and you, whether it's spiritual, psychological, genetic, whatever. Sometimes I just hear my dad as well. You know, I'm 50 hours in and then I'm like, if you do not say thank you for that banana, like I can just see my dad's face just being like, you know, and that's what he'd be most proud of. So yeah, after that swim, it was, it was on Father's Day as well, the Yukon thing. So it was, yeah, I've done pretty well there, not to cry. It's impressive. It's a very, very meaningful story. Yeah.

Thanks for asking that. Yeah, because I can talk about it now without like, it was three years ago we lost him. So I can talk about it now. And yeah, it's someone said something lovely because it was like he was my guiding North Star when he was here.

And every single swim, I would speak to him. Like I said, he was a tennis coach, taught wheelchair tennis, visually impaired tennis. You know, even when he was fine, he would just blindfold himself, go out there and just start playing tennis. You know, so he would just play visually impaired tennis just to make tennis available to all.

and as a coach I would be like I'm going to swim around Great Britain and he's just sat there at the dinner table Sunday roast dinner and he just started doing the calculations it was like you need to swim this so he was my north star and what's interesting is now he's not

physically here but he's still sort of that North Star because I always think what would he say and you know you can actually for anyone who's lost a parent or anyone close to them they'll know probably what I'm saying you just you literally hear their voice you know that yeah it's just I'm gonna swim the Yukon I can hear my dad I can hear what he's saying right now you know it's just yeah

Thanks for listening to that monologue, Chris. What a fantastic imprint, man. What a hero. Yeah. Yeah. So that's it. I think when people go, it's not because I'm completely smiley and stuff. It's because my dad was the most stoically strong person I've ever met. So polite. And yeah, even, yeah.

In the latter stages. We're still coaching. He's carried on coaching. And even when he was completely bedridden, he was just doing paperwork and everything. I remember, I remember he rung up, um, cause he needed to sort his accounts. I never forget this conversation as well. He rung up the accounts, um,

And he was like, oh, I'm going to file my accounts early because he just didn't want to bother my mum with it. So he wanted to make sure all the paperwork was sorted. And they went, oh, Richard, you don't have to sort it for another six months. And he just went, no, no, I'm aware of that, but I will probably be dead. And they were like, oh, yeah, just so, you know. Matter of fact. I'm so glad I'm talking about this because I can talk about it fondly now. But even when we were sorting out his funeral and they said, you can be buried in anything you want. And he was like,

anything and they went yeah pretty much anything and he had a natural burial where they um create a sort of coffin and it goes in the ground and it biodegrades and you become one with the earth and stuff and that was my dad he was so sort of thoughtful like that and then they said yeah you can pretty much have anything you want and uh he looked at the designs and then eventually again we're all on the phone it just goes can i be buried in a tardis because he loved doctor who and he's just having these conversations

So I think that's it. You know I love stoicism and the last thing that you can choose is your attitude to things. And watching dad in that particular scenario and his attitude towards death and how he just completely agreed. I say my dad taught me how to live, but he also taught me how to die. And I don't want that to sound morbid because I think sometimes in the West we have a bit of a, you know,

Yeah, don't want to talk about that. It's a bit of a weird relationship with death. Whereas dad just taught me just to, yeah, just...

You know what I say, yeah, thanks for listening to that, Chris. Sorry, that was a long answer. Not at all. Not at all. I'm glad that I got to see that insight. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentous. You might have heard me say that I took my testosterone from 495 to 1006 last year, and one of the supplements I used throughout that was Tonkat Ali. I first heard Dr. Andrew Huberman talk about the really impressive effects, which sound great, but

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That's one of the best bits of British culture at its best, I think. You know, the kind of stiff upper lip Britishism that, you know, keep calm and carry on. Like, that's what it feels like it embodies. And I've been, since moving to America, I have been quite critical of British culture because I don't think that we fully embrace the best bits as well.

or as frequently as perhaps we should anymore. And yet you look back and Antarctic adventures, crossings of the channel, exploration, Ralph Fiennes, you know, we have such an illustrious history of people who were able to withstand suffering, take risks, be adventurous. And yeah, it feels like your dad is a...

from a bygone era, like a personality from a past time. Yeah, that is exactly it. All those what are now considered old-fashioned ideals, you know, he just had in abundance. And then that's what me and my brothers and my mum, yeah, still have. I love what you said there with, you know, Robert Falcon Scott as well, obviously perishing in the Antarctic. And I forget, it's going to annoy me now, but that particular part of his career, and there was one guy who had gangrene on his foot and, you know, turned to the team. He knew that he was slowing them down. And so, yeah,

one night in a tent as a blizzard was just coming in, he just turned to his team and he just said, gentlemen, I will be going for a walk. I may be some time. And he just walked to his death knowing that he was holding up the team. You know, there was, I completely get what you mean. There was an element of that that's quite proudly British, you know, that sort of, yeah. What's your favorite retelling or what's your favorite book of those crossings?

