Ross Edgley, who has just become the first man to swim around Great Britain, is trying to describe what it feels like to have your tongue disintegrate. “I realised something was bad when I woke up with chunks of it on my pillow,” he recalls. The flesh was translucent, but otherwise a lot like beef stroganoff or slow-cooked pork. “It’s that tender, you’re just pulling strips off,” says Edgley energetically. “You could see the tastebuds on it, it was that thick.”
Endurance swimmers call it salt mouth – the effect of seawater buildup in your mouth and throat. Edgley’s was at its worst as he passed Dungeness in early June, about 85 hours of swimming after setting out from Margate harbour. “Even a week in, it went from being a swim as most people consider it, as a sport, to being a survival exercise,” he says.
That “exercise” lasted 157 days, during each of which Edgley slept no more than six hours, and often less, and swam for six hours, and sometimes more.
Alongside him was his support crew, husband and wife Matt and Suzanne Knight, on board their 16m (52ft) catamaran Hecate. The instant Edgley boarded the boat every day, its location was recorded, and it would return to that exact point when the time came for Edgley to return to the water, thereby ensuring a continuous circumnavigation of 1,792 miles – about the same distance as London to Moscow by road.
In the course of his five-month-long Great British Swim, Edgley raced ferries, stopped boats, braved storms, swam with countless dolphins, suffered hundreds of jellyfish stings, saw “every single seal”, and became a connoisseur of the nation’s waters. “Scotland tasted really nice,” he tells me. The Irish Sea, he says after consideration, was “organic”. The Humber Estuary: “straight-up fertiliser”.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
