British Adventurer Sets Record With 5-Month Swim Around Great Britain

A British man who spent 5 months at sea has become the first person to swim 1,780 miles around the island of Great Britain.

Ross Edgley, 33, set off from Kent, on the southeast coast of England, on June 1. After swimming 1,780 miles, he arrived back on shore Sunday for the first time.

For 157 days, Edgley swam between six and 12 hours a day, taking breaks for sleeping and eating on an accompanying boat. (He ate more than 500 bananas during the trip to keep his energy up.) The author of a fitness guide, The World’s Fittest Book, Edgley had to endure freezing conditions, vicious storms and jellyfish attacks during his extraordinary journey.

His list of injuries makes for grim reading; salt water exposure caused the partial disintegration of his tongue, his feet are bruised and misshapen and blisters speckle his skin from wetsuit chafing.

Despite all this, Edgley is still “not quite bored of swimming,” he told the BBC.

In April 2016, the adventurer completed the world’s longest ever rope climb, for which he pulled himself up 8,848 meters (29,029 ft), the height of Mount Everest. Four months earlier he had finished a marathon while pulling a small car.

And in 2017 he attempted to swim 25 miles from Martinique to St. Lucia in the Caribbean while tied to a tree trunk. When strong currents forced him to stop, he resolved to do what no one had done before and circumnavigate Great Britain.

“The adventurer in me had unfinished business,” he said.