I think Shackleton's hard to beat. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. By Alfred Lansing. Oh, yeah. One of my favourites. Oh, but what he did as well, what the entire team did, certainly from that navigation from the Antarctic Peninsula through to the islands, it was just crazy how they talk about how they had like five seconds of coverage where the clouds cleared and they just looked and went, oh, okay. The navigator went, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

I think it's that way. And it's like, you miss. Oh, my God. Yeah. I get honestly, I get chills. And all of Shackleton's stories as well and how he just instilled in his men. But equally to that point, Tom Crean as well, the unsung hero of Arctic and polar exploration. Tom Crean, an Irish explorer. What was really interesting, it's only until recently that historians have kind of looked and gone, hang on, this name just keeps on appearing on loads of expeditions.

and it was just this guy who was just like bulletproof like hard as nails but it was always interesting that coming back from expeditions obviously adminson and shackleton were like no no one says anything until i've published my book you know

They could write, they could read, but there were people within that team, like Tom Crean, who was not very good at writing and reading. I believe he might have been illiterate. And there's still, I think there's a pub called the South Pole that he took all of his earnings, came back and started a pub in Ireland. You just get stories like that, which are amazing. And then Shackleton,

just keeping you know christmas pudding in his sock and then just pulling it out at the opportune moment to rise spirits in the team there's just like yeah there's stories like that that um us as a team going down the yukon we were very much like what would shackleton do what would yeah yeah yeah you mentioned your love for stoicism ryan holiday was sat in that seat not long ago

I'm always interested with people who have immersed themselves in a philosophy and a worldview for a little while and then matured

to see what they've retained and what it is that they still rely on. Because when something is new to you, everything's exciting, everything's sexy. You know, you've got the like dichotomy of control and oh yeah, but it's intro, but your thoughts are not thing, but believing makes them so like, you know, you've got this huge, big buffet of new insights.

What have you held on to from Stoicism that even six years, five years after beginning to write a book on it, you still use? I think it's the stories more than anything. I think so often people say, you remember not what people say, but what they do. And I think Marcus Aurelius is probably one of the biggest inspirations. By all written accounts, not a very well man. You know, survived wars, assassinations, etc.

complained you know and so this idea of like everything that he endured I just so often just find myself being like what would Marcus Aurelius be doing right now again it's just that idea of a

at meeting adversity with a smile, you know, just being like my dad, you know, I think it's that idea. So yeah, it's stories, it's people, it's what they embodied. And I also just love that Marcus Aurelius never wrote it to be a best-selling book. It was just his musings. It was his diary. And it's crazy that years and years later, people are going, oh my God, that's so applicable now. It was an operating system for the brain.

And that sounds so strange, like, because so often we don't know how to run our own brains. And that sounds really weird because it's not taught in school. But Marcus Aurelius did a pretty good job and it's essentially timeless what he produced. Yeah. I really do. I really do find myself going back to the lessons that I learned when I first started personal development and self-growth that.

you keep on reinventing the wheel around things that you already know. And then you find something and you realize, that's very interesting. It's a rewording of an insight that I learned in 2018. And I'm just sort of bringing this same thing up over and over. And yeah, I think that there's a really big argument for

embedding what you already know after you've done a good bit of self-work. Embedding what you already know as opposed to trying to acquire more. The dopamine from trying to acquire more is exciting in some ways, but I think a lot of the time you already have the answers after you've done it for long enough. Agreed. And do you find though as well that you think there's times where you go, I've got it, sort it, let's do it.

life feels great you go i know how it all works i am infallible nothing can touch me something then happens you go oh god no i i have permanent uh imposter syndrome so i i'm on i'm on a perpetual treadmill of not knowing what i'm doing it's idiots all the way up how high i climb um but yeah i i do know what you mean that you've you've

Josh Waitzkin from The Art of Learning calls it tighter and tighter circles. And this is the guy that Seeking Bobby Fischer was written about. So he's a chess prodigy and then lets that go and becomes a Chinese push hands world champion, lets that go and then dies.

takes up a combination of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and e-foiling and tries to become a world champion at that too. And I love the idea of tighter and tighter circles. He basically refers to the increasing resolution with which you look at the dexterity of anything, any pursuit that you do as your capacity increases, as you become better at what you're doing, the way that you look at it and the

the grace and the bar that you try and get yourself over becomes ever higher. It becomes ever more deft. The way that you try and do this thing, the stroke is even more beautiful. There's even fewer ripples in the water. And that's an infinite game. It's a way that allows you to perpetually be improving. But I often think about titra and titra circles when you believe that you've reached mastery, but then you just look at the same pursuit

with a sharper set of eyes, more close, better magnified. And you actually realize, oh, there's games within games here. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what? I'm so glad you asked that just because,

Well, going off on a slight tangent, can I talk about Shark documentary? Absolutely. Oh, amazing. Okay. So for those who don't know, this will probably be out when it airs. It's probably on TV now. How exciting. So for two years, I've been working on this documentary, Shark versus Ross Edgley. So it appears on National Geographic and Disney Plus. And oh my God, it was the best thing I've done. Like the best project to be involved in. Just essentially because I love what you said there.

The realm of conventional sports science, I've been studying it for over two decades, you know, from Loughborough University right up until now, started sports nutrition brands and everything. And I felt I fully understood a lot of things. You know, I was like, I feel pretty good in this.

The whole concept of Shark vs. Ross Edgley is me trying to take four sharks and compete against them. So National Geographic came to me and they were like, Ross, you love a challenge. I was like, I do love a challenge. They said, cool. We want you to polaris out the water, so jump out the water like a white shark, the ones that hunt off South Africa and jump out and grab seals. We want you to eat as much as a tiger shark. We want you to withstand as many g-force as you can, so agility as a hammerhead shark. And we want you to swim as fast as a mako shark.

In my head, I was like, oh, I reckon I would do all right, especially the eating, for instance. I was like, oh, you know, so let's take eating for an example. I was like, right, good. So tiger sharks can just basically migrate over like thousands of miles across oceans, just completely famine. And they're just able to just go for miles and miles and miles with no food. But then when they do find something because of the unique shape of their mouths, they can chow down on a whale carcasses, just like thousands of calories.

