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Great British Swimmer: "There were chunks of my tongue on my pillow"
His tongue is falling out due to 'salt mouth' and he's fighting off jellyfish. How has Ross Edgley handled the first 100 miles of his epic swim around mainland Great Britain?
Strongman, log-hauler and all-round adventurer Ross Edgley is on a mission to swim around mainland Great Britain. You can follow his progress on a map here and watch his third weekly video diary below.
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Watch the rest of Ross's vlogs here.
Ross has now completed the first 100 miles of this epic, 2,000-mile swim. But what sort of toll does completing a 100-mile swim at sea take on the body? Here are seven incredibly tough things he's dealing with on his journey so far – the fact that he's dealing with each of them and still choosing to carry on swimming is remarkable.
1. Salt Mouth
100 miles of saltwater swimming can do all sorts of horrible things to your body. As Ross reports in the third of his weekly vlogs, he’s currently struggling to eat, swallow or talk due to the water making his mouth and throat dry and sore. To make matters worse, (and don’t read this if you’re eating) chunks of his tongue are now falling off. Still, he gets back in the water.
2. Extreme Chafing
Ross's wetsuit has caused an abrasion across the back of his neck
© Harvey Gibson
Ever walked back from the beach in a wet swimming costume, and found things get a bit… sore? Well, an hour into the swim, Ross realised his suit was rubbing on his neck. And, as you can see, it looks pretty grim. Ross and his support team are still working out how to treat his ‘Rhino neck’. He's tried wrapping it in packing tape (pictured below), trimming his suit away from the injured area and slathering the area in Vaseline. Unfortunately, he’ll just have to push on until it heals – a feat he likens to rubbing a wound with sandpaper for six hours a day, twice a day.
3. The world’s busiest shipping lanes
The sea’s a big, empty expanse with lots of room to splash about in, right? Well, no. In his first 12 days at sea, Ross has had to deal with some of the world's busiest shipping lanes at Dover and Portsmouth. These treacherous waters are full of large boats travelling at around 20 knots. Ross has had to dodge P&O ferries and tankers; the whole thing has been the seafaring equivalent of trying to cross six lanes of motorway on foot.
5. Sea mist
Sea mist hinders Ross's ability to see where he's going
© Harvey Gibson
For most of us, mist is just something that obscures the horizon as we stand on the beach gazing wistfully out to sea. For Ross, however, mist presents a problem as it blocks out any landmark he might be swimming towards. As the picture shows, it’s somewhat difficult to navigate when you can’t see the hand in front of your face…
6. Extreme cold
Even in summer, the water around the UK is cold enough to reduce Ross to a shivering heap. The average water temperature is 15-20 degrees celsius which, when you consider that Ross is expending a rough average of 2,500 calories per swim, is absolutely freezing. In the video above you can see him struggling to eat as he shakes from the cold.
The issues with his wetsuit have not helped matters – in an attempt to negate the chafing to his neck, Ross tried swimming with his top half bare (apart from a healthy slathering of grease). The water was so cold that, when back on the boat, he had to be wrapped in a space blanket and given some hot food as soon as possible to prevent the onset of hypothermia.
7. The threat of meeting a Great White Shark...
Ross is approaching the coast of Cornwall. Which sounds nice, until you learn that a porbeagle shark – a member of the great white shark family – hospitalised a fisherman off the coast of Land's End in May of this year. The 8ft (2.5m) animal was estimated to weigh in at 20 stone (127kg).
More dramatically, in 2017, shark expert Graeme Pullen claimed he was tracking a great white shark in British waters. "Make no mistake, this is the big one," he told The Mirror. "The danger is that this shark will stumble across someone in a wetsuit and mistake them for a seal." If it is out there, let's hope Ross doesn't meet it – out-swimming it won't be an option; great whites have a top speed of 25mph. Luckily, Ross has a specialist safety team around him to guard against this sort of thing.
