ENDURANCE » GREAT BRITISH SWIM
out… jellyfish!” said Ross. “The first one
wasn’t so bad, but once I took, like, the
10th one, straight to the face...” He’d
grown his beard to give himself what he
hoped would be some protection, but
his team had to develop a makeshift
mask to help ward off the agitators.
He took 37 stings in all, the worst off
the coast of Scotland. “The sting was
searing into my skin; it wrapped around
my goggles. This fat, giant jellyfish of
Scotland and its tentacle had been
slapping me in the face for half an hour
through a giant whirlpool. It was brutal
but you couldn’t stop.”
Sea otters and dolphins provided
more pleasant wildlife encounters, and
a highlight was in the Bristol Channel,
where he was accompanied for five miles
by a female Minke whale that apparently
mistook him for an injured seal. “For all
the jellyfish stings and the hardship, you
get a moment like that,” he says.
To fuel his journey, Ross consumed
between 10 000 and 15 000 calories
each day – up to six times the male
average – and wolfed down pizza,
pasta, rice pudding, 610 bananas
and 314 cans of Red Bull, which
backed his epic journey.
His final challenge as he fought
towards the finish was crossing the
Thames Estuary. “Imagine an Arctic
storm of Scotland fused with the water
quality of the Humber, throw in big
ships going across: that is the Thames
Estuary,” he said. Finally, Margate was
in his sights, and four hundred people
braved the icy Kent waters to swim
alongside Ross for the last half mile of his
new World Record.
Reflecting on what he dubbed the
‘Great British Swim’ he said: “So many
people told me it couldn’t be done – it’s
impossible – and I was like, ‘I agree with
you, in theory it looks like it can’t be done
but I’m going to try’. Having done it now,
what would be amazing is to see people
shift their own personal barometer on
what they think is possible.”
To mark Ross’s 100th day at
sea, the Red Bull Matadors
aerobatic display team wrote
100 in the sky above Moray
Firth Bay in Scotland. At the
finish in Margate, hundreds
of swimmers joined him in the
icy water for the final half mile
of his epic 3 200km journey.
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