So I had to do the same. So I basically went to Loughborough University under medical supervision, lost as much weight as I could, and then in 24 hours managed to put on 22 pounds. It was amazing, Chris. I ate 40,000 calories. It was amazing. And I felt pretty good about that. I was like, that's good, right? 40,000 calories. Against a tiger shark, I reckon I'm competing.

We went out to the Bahamas. Mike Hightouse, world-leading expert in tiger sharks, amazing. We took a giant lollipop the size of kind of this seat here, went down, fed it to a tiger shark. It bit the lollipop, and then we were able to measure its mouth and how many, if that was whale blubber, how many calories it could eat. In a single bite, did 20,000 calories. Two bites and it's beaten you. Exactly. God damn it. You win again, Mother Nature. Exactly.

It's exactly it. So I became fascinated. This went down a rabbit hole. All of a sudden, I'm polarising out the water. So using a monofin as well. So again, I've got to learn how to do that. Alison Towner, world-leading expert in white sharks. She's amazing. And I never forget feeling pretty good. I've been training hard for this as well. Like basically, that was why I cut all that weight. My power to weight ratio last year was amazing. I felt amazing. I was like, this is gonna be brilliant. I'm gonna impress Alison so much. She's watched white sharks jump out of South Africa down five metres, polaris as high as I can get. I look at her.

Her reaction, underwhelmed, she said, Ross, that's really good for a naked shaven ape, you know, but you have this clumsy skeletal system, your 40, 45% muscle. A white shark is up to 65% muscle. The cartilage is so flexible. These propulsive forces just go all through this tail.

So again, I was like, right, fair one. Not very good. Then I thought, right, hammerheads. Fine. I'll take on a hammerhead. Hammerheads, because of the unique shape of their heads, are able to withstand so many G-forces as they spin. So they went, Ross, we're going to send you up in an RAF fighter pilot plane. Greeners Greenfield, one of Europe's greatest RAF fighter pilots, sends me up, goes, Ross, this is 1G. This is 2Gs. 3Gs. I'm just decorating the entire

side of the plane with my breakfast. Oh no. Yeah, again, and he was just like, yeah, hammerheads, you know, up to 10 Gs just casually as they're hunting just on the sea. What did you get up to in terms of Gs? Honestly, I say two to three and I was tapping out. Green is Greenfield. I hope I get this right. He says he's done up to nine to 10 more, I think. And what was amazing is I was like, am I just a massive wimp? Do people have a genetic...

propensity to predetermine to be good or bad. He says, "Yeah, an element." He was like, "You're pretty bad." All of the capacity went to your stomach. Exactly. Then Mako sharks as well. This one was amazing. The fastest sharks in the world. What was really interesting, training at Loughborough University, the English Institute of Sport, hammering training as a sprinter, just trying to get faster and faster and faster over 25 meters.

And then eventually we're like, look, we've got to think like a shark. And over long migrations, they'll use water columns, tidal currents, everything to just move faster. So we found this amazing current basically just off the coast of Wales and jumped in and just absolutely gunned it. Felt amazing. Still was woefully bad compared to- How fast did you go? Off the top of my head, I think it was over 10 miles per hour.

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Wisdom. Take me through you eating 40,000 calories in a single day. Explain what you did before. Explain what you did during the day. It was so good. So basically to deplete myself, this idea of a tiger shark going across an entire ocean, this famine period.

I just basically had to exercise for 24 hours non-stop. But to sort of accelerate that, and obviously my physiology is very different to that of a shark's, but it was the same idea of just depleting energy reserves. So there's this idea of exercising to deplete muscle glycogen, but at the same time as well as humans, I had to dehydrate myself as well. So Loughborough University have this heat chamber, an altitude chamber. They just crank that up to basically...

Kona, you know, the famous triathlon, you know, up to those temperatures. And they just locked me in there for like 12 hours. Yeah. And I was just sweating, depleted of muscle. I started cramping, void of electrolytes. There's a clip as well. Like, oh, my entire stomach just went into cramp. Like my sort of, you know, stomach around that, just the obliques, everything just went into contraction. What are you feeling like at the time? Oh, yeah.

horrendous and I think that was it I was trying to get into the psychology of a tiger shark and I think it's interesting because we humans have kind of lost that I think I've posted some clips on social media and people were like that's nuts that's crazy I'm like

is it because our ancestors would have just said that was monday do you mean that's not a big deal they would they would have just done that you know this ability to suffer like we humans are actually really really good at that um so it felt disgusting and then i think what was really interesting and what surprised me is afterwards i thought oh my god like as soon as i have to put on weight i am going pizza burgers ice cream i'm going cheesecake i'm

The first thing I wanted was just to curl up in a corner with the biggest ice bottle of water. That's all I wanted. And again, going back to that primitive need. I think what was also really interesting is having depleted myself so much. And for anyone sort of listening, they might experience this as well when you're dieting and you're not having crazy hyper palatable foods.

Anything tastes amazing. You can give me a raw stick of broccoli and I'd have been like, oh my God, that's unbelievable. So in that moment, not even flavoured water, I just wanted ice cold water. And I saw litres of that off. But there's no calories in water. Exactly. You did 40,000 calories...

plus all of the fluids that you needed to replace. It's exactly that, yeah. Yeah, so first off, it was just water because that was just so easy. You've done 24 hours. Around about 12 of it was in the hot altitude sauna. Yep. What else do you do for the 12 hours? Swimming a lot and then running around the track at Loughborough in a sweatsuit as well. Okay, okay. So this was kind of a little bit

mimicking a MMA fighter's weight cut a little bit, but way more aggressive. It's exactly actually. Yeah. Certainly with anyone who's doing mixed martial arts, they're trying to basically look after their body because then they've got to fight the next day. Whereas mine was just very much just like, yeah, ruin your body as much as possible. Deplete it.

