The Science of Extreme Endurance (Fueling, Strength, Recovery & Mental Toughness) | Ross Edgley
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Save as PDFRoss Edgley: The brain and the body are so interlinked, and when fatigue happens and the body shuts down, scientists were trying to study, is that the body giving up? Is it the brain giving up? And now they understand it’s complete interaction between two. Because the brain’s a hypochondriac. It’s basically getting you to stop before you do damage to yourself. Knowing that, I then tell myself, “You’re far more powerful than your own mind allows you to believe.” Psychobiological model of fatigue. So when in Loch Ness, when in Trasimeno, I’m like, “Is that cellulitis? Is that hypothermia?” And I tell myself, “No, no, no, no. You’re far more powerful than your own mind allows you to believe. Keep swimming. Keep swimming.” Friends of mine at Loughborough University have just said, “With you, because you push beyond that, it’s like the whole body, the whole system just hits shut down. He’s not listening.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I’m Andy Galpin. I’m a professor and scientist of human performance, and today I’m speaking with the uncomparable Ross Edgley. If you’re not familiar with Ross, he is an ultra-endurance athlete specializing in swimming. Perhaps most notable and famous for swimming around the entire island of Great Britain, as well as swimming over 500 kilometers straight through the Yukon, and so many other feats that are just absolutely mind-boggling. If anything, in today’s conversation, you’re going to walk away completely entertained and inspired. It is by far the most I’ve ever laughed on a podcast. Ross is so joyful, so energetic, and so positive that if you have no interest in endurance swimming at all, you’re still going to walk away from this a better person. Ross has shared a lot of his journey and incredible stories already in his documentaries, books, and other podcasts.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But one thing that’s unique about this conversation is we were able to dive hard into the science. Many people probably don’t know this, but Ross himself is actually an educated exercise scientist. So, one aspect of our conversation that you’ll get a lot from is the technical detail, the nutrition, recovery, sleep, training, and all that goes into Ross’s brain when he’s thinking about engaging in one of these ultra-endurance swims. I personally learned a ton, and I know you will as well. So, with that in mind, I don’t want to delay it any further. Please enjoy today’s conversation with the unicorn himself, Ross Edgley. Ross Edgley, finally in the building.
Ross Edgley: How are we? This feels overdue.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: This feels like a reunion.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’re going to be sitting here for the next two to three hours, but what people don’t realize is we’re on about hour five today-
Ross Edgley: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … of this conversation legitimately.
Ross Edgley: We actually are. Also as well, I want to publicly say as well, you’re such a hero. So, for those people listening, so I, after I broke the record for the world’s longest nonstop river swim, which was 510 kilometers, 60 hours nonstop swimming, I basically tore every tendon in my rotator cuff, and it was this legend sitting opposite me who helped me, nursed me back as well to health, and then got me to the start line of Iceland with your genius. So, I just want to say publicly, thank you so much, Andy.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re far too kind. Also a liar, but that’s okay.
Ross Edgley: I know it all. My tendons and my rotator cuff love you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We could sit here and talk about your tongue swelling up and falling out, and all the wild stuff, but I don’t want to do any of that today. You are an exercise scientist. You are one by trade, by academic profession, and by reality. So, I want to talk about science. I want to talk about the science of the stuff you’ve done and some of the stuff you’re going to do, and that is where I think I want to spend our entire time.
Ross Edgley: That sounds good. Yeah, no foreplay. Let’s just get into it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No foreplay, he says. Amazing. As I understand it, you’re going to go on a couple of other smaller podcasts while you’re out here, and they can have all the fun stories. Let’s get into the science with the real one.
Ross Edgley: Got it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’ll frame everybody. You mentioned quickly you have a number of world records. If someone doesn’t know who you are, I cannot imagine they are listening to this show. But you also recently swam around Iceland?
Ross Edgley: That’s right. Yeah. 1,000 miles, 114 days. It was a terrible idea. It was a weird way to spend a summer.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Such a terrible idea that you’re probably going to do it again.
Ross Edgley: Probably.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I’m sure you’ll absolutely hate it. So, I want to get into this. How do we train, how are we eating, how are we recovering, the entire thing. If you can go and keep it under three hours, answer. All right.
