"Pieces of my tongue broke loose – you could see the taste buds": Ross Edgley swimming around Britain | Life and style

REdgley, who has just become the first man to swim around Britain, is trying to describe what it feels like when his tongue disintegrates. "I realized that something was wrong when I woke up with pieces on my pillow," he recalls. The flesh was translucent, but it looked a lot like beef stroganoff or pork cooked slowly. "It's a call for tenders, you're just removing strips," Edgley said energetically. "You could see the taste buds on it, it was so thick."

Endurance swimmers call this the salt mouth – the effect of the accumulation of seawater in the mouth and throat. Edgley was at the worst when he had spent Dungeness in early June, about 85 hours of swimming after leaving Margate Harbor. "Even a week later, it was swimming like most people think of it as a sport, to become an exercise in survival," he says.

This "exercise" lasted 157 days, during which Edgley did not sleep more than six hours, and often less, and swam for six hours and sometimes longer.

Her support team, her husband Matt, and wife Suzanne Knight, were aboard their 16-foot (52-foot) Hecate catamaran. Every day, whenever Edgley boarded the boat, his location was recorded and he would return exactly at that moment when it was time for Edgley to return to the water, ensuring a continuous circumnavigation of 1,792 miles – about the same distance as London Moscow by road.

During his five-month journey in the Great British Swim, Edgley went through bins, stopped boats, faced storms, faced innumerable dolphins, suffered hundreds of jellyfish bites, saw "every seal" and became a connoisseur of the waters of the nation. . "Scotland really tastes great," he said. The Sea of ​​Ireland, he says after considering, was "organic". The Humber estuary: a "simple fertilizer".

Edgley – 33, a native of Grantham, Lincolnshire – takes a perverse pleasure in pushing his body to the extreme. A fitness and sports specialist, he played water polo for Great Britain before going to study sports science at Loughborough University. He has collected a lot of social media for his superhuman stunts, like running a marathon pulling a Mini Cooper or climbing a rope at the top of Mount Everest, designed both to raise funds for charity and to test his own theories about physical performance. He does not have super powers, he said in a first installment of his weekly video diary – a combination just enough naivety to begin with and stubbornness to finish. (He has since added some reservations to this slogan, lest his supporters – many of whom have already told him that his feat inspired them to sign up for Ultramarathon and Strongman competitions – put themselves in danger in their enthusiasm. )

In retrospect, he had a superabundance of naivety, Edgley admits enthusiastically, on the penultimate day of his journey. It's Saturday morning and we are drinking coffee in Hecate's badpit, moored at Margate's pier before its final stop. He shows me a bucket of 5 kg of Vaseline, almost emptied. "At first, it was like it was impossible to get through that. We did almost a kilo a month. "

Edgley himself is barely recognizable by the elegant bodybuilder of his first vlog. Then he looked like a superhero sharing his DNA with one of these giant otters, or a bull terrier pedigree. The bearded man sitting in front of me, dressed in a pompom hat and a hooded jacket lined with fleece, reminds Bilbo Baggins more towards the end of his unexpected journey.

In five months, Edgley put 8 kg to weigh 100 kg, which allowed him to gain muscle in the shoulder, lose it in his legs and develop a "volume similar to that of a seal". "My body has completely changed. I have bigger, bigger ones. Fitness is a slippery concept, although he has tried to point it out in his "eccentric and complete" bestseller, The World's Fittest Book. "There is no definition. Right now, I'm really fit if you want me to swim around Great Britain, but awful if you want me to run a marathon. "

After swimming for 12 hours a day for five months, he adapted "to the point where I'm really going to be bad on dry land". He was ready to do balance and leg strengthening exercises. His feet have completely lost their arches, he tells me, although their purple-yellow color is apparently not a cause for concern. His trench foot ("very bad, at one point, yeah, you can lose them") is cleared up, as is a "marine ulcer" on his heel. "It's not as bad as it looks," he said as he saw my expression. "If you had a small cut, it would never heal, it would sink deeper and deeper. It would basically start in the bones.

The realization of Edgley, it quickly becomes obvious, is convincing, not only as an unprecedented feat of mental and physical endurance, but as much like those lugid quasi-documentaries about medical abnormalities. Just as his tongue was disintegrating, the rubbing of his suit created a raw wound, inspiring viewers of his weekly vlogs to give him the nickname Rhino Neck. Efforts to protect him with layers of Sudocrem, dressings, petroleum jelly, trash bags and duct tape have been slow and only partially successful.