Okay. And then did you sleep or did you immediately begin eating? Badly. Yeah. I was going to say. Yeah. I'm talking like I probably got two hours. My body was, it was incapable of sleep. I was so hungry, so dehydrated. The body just wouldn't go to sleep. The body was at fight or flight. Cortisol was probably through. Biochemically, I would have loved to have seen what was happening then. Like they would have just gone, this is disgusting. Yeah.

And then wake up in the morning, like I said, the very first thing, it was just water. But then once your body had basically gone, okay, we've had enough of that.

then the hunger kicked in and it just went crazy but initially it was really interesting because the nutritionists at Loughborough University were like whoa whoa whoa you gotta hold your stomach is like this right now it's just gone into a ball like we need to basically replenish muscle um muscle glycogen but very slowly electrolytes and then once we've done that that was probably four hours of very carefully controlled in terms of like the micronutrients the macronutrients and the volume uh it just got silly and and then it

it's like that primitive instinct just kicked in. What did you eat? Everything. Honestly, we just had deliveries on speed dial. So I started with pizza, saw off two burgers, fish and chips,

uh and then it just started to get really weird as well you know the the share and test cinnamon loaves yes i got like five of those and then eight liters of custard and i was just basically just take and just dipping and putting that in ice cream then also became my best friend because it got to the point where i wanted calories but i wanted to continue the hydration or something soft on my palate

And then that night when I slept, again, I had six cinnamon loaves just stacked next to the bed with what was eight litres of custard, but in a bucket. So I basically just had the cinnamon loaves. Sounds like a Nikocado avocado video. It was amazing.

and I just yeah scooped bang put that away and then because you're able to put away anywhere between I hope I get these right but you know 600 800 to a liter of water liquids every hour on the hour through the digestive you can't have much more than that so that's why my body was almost waking me up all the way through the night to just go there was an hour I woke up and it was like oh I just have a little bit more so we were just

forcing as much as we could through the digestive system into the muscle glycogen. And you ended up consuming 40,000 calories in a day. Do you know what the world record is?

I don't, do you know what? I don't actually know what it is. That'll be worth investigating. Imagine if you'd broken a record accidentally. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting when you just have to make up calories as though, because it just gets to the point, like similarly, when I've been bulking for the Yukon, you start off with cereal in the morning, chocolate cereal, and then you have full fat milk and then you have full, you might add Biscoff and

chocolate spread and then you just go from full fat milk to just double cream and custard. It just gets silly, which is it was necessary with the amount of time we had for the Yukon where you just can't make up those calories cleanly. It's not sustainable. I absolutely don't recommend it for anyone listening. And right now I'm in the phase where I'm being very kind to my body. But yeah, the Tiger Shark bulk was amazing. It's so good. That's wild. And just explain how it feels for

from an inflammation standpoint on the muscles, on the joints, to consume that many calories in a day? Yeah, it was strange how I think, well, so much was probably in pain at that point because my stomach was so, I've got to show you pictures afterwards. I've got a video as well. You can literally see the muscle glycogen being replenished. I'm so vascular as well because at that time it's sort of also, it's exactly it, yeah. So it was really weird. The sports scientist in me

was fascinated by this almost physiological puppetry. To see a video, I posted a picture of it actually on my Instagram, but you would struggle to explain to someone that that's 48 hours apart. You're like, that's not the same person. And it just shows how crazy malleable the human body is. I love the UFC and Alex Pereira. You know, I love, you know, went from middleweight, now light heavyweight. Talks of him eventually maybe going up to heavyweight, but Robert Whittaker, when he was like...

Who let this guy in? What is going on? I'm just... I think he puts on 24 pounds. I hope I'm not wrong there, but he puts on... Khabib used to put on an insane amount of weight as well, I heard. Yeah, yeah. I mean, have you seen him now? Have you seen what his face looks like now? That was a fat man inside of a fighter's body just...

That was the biggest fight of his life. It wasn't McGregor. It wasn't winning the title. It wasn't going undefeated. It was keeping that fat lad inside of himself for an entire UFC career. But what I love, there was a clip of him rolling with Luke Rockhold. I think it was DC, Daniel Cormier, who was talking. And he's just like, now, to your point, he's not cutting weight. And they said, it's just like wrestling a bear. Because now he's just pot on. He's not weight restricted. And there's that clip with Luke Rockhold. And he's just holding him. Just chilling.

this yeah he must be he must be 200 pounds plus now i think at least maybe a little bit more and i'm fascinated by the physiology of fighters like that and how you know at a certain point a lot of them will move up weight because they can't quite cut the weight when they were younger so sort of conor mcgregor training age exactly yeah yeah i guess you just accumulate it that's interesting just a byproduct of training a lot you just

pick up little hypertrophy coins as you go and you're like it's gonna be so hard i'm gonna have to suffer so much in other areas to get rid of this muscle i kind of just need to take it on the chin that maybe at 33 i'm just gonna have to go up a weight class yeah i think that's what it is and because you do see with younger again it was actually james morton at liverpool john moore's who i've been talking about and there's a study i believe it's published um i i i think i'm i

I think I can say his name because I'm pretty sure he is in the study, but it was Paddy Pimlet. And it was just talking about the insane weight cut of him. And his blood work was fascinating because it literally from the weight cut down, his testosterone just went, nope. And then he just refeeds and it goes, okay, and just goes back. It was crazy. So I think that's a whole area in sports science, especially with fighters, because they are so tough.

