Endurance swimmer Ross Edgley has told of the unbelievable pressure he felt as he undertook a swim around Iceland against the clock – because his girlfriend was pregnant with their first child.
The athlete, sports scientist and all-round hard man already holds the world record for swimming 2000 miles around the coast of Great Britain, a feat he accomplished in 2018. And previously he has also run a marathon dragging a car behind him and finished an ultra-marathon with a tree trunk on his back. Then, in 2024, he landed the record for the longest non-stop river swim, making it 317miles down Canada’s Yukon River in a challenge that lasted more than 62 hours.
But as he approached his 40th birthday, Ross felt he needed a new challenge. And tomorrow night, Channel 4 viewers will get to witness him as he sets off on his most extreme mission yet – swimming 1000 miles in freezing waters, over 116 days, around the coast of Iceland.
Ross encountered freezing temperaturs and 60-metre waves as he battled to get around Iceland(Image: PA)
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And all this in a race against time because his first child, a son, was on the way. “People will be like, oh my God, you idiot,” he laughs. “Why did you decide to swim around Iceland when you had a baby coming?”
Ross was well into his year-long training programme when he and his girlfriend of 13 years, Hester Sabery, decided to try for a baby. “We thought it would take a while so I’d have plenty of time to get back but it literally happened the first week,” he marvels. “I was like, oh god. So the boat’s been booked, the scientists are all lined up. Channel 4 are on board. But Hester is amazing. She just was like, ‘you have to go. You’ve done all the hard work now, this won’t come around again’.”
He admits that he’s lucky that she is so laid back. “She kind of knows that I’m a strange feral sort of boyfriend,” he laughs. “I’m wired a little bit wrong. So she just kind of goes, ‘look, it’s your job, go and do what you have to do, but be back to build the nursery’. She just understands.”
Ross is not programmed to give up, even when he’s threatened with hypothermia and cellulitis(Image: Handout)
In the final episode of the three part series which airs later this month, viewers will see how Ross faced a massive delay in the final stages, when he and the nine-man crew onboard the support boat were sandwiched between an erupting volcano, a glacier and a hurricane.
“There was larva spewing out everywhere and destroying a town to the west, then to the east it was Hurricane Erin, that ran across the Atlantic, and to our north was Europe’s biggest glacier with massive shards of ice coming off it. They said, ‘Ross, we’re so sorry. We’re going to have to wait for two weeks for this to clear’. And I was just like, ‘no, no, no. We need to go. I have to get back’.”
When he finished swimming around Britain a few years ago, he was given a huge celebration on the beach in Margate. But this time thoughts of the baby were foremost in his mind. “The finish line was always going to be back home when the baby arrived,” he says. “So while it was amazing to deliver our conservation research to the University of Iceland, I don’t think I really allowed myself to celebrate until I was home. I’d just made a promise to Hester and to my unborn son. I was like, I absolutely will be back. So it didn’t really finish until that promise was fulfilled.”
The carefully planned trip had him swimming 12 miles per day, starting from the west of Iceland, near Reykjavic, and travelling clockwise for 116 days. Along the way Ross reveals his love of the Icelandic folklore and mythology about elves and trolls and mermaids as he takes on the seemingly impossible task, set against spectacular landscapes and extraordinary wildlife.
But viewers will also see him battling hypothermia, tongue rot (caused by over-exposure to salt water) and sea-sickness. And then came cellulitis caused by wetsuit chafing – which can be fatal if the infection reaches the bloodstream – and rhabdomyolysis, in which the muscles break down through prolonged exertion.
“Essentially, your muscles are liquifying and ending up in your bloodstream,” he explains cheerfully. “I urinate into a transparent bottle and the colour is literally like Coca-Cola. You have something called myoglobin that your kidneys try to filter out. And that’s why your urine looks like tea.” When this happened, around 90 days in, he knew he was putting his body under too much strain. “It has to finish soon because my physiology’s imploding,” he says, admitting he was doing deals with is own body. “I was just like get me over this last little bit and I promise we’ll rest. I’ll give you all the vitamins and minerals you want.”
He makes money by writing books about some of his escapades. “I suppose I’m very fortunate, people like the sports science because it’s outside of the realms of conventional sports science. So a few books have sold quite well.”
Part of his training involved him putting on 15 kilos so he had a layer of insulation to help him for the 12 hours a day he’d be spending in the water. “For weeks I was just trying to get as fat as possible to become like a whale,” he says admitting that the hours and hours of swimming in freezing temperatures was “just so hard”.
The Great Icelandic Swim with Ross Edgley, Saturday, Channel 4, 7pm