"Imagine having an open sore and rubbing it with sandpaper 12 hours a day, that's how it is," says Edgley. "I woke up the next morning and my sheets were stuck on it. I thought to myself "Oh, for the sake of God", I tore it, then I came in and swam. "His girlfriend, Hester Sabery, was lucky enough to visit him aboard Hecate at that time." Oh yes, it was horrible, "she says later, wincing from memory "He had just blisters on his shoulders, his neck, his chest, and when he moved, they were all right there on the pillow.

But he never thought of giving up, he said. He took the advice of Alexei Janssen, a Royal Marines performance coach, to focus on the process – the result would then be inevitable. "I never thought about arriving in Margate or quitting. I stopped counting. There was no time to pity on himself, his precious hours out of the water needing to be spent sleeping or eating. With a daily goal of 15,000 calories, Edgley called his company a "gigantic food competition, with some swimming between the two."

"ROSS EDGLEY'S BANANA TALLY", at all times on the roof of the badpit, indicates 649. While in the water, he ate one every 20 minutes, with an occasional break for porridge or fortified noodles. Between the races, he had breakfast – a real fry, with four slices of toast, two or three eggs, baked beans, the batch – lunch and dinner: a full day of meals every 12 hours. "It was like doubling," says Suzanne Knight, head of nutrition at Edgley. "The problem, is that when he started swimming, he was not wearing any fat, he was all muscle. That's why we went crazy and we so excited. "

For Edgley, a co-founder of a fitness supplement company, food had to be dense not only in calories, but also in nutrients; digestible in the mix of what he ate on the other day that day; and palatable, given its current state of physical degradation. ("Can you imagine that your salt tongue hangs, then you try to eat granola?") He took an intuitive approach to his diet, which allowed him to emerge from the ocean to engulf two Dominos pizzas, one after the other.

But the challenge was mental as well as physical. "In the end, I probably spent a month alone looking at the bottom of the seabed," he says. "Sometimes I did not think about surviving, I could let myself go to the coast. It's when you can get into this moving meditation and think about everything. But people ask me if I come to amazing epiphanies, while I go out and I go: "Do we still have cheese? Can I get a cheese toastie?

In his cabin, he read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations on Stoic Philosophy ("It's brilliant, this psychology in the face of adversity"), which he combines with the science of sport. Edgley knew that surpbading himself, or swimming in anger, could stress his immune system and compromise his endurance for the rest of the trip. His MO, as he explains in a vlog, was to "swim with a smile" even through the clouds of jellyfish. (Part of the reason he had a beard was to protect himself.) "It was easier said than done, and sometimes I had a brave face, for the crew as well."

His worst time, he says, worse than the salt tongue or the "hanging neck", was when he was kept awake for six hours by a facial wound while he was crossing the sea. 39; Ireland. He feverishly mimics his arms scratching his arms: "I seemed possessed. I was walking naked on deck because the wind was the only thing that soothed my skin. It looks like King Lear on the moor, I say, now dressed in my own weather dress. "Yes that was it!" Finally, I lay down and from my cabin, I saw the day turn into night and the night turn into day The tide changed and Matt knew that I I did not sleep, he said, "Mate, I'm really sorry. You must come in. "He had literally stopped biting me."

It seems paradoxical that someone who devotes so much to tweaking the body "as an instrument and not as an ornament" – a phrase by which he repeatedly condemns the approach based on the 39, aesthetics of the fitness industry in the broad sense – would cause as much physical damage. "I think sports science – and medical science – is right, rightly so, to be cautious and say," You need rest, you have to take antibiotics, or Something"Acquiesce Edgley. But he does not see in his body an instrument, but an experiment – a voluntary subject on which to test his theories on sports performance "in the laboratory that is the Great British coast".

In 1936, the Hungarian endocrinologist Hans Selye inspired it. By gradually increasing rats' tolerance to poison, Selye was able to prove that stress and stimuli were the key to adaptation, Edgley explains. "What I'm saying is, yes, I'm absolutely worried about long-term damage. But what if I become one of Hans Selye's indestructible rats? You do not know

"In the fitness community, we are all told:" Lose a stone in the week "," Stay in shape in five easy steps "- no one wants to say:" Prepare to live through stress and stimuli according to the Hans Selye's work in 1936. It's not going to sell anything Nobody wants to say, "If you want to get in shape or lose weight, it will be difficult – you will suffer."

Is he a masochist? "It's a good question." Five months ago he said no; now he is not so sure. "In this little bubble, with Matt and myself so motivated towards the same goal, I say to myself," Why not swim with the tongue hanging out? "I would say that I'm not a masochist, but maybe one In a month, when I look back objectively from the outside of the bubble, I'll say," What is it? what did I do? "

So, what will it do in a month? "Well, really learn to walk again" – and then a marathon before Christmas. "I think that could be a good litmus test."