Ross Edgley

Ross Edgley (born 13 October 1985) is a British athlete, ultra-marathon sea swimmer and author.

He holds multiple world records and is known for undertaking athletic adventures around the globe in some of the most hostile conditions ever recorded on earth.

On 22 January 2016, Edgley began a marathon (26.2 mi) around the Silverstone circuit in Northamptonshire, pulling a 1400 kg car.

The event was dubbed "The World's Strongest Marathon".

But he is perhaps most recognised for completing the World's Longest Staged Sea Swim in 2018, when he became the first person in history to swim 1780 mi around Great Britain, in 157 days.

Voted Performance of the Year by the World Open Water Swimming Association, he documented his training, nutrition, theories and strategies and published them in his books titled The World's Fittest Book (2018), The Art of Resilience (2020), and Blueprint: Build a Bulletproof Body for Extreme Adventure in 365 Days (2021), all of which became No.1 Sunday Times Bestsellers and have been translated into several other languages.

Edgley was born into a sporting family in Grantham, Lincolnshire.

His father was a tennis coach and his mother was a sprinter.

Although playing many sports as a child (football, rugby, trail running and tennis), he specialised in swimming and water polo and represented his country internationally at junior level whilst studying at King's Grammar School in Grantham, England.

He later gained a sports scholarship to study at Loughborough University's School of Sport and Exercise Science, where he continued to train at the British Swimming National Centre.

A year into his scholarship, Edgley then retired from international competition and decided to transition into ultra-distance sea swimming instead, which the university supported through the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine.

Between June and November 2018, Edgley completed a 157-day 1792 mi swim around Britain.

Aided by a team of experts which monitored the tides and his health in his 16 m support boat Hecate, he typically swam for six hours, rested for six hours, and then swam for another six hours on repeat.

He typically consumed around 15,000 calories a day.

The gruelling swim took its toll on his body, disintegrating his tongue through the eroding effect of the salt, giving him "Rhino Neck" from the effect of the wetsuit rubbing, and his feet entirely losing their arches and turning a deep purple and yellow.

The team treated him with Sudocrem, Vaseline, plasters, bin bags and duct tape.

Edgley's journey was documented as a weekly internet series, "Ross Edgley's Great British Swim", produced by Red Bull TV.

After completing the swim in Margate on 4 November 2018, the World Open Water Swimming Association announced it as the World Swim of the Year 2018 and it became officially recognised as "The World's Longest Staged Sea Swim."

Talking about his historic swim Edgley said, "It's my hope that people remember the Great British Swim as an example or experiment in both mental and physical fortitude."

During his circumnavigation swim of Great Britain, Edgley also broke several other records.

Notably this involved becoming the first person to swim the length of the English Channel from Dover to Land's End, over 350 miles (563 km) in 30 days.

Edgley never celebrated the achievement, however, and instead joked it was only a "warm up" because he still had 1,442 miles to swim (and 127 days at sea) before he completed his much larger mission and arrived back in Margate, Kent.

Edgley also accidentally became the fastest person to swim the 900 mi from Land's End to John o' Groats in 62 days.

More than halving the time of the previous record (from Sean Conway of 135 days), Edgley and his crew said they did not realise they had broken another record and were just trying to swim fast enough to avoid an Arctic storm approaching from Iceland.

He then became the first person to swim the length of the Moray Firth, before heading to the English border at Berwick-upon-Tweed where he joked, "It was all downhill from here".

On 23 September 2022, Edgley undertook a charity swim in Loch Ness, Scotland.

Known for being the largest lake (by volume) in the UK, the water temperature rarely reaches above 5 °C (41 °F).

Which is why, in preparation for the extreme endurance event and to counteract the cold effect of continual immersion in water, he gained 10 kilos of weight by consuming 10,000 calories a day.

After 52 hours and 39 minutes he was forced to end his swim early due to the onset of cellulitis and hypothermia and was taken to hospital where he messaged: "As you can probably tell the swim didn’t entirely go to plan, but the awareness raised for the charity was immense which makes the cellulitis and lost skin worth it."

The swim was done in support of Parley for the Oceans (a nonprofit environmental organisation that focuses on ocean conservation), so was not governed by any swimming authority.

The route and precise distance are unknown due to medical intervention, but Ross remains the only person to survive swimming in the cold waters of Loch Ness for more than 52 hours.

On 13 July 2023, Edgley was scheduled to attempt another ultra-marathon charity swim in Lake Trasimeno, Italy.

Unfortunately during this time the Italian Meteorological Society warned of a deadly heatwave hitting the area where temperatures exceeded 45 °C (113 °F).

Dubbed the 'Cerberus heat wave' after the mythical monster that guards the gates of hell the World Meteorological Organisation later confirmed this was the hottest month ever recorded on earth.

This caused the water temperature to rise above 34 °C (93.2 °F) which the Federation Internationale De Natation (FINA) states is unsafe for ultra-marathon swims due to heat stroke since the maximum temperature of water for FINA-sanctioned open water swimming competitions is 31 °C (87.8 °F).

This rule follows a study carried out by the University of Otago in New Zealand that was conducted in collaboration with FINA, the International Olympic Committee and the International Triathlon Union today.

Despite the warnings, Edgley still wanted to attempt the swim for his charity partners.

After 33 hours and 70 km he was pulled out the water due to heat stroke and hyperthermia (an abnormally high body temperature, the opposite of hypothermia).

He later joked during a talk with GQ Magazine that although it had, "Quickly (and unintentionally) turned into the world's hottest lake swim... it wasn't all bad, for the final 10km I was solely eating ice cream to try and bring my core temperature down... which was awesome."

In 2019, he received an honorary doctorate from Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) in Lincoln, for his research into mental and physical resilience and continues to coach and lecture around the world in the science and psychology of adventure.