Ross Edgley: Challenge accepted. Hold my beer. I think what’s really interesting is with some of my athletic ventures, sporting career, in inverted commas, if you can call it a career, it’s so strange now that I do these ultramarathon swims. I swam around Great Britain. That was 1,780 miles, 157 days. Then I did a couple of swims. So, the Loch Ness swim didn’t go very well, ended up in hospital. Then Lake Trasimeno swim, which we’ll talk about as well, ended up in hospital. But it’s really interesting how now, and this is such a strange position to be in, and I don’t say this proudly, but it’s knowing that whatever the result of one of my swims, there is a hospital bed waiting for me afterwards. And that’s so strange, because when people do marathons, ultramarathons, Ironmans, it’s incredible, but afterwards they are probably relaxing with their feet up, massage, carb up, and everything. My friend, Dr.
Ross Edgley: Tom, who’s amazing on all of my expeditions, he is just like, “It doesn’t matter. There is a hospital bed. You will be on a drip. I am worried about your kidneys.” And so it’s a strange place to be, this idea of ultramarathon swimming, but knowing you’re swimming yourself to a hospital bed.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’ve done the Arctic. You’ve done all the other stuff. You’ve been all around. How bad are these things? Because the only equivalent we have really in the lexicon is maybe ultramarathons. That’s a little bit more popular over here. You’re an ultra swimmer. How bad are these things on your body and-
Ross Edgley: Yeah. It gets so strange. So, let’s delve into Lake Trasimeno, for instance, in Italy. So basically, I was going to do a 100-kilometer swim in Lake Trasimeno to raise money for ocean conservation. That was the whole project. We got caught in a freak heat wave. So, it was something sent from the Sahara Desert, ended up over Italy in Trasimeno. It was one of the hottest months ever recorded. Weather warnings, people like, “Do not go out.” But the problem is because of bureaucracy in Italy and also we had the film crew and everybody out there-
Dr. Andy Galpin: What was it like 40 degrees? Like what?
Ross Edgley: Oh, it got over 40 degrees. The water-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Dang
Ross Edgley: … as well was in the shallows about 34. That-
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s probably what got you, yeah
Ross Edgley: … that’s bath water, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: When I walked, and I knew this as well, but like I said, it was for charity. We had the film crew out there. Naively, I was just like, “Look, we’ve got to attempt it.” But as I’m walking in, I can just feel, I’m like, “This is not going to go well.” And as we know, so with rhabdomyolysis, when the rate of exertion is exceeding the rate of recovery, basically that compounded by the heat as well. We were 37 hours in, got hypothermia, so my body is just trying to dump the heat.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Do you know what your internal temperature was? Did you have that tracked at all?
Ross Edgley: No.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No, okay. All right.
Ross Edgley: No, we literally went straight there to the hospital, and that was where they looked-
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you were still cooking. You were-
Ross Edgley: It’s bad. But what was interesting is when they took my blood work, so for those listening, sitting here right now are what creatine kinase might be at, I don’t know, what, 80 maybe? Something like that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Pretty chilled.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sub 100. For sure.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. For those listening, so creatine kinase, basically an enzyme, when it’s broken down, ends up in your bloodstream. It’s a good indicator of muscle breakdown. So sitting here right now, it might be at 80. If we did a hard workout, 300?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sometimes 120.
Ross Edgley: Wow.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. 300 would be, I’ll give you maybe some equivalence. If you’re a Major League Baseball player and you throw 100 pitches in a game, the next day, yeah, you might be at 300, 400, 500. The next day after that, so two days later, you might be at 1,000, 1,500. I’ve seen significantly higher. And then day three, you might be back into the 300, 400 range. The average person kind of doing an average workout, I think 300 would be pretty reasonable. It would range, 200 to 400 or 500-
Ross Edgley: Mm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … plus or minus. So calibration there.
Ross Edgley: Ultramarathons, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000?
Dr. Andy Galpin: 15.
Ross Edgley: Really? It gets up that high?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, it can. I’ve seen data as high as 35,000.
Ross Edgley: Oh.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And-
Ross Edgley: In ultramarathon runners?
Dr. Andy Galpin: I won’t say a name so we don’t get sued. But like mixed modality type of competitions.
Ross Edgley: So CrossFit.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You said it, Ross. Not me.
Ross Edgley: Wow. But that makes sense, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And what you’ll see about that is this is not like two days later, three days later, five days later. You’re talking about, I don’t remember the exact data, but on this case study that was published, I think it was like 21 days later, they were still at 5,000. Like they’re still way up there.
Ross Edgley: Wow.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And that’s not crazy. I have seen personally in some of our stuff, guys 20K or more.
Ross Edgley: Wow.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And not feeling that bad.
Ross Edgley: Wow, kidney’s doing a great job filtering it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Number of reasons. Also, look, if you’re 280 pounds or you’re 140, 150 kilos, 160 kilos, and you do something like an NFL game or some strongman competition, there’s just a lot of tissue that breaks down.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally different world of performance. Nonetheless, back to your story. I’m sorry.
