#2568 - Ross Edgley

I walked away from a whiskey deal after tasting an eighteen-year Scotch and realizing I couldn’t pretend the other bottle was my favorite. Time in a barrel wins. Scotland takes this seriously. We nearly used the whole pre-show on it, but let’s get to the madness: you swam Loch Ness for around sixty hours.

It was non-stop, and after nearly three days awake, everything narrowed until it went dark. I had hypothermia and cellulitis, a staph infection apparently introduced through my wetsuit. My skin was on fire while I was shaking with cold. Something touched my leg too, so I’m not exactly the authority on Nessie.

Infected, freezing, exhausted, in open water—brutal. Running lets you pause; swimming doesn’t. Did they pull you out?

Thankfully. I came round in hospital maybe thirteen hours later, saw my mum and girlfriend, and thought, ah, this has gone badly. A year later, Italy was the opposite: a charity lake swim in a heat wave, water near ninety-seven Fahrenheit, fish floating past cooked by the heat.

That gave me heat stroke and rhabdomyolysis—muscle tissue breaking down. My creatine kinase was nineteen thousand; over ten thousand is hospital territory because your kidneys are under pressure. As a sports scientist, part of me was fascinated. By Iceland, I’d had cold injury, infection, and muscle breakdown. I felt oddly hard to surprise.

You became an expert afterward, which is not the recommended order. But people have always chosen voluntary difficulty—the marathon monks, barefoot endurance cultures—to find something out about themselves.

At twenty-one, filming with an Amazonian community, I saw that firsthand. Their initiation involved biting a snake’s tongue, then silence. I was naked up a tree with fire ants climbing over me; if I made a noise, I’d supposedly be haunted. Face-painted and swept up in it, I did the tongue bit. Ridiculous, but I’d probably do it again in that moment.

Living with the Evenki in Siberia showed me how far civilization can get from survival. Some practices shocked me, but they depended completely on their animals. I’m not saying every ritual is wise; hardship and necessity create a different relationship to pain, bodies, and nature.

Nature was clear underwater too. Great whites off Australia seemed to identify me as the least comfortable diver. Their electroreception picks up heart rate, movement, panic, and they came right for me. I stayed composed enough that they decided I wasn’t worth it. With tiger sharks, eye contact matters; if they drift behind you unseen, that can be it.

Sharks are not ocean friends. People treat the sea like a cute aquarium until an apex predator reads one bad movement as food. I’m not saying destroy nature; I’m saying don’t pretend it’s harmless.

The Yukon was another kind of vulnerability. I swam five hundred and ten kilometers in about sixty hours, got bounced through rapids and cut up, then blood started dripping from my suit. Bears and wolves appeared on the banks. My team said I was basically an ice-cream van advertising to wildlife. Black bears were wary; brown bears looked like they were assessing a menu.

That’s why the crew had what amounted to a cannon. A grizzly with cubs is not something you outrun, climb away from, or negotiate with.

Iceland gave it a mythic frame. Berserker roughly means bear-shirt: warriors taking on an animal’s spirit. I love the attitude behind it: fate may be fixed, but your stance toward it is yours. Odin knew Ragnarok was coming and still faced it.

Before I circumnavigated Iceland, a blessing ceremony named protective beings: bull, eagle, dragon, giant. Then birds dived at me in the north, waterfalls and caves made the dragon feel plausible, and locals pointed to roads bent around elf territory. Under the northern lights, an old fisherman told me they might be deciding whether I lived. At the final swim, one hundred and twelve days later, the lights returned.

My partner was pregnant, and I had to get home. The University of Iceland wanted environmental DNA samples, so the expedition had science built in, but hurricane conditions, poisonous volcanic gas, and glacier ice kept interfering. Salt was breaking down my tongue; jellyfish hit my face. Fatherhood gave me motivation I’d never had. I got home three days before my son arrived.

Kids changed me too. Not everybody needs them, but for me they enlarged the love I could hold. The difficult person becomes somebody’s little boy whose life went sideways, not just an asshole frozen in time.

I’d lost my dad four years earlier, so Iceland sat between grief and new life. I’d been selfish and single-minded about swimming. Then my son came along and the chemistry changed. I hope my children see the values I was given—not that they copy these swims, but that they understand why I kept trying.

For me, it’s pain versus purpose. My brain shouts quit—the neck is raw, the tongue’s wrecked, I’ve fought a current for hours—but if purpose outweighs it, I continue. Sometimes it’s grit; sometimes strategy or reframing. Be the hero in your own story instead of treating suffering as meaningless.

I train for Arctic water to be more whale-like than pool-sprinter-like: bulk keeps me warm, and strength gives tendons and connective tissue resilience. Water polo built that early. At thirteen, against grown lads, it was water jiu-jitsu. I split my tongue with an elbow, sprinted back to defend, and only noticed the blood was mine when the crowd stared. You learn to stay calm while uncomfortable.

A special-forces friend told me selection is about how you handle losing again and again. On the Yukon, six hours into a sixty-hour record attempt, my wetsuit toilet flap failed. I could stop and be the guy who quit after soiling himself, or zip it up and continue. It became a black-wetsuit slow cooker. By the end, I was dodging bears and tearing up my shoulder anyway.

That is why your stories land. Nobody needs to swim for days or sit in a suit full of disaster. They hear it and think maybe their own limit is farther away than they assumed.

Exactly. I don’t recommend this lifestyle; it’s a terrible recommendation. I just hope people move their internal barometer by one degree. If that means I keep doing ridiculous things, fair enough. Good to see you again, brother.

You’re a one-of-one freak, man, and I mean that with respect. You came in loaded for bear, told unbelievable stories, and crushed it. Great fun.