Going back to resilience, you know, suffering strategically managed. Some just lock themselves in saunas and just go, I'm just going to be here for four hours. And it's like, well, you're going to lose the weight, but you're frying your central nervous system, you know, come fight day. So I find that interesting as well. So although it was tiger sharks, it certainly gave me an insight. Because if you just said the next day, Ross, go and fight, I was full of custard. Sorry, sorry. It's too many cinnamon rolls.

I want to try and dig back into what we were talking about before that. The degrees removed that you are from the way that your mind feels by saying, I understand what's going on. There's an amount of norepinephrine. There's some cortisol. There's some adrenaline going through me. I'm depleted. I've got my cholinergic system. My cytokoline is down. I've tried to sort of ramp my adenosine up as much as possible, but all of those receptors...

What that is to you as a secret nerd sports scientist is a bunch of knobs and levers and parameters. And that's actually what's happening, right? What's happening underneath any...

mental state, physiological process, feeling good today, feeling bad today, feeling well-rested, not feeling well-rested, got lots of power in the muscles, oh, I'm feeling a little bit weak. All of those things are knobs and levers and dials that have been turned in one form or another by your physiology. The story that a normal person tells themselves about what that means, about who they are,

about their capacities as a person, about their resilience, their willpower, their worth, their validation in the world. I'm fascinated by your capacity to split apart those two things and to not get dragged into the personification, the narrative that that side wants to convince you of, and to see it with more perspective and equanimity

For the people who don't maybe understand physiology in the same way as you, how would you advise people that want a little bit more resilience to see what signals their body gives them during mental or physical tough times? Yeah. I'm so glad you asked this just because there's two things there.

One, there was a meta study, so a study of lots of studies that looked at successful ultramarathon athletes. I think it was running and cycling. It might have been swimming as well. But what was really fascinating is the age at which they were competing at elite level. So winning, these people are winning. Who were the victors? What were their ages? It was 35 to sort of 45, maybe upwards.

And I found that so interesting because it's one of very few sports where when you look at sprinting, weightlifting, there's all these arguments that elasticity of tendons, fast twitch fibers, reaction speed, all of these things, testosterone growth hormone, all of these things are better when you're younger. Whereas with ultramarathon running, it just feels like as you get older that you're getting as a better athlete. Now, whether that is capillary density, mitochondrial efficiency, uh,

I personally think it's just experience. You just bank so many ideas of how to suffer. You've been here before a million times. You know, now, if I competed against a 21-year-old Ross Edgley and we both went down the Yukon, I'd back the 38-year-old.

even though the 21-year-old would be so much fitter, I back the 38-year-old because I know we're going to be 36, 40 hours in and the 21-year-old will be like, whoa, God, I'm tired. The 38-year-old will be like, oh, I've been here before. I think that's really interesting. And then also to that point,

I think sometimes knowing too much can be bad. Knowing too much can actually hurt you. I think going back to those voices in your head, if you're really educated, that voice all of a sudden is, Ross, you know, how we doing there? Are you cramping in your left leg a little bit? Ah, have you had enough sodium? Oh God, your electrolytes must be so out of balance. But the fact that you've educated yourself, that voice is then saying that. And I'm

And I find it really interesting. Friends of mine at the Royal Marines down in Limston, they talk about the benefit of being a 18 year old turning up, saying to mum and dad, I'm going to go and get my green beret. Turning up, you turn up at Limston with nothing. You just told all your family and friends that you're going to become a Royal Marine. You've got 32 weeks to do it. If you turn around and you say, oh, I didn't do it.

you know, you're going to look kind of foolish. So these people, they turn up, these kids, and they are so naive. It's such a superpower. They don't know enough to know that they should struggle. And they just crush it. I've seen it. It's just like unbelievable times. When I go down to Limston on bottom field, there's an obstacle course. And I never forget, they put a full kit on me and I was just running through it. And I ran the bottom field.

I felt it was pretty good to this day I look back and go I couldn't have done much more I didn't stumble didn't hesitate I was fairly quick and they were like yeah yeah Ross you'd have passed fair play but I was well rested I turned up I hadn't done 32 weeks training but I never forget they then turned around out of curiosity I said what's the record because I felt pretty good about myself I'm not exaggerating the record I swear was it might have been a minute might have been two minutes faster than me

And I'm like, how do you make up a minute on what I just did? It was crazy. So there's some absolute specimens down at Limston. But one of the things that friends of mine who were the PTI said, oh yeah, but there's some young kids who just throw themselves over that wall. Whereas I was maybe...

tiptoeing. Little bits of hesitation. Exactly. And I've heard cyclists, pro cyclists talk about it a lot as well. You know, they're like, I hate going up against younger guys who haven't got a family and things. I'm like, why? And they're like, they do not touch the brake downhill. No risk. Yeah, it's almost like a...

cultivated naivety or educated stupidity. I love that. That's exactly what it is. But that's the problem, I guess, you know, as you begin to learn more things, as you get a little bit older, you accumulate this. You can't not know what you know. So you actually have to somehow educate yourself back into stupidity or cultivate this naivety. Have you been watching...

tour de france unchained on netflix no i need to you're the second person who said that in any way is it good i am fucking evicted to that thing the first season came out last year and i loved it and then i just saw it just appeared on my feed season two and i thought this is brilliant it's so great and what i particularly love about tour de france the suffering is so protracted you know

My housemate, Zach, is a weightlifter. He's competed at the top flight of weightlifting. And weightlifting is great, but it's over and done with within five seconds. Even a really long clean and jerk with someone re-racking a failed jerk is maybe 10, 12 seconds. The Tour de France rides, some of them are three, four hours, and it's over multiple days. It's over multiple weeks. And that's what I really love. I love being able to see the...

machinations of these different athletes and where they're putting themselves. And there was a time trial. I won't spoil it too much, but there's a time trial and it's the kind of golf that you're talking about where this guy fucking nails it and he's

top time and all the rest of it and there's one guy left to go and he comes in with a time that immediately gets him pd accusations there's no way that he can take this much time off a guy that is world world world class and he does and yeah i mean for you to just sit and and chill at a well-deserved chill after the last couple of uh download it for the flight home uh bro it's it's phenomenal and there's two seasons of it and it's really well done and

Now I care what's happening in Tour de France. I genuinely care what's happening. It's the same thing that we've seen with the golf. Is it top spin or full swing? Uh, the, the,

Base point, whatever the tennis one was, where Nick Kyrgios was the first episode. Drive to survive, that Man City thing for football. Getting to see behind the scenes and creating these narratives has just really, I think, revitalized sport in a different way. The UFC does it with their embedded series in the buildup. You know, they understand this. You need to get some...

buy-in you need to be invested in these fighters beyond just I like him because he's got a cool style or he fights southpaw or he's from my country it's more than that you know their family and their dog and where they live and the car that they drive and that kind of investment to me is awesome and yeah the tour de france unchained series is just

Out of this world.

no one is the new me and he marks this poor kid just dunks on him and then equally what I also found fascinating was Dennis Rodman and I love how was it Peter Jackson the head coach and was sort of like look that

that's what works for him. We need to let him go to Vegas. We need to let him go out. And Michael Jordan was like, you do not let him go. He will never come back. And he's like, no, no, you need to. And I've known athletes like that as well that I find so interesting. I was talking about this recently that if aliens came down to this world, there would be aliens

there are certain sports that you'd have a really hard job explaining that you have two athletes who are world-class, but their approaches are so different. So one of the best examples is Khabib and McGregor, you know, that you're sitting there going devout Muslim, you know, it says, I only need a bed, water and bread for training camp. That's all I need. You know, I don't need anything else. And then the whole time you've got McGregor smashing whiskey as a, but

it's like, that's what got him to the dance. You know, McGregor famously was like, oh, I'd never see a morning. You know, I'm such a night person. Oh, you'd never catch me, you know, early in the morning, a training session. And then others being like, I'm up at 5am in the morning. But how? So I think with regards to the McGregor point, I think that what got him here is not currently what he's doing to try and get him there. I think that he's leading a very different life to the one that he had on the come up. I completely agree with you that, um,

having a one size fits all best practice just does not seem to work. And this is something I really need to spend a little bit more time thinking about it, but I'm becoming more disillusioned with advice giving, which is blanket coverage. And what's easier is to basically say, this is what works for me and a little sort of brief description

overview 30,000 foot of my particular constitution and saying, if you are constructed mentally or physically in a similar way to me, you may find some success with this particular type of approach. If you were to say to David Goggins, stop using the chip on your shoulder, stop using the fire that's been lit under you from your childhood and from the people that didn't like you and from the doubters and all the rest of it.

he's going to say, that's not my fuel. I'm going to try putting diesel into a petrol car, right? It's not going to work. Such a good analogy. Whereas for other people, the Goggins approach is precisely what they need. And I'm becoming, I think, a...

a little bit more gentle with my proclamations about this is the right way to do something. I've never been too much of an evangelist about any one point of view, but even more so sort of caveating and realizing that there's sort of delicate areas here. But yeah, when it comes to the Khabib, the McGregor approach thing,

I found it so interesting to watch that come up. And I do think that that was the point where McGregor really kind of turned from fake heel to actual heel when he threw that trolley through the window. And, you know, I don't know. I really do hope that he is able to come back and do something sort of...

But him at his best for me was when he was working with Ido Portal. And, you know, he'd almost become this, he transcended the sport. He was this savant of movement and he was using capoeira and sort of free movement style things. He's walking along hand railings in like a,

parks in LA and it's so cool that to me was him at his best you're so right and on that note I'm glad you said because Dan Hardy is a good friend of mine and Dan I remember when he knocked out Aldo and then went on to become double champ with Eddie Alvarez and

Dan is incredible. His IQ, not just... I mean, I love MMA, but people who really know MMA go, Dan's another level. And he was just explaining exactly what you said. You're like, he's on another level. His movement, his understanding of spatial awareness. And he was explaining what he was doing. And I was like, I had no idea he was even doing that. And so you're so right. I think that version of... It was special. It was advancing our understanding. He then started to believe his own hype. Yeah.

which was dangerous. You know, what it is that gets you there is sleeping in the attic of your parents' house and rolling the same sequences and fighting and punching the same combinations and doing it. You know, there's a really great

my two favorite videos, three favorite videos from McGregor, which I'm a massive fan of. And it's a shame that I find him so cringe now because I find it hard. I look, I almost look back on old McGregor as a different person. I don't see him as the same guy. Now the Lambo, the roadhouse movie, the your wife's in me, DMS, like all that stuff just makes me think, Oh God, it's all the bad bits of Irish culture. Do you know what I mean? He's Conor McGregor is all of the good bits of Irish culture and all of the bad bits of Irish culture. Um,

And my three favorite first one is when he said, I went crazy for this game. He's basically talking about how he lost his mind doing that thing. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's a really nice analogy and actually maybe is a bit it's prophetic for where he ends up going in future. The second one is when he has beaten Aldo and the journalist is so good for doing this. He brings up the quote,

that he was going to talk about. I will create vacuums. He will think I'm there. I'm not going to be there. I noticed the subtle tell of him. He's going to unload that hand and blah, blah, blah. And then you cut that to the shot of him backstage in the warmup room, throwing that left hook that he ends up knocking him out with. Phenomenal. And then my favorite one, which I rely on a lot for myself is when he first won the interim title against

Chad Mendes. And then someone asks him, well, you've kind of fought for this title twice. What are you going to do the second time that you didn't do the first time? And he says, I'm actually going to remember it because he was so focused and so scared and obsessed about...

the victory that at no point was he basically present. And I've heard this story from high performers before, Olympic athletes and world champions and stuff, that basically when they try and think back to the performance that they did that got them the achievement that is their crowning glory, they can't actually really remember being there. They were in this odd sort of mental fever dream where everything was just performance. And I don't know, it's such a strange duality to think that

maybe the price that you need to pay to succeed at the thing that you want to do is being so unpresent in it that you basically weren't there to win your own title. Very interesting. That's a real, do you know, not, I don't, that was so insightful. I don't want to talk about myself and BruteMath to me at all, but I've had to wait six years fucking talking about myself.

But it was the same with the Yukon. So with the Yukon, we didn't go out on social media with that. It was the first swim that I didn't, mainly because we didn't have any signal when we were going down. So if I'd have announced that I was doing it, there would have been just been a period of 60 hours of people going, well, what's going on? Because we had no signal. But, and I don't, I wouldn't change it for the world, but when we finished the GB swim,

I'm not comparing myself at all because what Conor McGregor did was amazing. But I came back onto the beach and was immediately speaking to media and everything. And it was amazing. But all I wanted to do was hug my dad. And I wanted to be there with the people who had made this impossible. Whereas I ended up getting whisked away. And then I went to America on a US tour. It was a whirlwind. I would have still done the same. It was amazing. I just wanted a different world.

to Conor McGregor's point, I just wanted a different experience this time. And being out in the Yukon in the complete wilderness, we finished and I got that moment. I'm not saying it was better or worse. I still, the GB swim needed to have that. And it was amazing because we ended up swimming in with 200 people. It was incredible. People still come up to me with the GB swim hat and I see them and I'm like, you were part of the 200 and we hug and we're like, oh my God, how good was it?

And it was amazing. I just wanted something different with the Yukon. And at the finish, you know, I sort of collapse. I'm sitting there and then you see me in the boat. And I was just like, this is amazing. How did they decide when you finished? Did you just say, I've had enough? Did you get pulled medically? What happened?

Well, it got pretty ropey towards the end, actually, because the river really picked up. We broke the record. So we were like, right, at any point now, you can just head to a beach. So the rules dictate you have to leave from a beach and then you have to walk unassisted onto a beach as well. So they're the rules. So it was like, right, at any point, any logical place, now you need to get on. But it got really ropey because the river, we went down this particular part and there's sort of trees that are diagonal. So you can't see them. They call them sleepers.

because they're just under the water. If you get caught on one of those and you're being pushed by the water, you will essentially just be jammed under a tree underwater. So at that point, I think everyone was like, look,

everyone's sleep deprived we've got the record i think what was really interesting as well is um again 38 years old i'm maturing that i was like this has been amazing you know it's enough i think that's what's so interesting like at 21 nothing was enough i would have just gone no no no i want more i want more let's go whereas the swim was perfect everyone was safe

it was the sun had come up it was a nice end and i and i could enjoy it without being in hospital certainly from tressamino where i was out for a few weeks afterwards with rabdo um same with loch ness as well uh i was like i don't want that i want to be able to go and sit with chris exactly exactly genuinely that was all going through my head i was like this is enough and you know what you know i've already thought i've forgotten who said it now but when they said um

man who steps in the river is never the same man it's never the same river I've butchered that quote but I think it's something like that people know thank you thank you but I'm like look I could revisit this in a few years what's to say you know 10 20 years you know when I'm 70 years old I'll put my wetsuit on hopefully with the toilet flat working this time and

And I'll go again. But at that particular moment, it felt so right. And I was coherent. I was conscious that I could go, guys, we are done. And sorry, going back to what you said about Conor McGregor, it was just so nice. And we all had bison burgers and moose burgers. And we all sat down afterwards. And we all just reminisced because what they had on the boat was a very different experience of what I had because I was just literally staring under the water. What happened that you didn't see?

There's a whole other story. And I can't wait. Like I said, we're putting a YouTube series together, but it's amazing. So we had four boats, essentially. And there was one that went up ahead to make sure that there was no moose, bear, log jams, and also finding the path of most assistance, least resistance. And then there was one that was constantly feeding me. So it was constantly by my side. And then there was another one, which was the mothership, which kind of had, it was a slightly larger that had a bed on it so people could sleep. And then there was one behind that was making all of the hot water.

basically. And that just worked in like this perfect unison of just coming around. But then there was sometimes when I was swimming, I was like, hang on, there's only one boat. And it was because they'd basically just like hit rocks, come to a log jam. And there's just stories, and guys have got it on camera, of like my girlfriend and my older brother just deadlifting a boat off the rocks. My brother talks about it as well. There was a time where it went onto the rocks and

And they are like, Ross is heading to some rapids. We need to get there. This is really bad. And my older brother, Scott, just quickly looked around. I was like, there's five of us. I can sled drag.

250 deadlift 220 what can hester his girlfriend and he did the maths and was like we've got this and they did they managed to deadlift it off the rocks he's gonna be yeah the whole series on youtube is gonna be nuts that's very exciting yeah mission critical uh uh roles like that i find so fucking funny oh

Yeah, yeah. What have you learned from training Chris Hemsworth? The time with him and the guys in Australia? Not a lot. His genetics take care of most things. He's honestly, his, I said it before, his genetics, that family genetics need to be studied. It was crazy. Limitless was amazing. But I was, like I said, I was basically brought in with my niche skill set, which was ice swimming and climbing rope.

It was just, it was unbelievable. I still maintain that I don't think anyone's done what he did, which was to go from the Australian summer, take him and then just drop him in the Arctic Circle. No one does that. And I think Limitless was amazing. It was brilliant to be part of it. But one thing that, for obvious reasons, because they only had a certain amount of time,

what he did made no sense in terms of like an athlete periodized calendar so he was Thor size so Marvel were going get massive and he was like okay done and then extraction they were like right we need you

size. And then also as well, we had Limitless going, we need you to climb a rope dangling from the Blue Mountains and then also go ice swim. It was nuts what he did. But equally, like I said, I think the family as a whole. Liam, who is the new Witcher as well, I think he was 110 kilos. I've still never seen anyone do 20 barbells.

bar muscle-ups at his size. His back's ridiculous. And then equally, sled drags with Luke. Like, his legs are just like... You know those people who just have silly... Yeah, he's one of them. And then you only have to look at Leone and Craig, so they're parents. Craig, I don't know how old he is now. He's just coming out the water with a beer in one hand, surfboard in the other. Just chiseled. So it's a family of genetic freaks. Oh, it really is. And then, yeah, and then Elsa as well, Chrissy's wife. And then you look at the kids as well. So they're...

Sasha and Tristan, twins, they're doing jujitsu at the moment and they are like tearing through kids, like literally just like pulling limbs off. And then India as well. I tried to sort of coach her. It reminded me so much of Chris because I tried to coach her in swimming. She had a swimming gala sort of coming up, gave her a few pointers and she just went, yeah, yeah, cheers, Ross. Just gunned it and just smoked everyone with no technique whatsoever.

And then Elsa as well. She's an absolute specimen. The entire family, it just needs to be studied. Yeah, they're ridiculous. What's Chris's mindset like? Do you know what? I think he doesn't quite, I think, get enough credit that he probably deserves because, this is going to sound so strange, because he's such a good actor, you sort of forget that he's an amazing athlete. If you look at what he did in Limitless...

alone, any other athlete, and you said they did that, it would be great. If you took someone who was, I think he was, I hope I'm getting this right, I think he was about 112 kilos, Olympic gymnasts are maybe 55, 60.

So it's like taking a rope dangling 100 foot from the Blue Mountains. And I believe it was, I can't remember the distance. It might have been 50 meters. I'm not sure now. But it was a long rope. And taking two Olympic gymnasts, fusing them together and telling them to climb up a rope. Like when you actually break down the metrics, it was obscene what he did. And then with ice swimming as well.

Ice swimming, you need body fat. Body fat is insulating. He had none of it because he needed to look like Thor. So the only way you're really going to get through that is just pure resilience. Because physiologically, like the rope climb, you're completely handicapped. So I think that was one of the biggest things that I saw. He has a mindset of an elite athlete, but that's kind of not really talked about because...

he's Chris Hemsworth the actor does that make sense yeah it does yeah I think it's the same as Liam and Luke as well and all of they're just like when I train with them they don't they're proper Australians in that like when they turn up I go right what we training and they'll be like oh I don't know we'll throw up uh do a powerlifting centric workout I'll be like have you trained today they'll go no no no we're fresh but then I'll find out they've surfed for six hours but they don't count that as training what is going on yeah they're absolute specimens yeah all of them what's next for you um

Well, we've got a few ideas, but ultimately, Shark vs. Ross Edgley airs. I love doing that. It was amazing. There's so many different species of sharks. So should it go well, I'm already speaking to National Geographic. I'm like, look, I've got to run it back. Oh, I've got two, three and four in my head already. So there's loads of those. But then also as well, like I said about the longest swims, the river swim was amazing.

But I said at the start of the year that it's kind of this infinite goal, you know, that that was a river swim. I want to get back into lakes. I want to get back into the ocean. Just to sort of like touch upon that, I was sort of speaking to friends of mine about this. And I know you'll be aware of the myth of Sisyphus. You know, Sisyphus in Greek mythology, one of the cleverest humans ever to exist. And he outsmarted the gods numerous times, including death.

And the gods were really pissed at him and was just like, oh, you know, we can't have a human just outsmart us. So when he eventually came to the underworld, they were like, right, we're going to punish you. And the Greek gods were renowned for their punishment. They said, we are going to make you roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. And just when it gets to the top of the hill, it's going to roll back down. You've got to do that for eternity.

Sisyphus was like, oh, fine, I'll do it. So he started doing it. But then it was Albert Camus, the French philosopher, who just said, you know what? Sisyphus was able to outsmart the gods one more time if you imagine that he was smiling. And what I love about this is Albert Camus said, the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart. And I love that. That really stuck with me. And I think the river swim was amazing. But when people say what's next,

just like another long swim because ultimately, you know, that's my boulder. You know, the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart. And I know, you know, a good friend of yours, Jordan Peterson, I love his work when he starts talking about, you know, the purpose of life is to pick up the heaviest load and carry it. Simple. You know, Viktor Frankl as well. The meaning of life is to give life meaning. There's this whole idea of just purpose. You know, I think for me, when people say what's next, it's like, I'm probably going to pick up that proverbial boulder and go for another long swim somewhere.

Hell yeah. Ross Edgley, ladies and gentlemen. Ross, I really appreciate you. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the bits and pieces. Oh, bless you. Yeah, social media, I suppose. We've got Instagram, all of the usual channels. The YouTube series for the longest swim will be on there. Posting more pictures of poo flaps and chafing skin. It's been six years. Well, wait, I appreciate it. Get away, get off.