Ross Edgley: That’s really interesting.
Dr. Andy Galpin: This was your fault, this-
Ross Edgley: Yeah, no. But I love what you said there, because that’s so interesting, because I think after, I wish you were there in Lake Trasimeno because afterwards, mine was at 19,000, and they said, “This is so strange for someone swimming.” You’re suspended in water. You shouldn’t really be producing that amount. But it’s interesting you said that. Looking back now, my muscle mass was probably a factor in that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What do you walk at? And then what would you, like start of that race, what do you want to be at?
Ross Edgley: I think about 90. I carry quite a lot of muscle mass for a swimmer.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Sometimes that’s great. So in Iceland, for instance, just muscle mass being thermic, it generates heat. So for the Yukon and Iceland-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm
Ross Edgley: … certainly, I was a lot bigger. But there was videos, especially towards the end of Iceland, where you can just see from my urine, it is like a dark sort of coffee look.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. The coffee I like.
Ross Edgley: It’s exactly it. And when I was going to the toilet, so I was actually… I’m so sorry for those listening. I was pissing in bottles, so when I’m sleeping in my bed, I didn’t want to get up and walk to the thing, so I would piss in a bottle and then look, and it is just a foamy…
Dr. Andy Galpin: Don’t look, Ross.
Ross Edgley: And I was like, “That’s not good.”
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Ross Edgley: No, not at all. No.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. So sorry, back to your story.
Ross Edgley: And I think, but what was really interesting is from that, they said, “Look, this is your blood work, 19,000. This is bad, rhabdomyolysis, but your kidneys are doing an amazing job.” So from there, it was kind of like sounds so bad, but I was like, I have an ability to just sort of suffer, clear it, and literally I was back training the next few days later. Since as well, and this is where it gets really interesting. So, back at Loughborough University, they wanted to do various studies on me because they’re just like, “No one’s really doing these stupid swims.” So we’re uncovering a lot about the body. A MRI scan revealed that, and I’m going to apologize now, I’m not an expert in this, but you’re born with a certain amount of red bone marrow that’s very metabolically active, produces red blood cells, everything like that. But then obviously as we get older, that converts to yellow bone marrow, which is less metabolically active.
Ross Edgley: They’re saying, “Ross, we’ve got red bone marrow reconversion in you” because they believe just the amount of stress I was putting on my body, that it was just like, we need more red blood cells. We need more hemoglobin. He’s not taking a day off. So there was that kind of reconversion, which was awesome. So there’s two things there. The kidney’s doing really well, red bone marrow conversion, and also a very high, unusually high percentage of fast oxidated glycolytic fibers as well. So you’ve got your fast twitch, your slow twitch, and they were like, “That would explain your 210-kilo bench, but you can also swim around Iceland.” So with all of those things, I was like, okay, I’m uniquely equipped, if I can say that-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … to do the strange swims that I do.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Give me, just thought, I don’t want to spend too much time on this particular race, but calibrate me. How long did you last in that race? What did you do there? Because I want to understand.
Ross Edgley: Back to the Italy one?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. So that was, we just short of 100 kilometers. It was about 37 hours in the water.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Just a straight swim across or something?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Just back and forth between-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah
Ross Edgley: … two islands. Yeah. And I think it was, this is going to sound so strange. I was really proud of myself because I was aware what was going on with my physiology. So I’ve become this strange guinea pig, and I’m just aware that through dehydration, my blood is turning to treacle, where my kidneys are taking a battering. I got cold, really cold, even despite being in a heat wave. And I was like, okay, now it’s my body dumping heat. So it was really strange how everything that I’d learnt in theory in my sport science degree, it was strangely nice to now go, “Ah, heat stroke. This is what it feels like.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: So when you say it went poorly, do you mean performance-wise, or do you mean the cost? Like it just hammered you so much?
Ross Edgley: Yeah, it just hammered me so much.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. And I think what was weird is that was a year after Loch Ness. So the Loch Ness, so that was basically hypothermia, heatstroke. Whereas I got hypothermia back in Loch Ness. So it was strangely nice to experience both ends of the spectrum. That sounds twisted, I know.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Everything you say sounds twisted and terrible. You realize your brain is not like the rest of us, right?
Ross Edgley: I think-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay, just so we’re on the same page there.
Ross Edgley: But it’s so nice that now when I’ve done swims, even as a team, I say I have to outsource common sense because I know I can’t trust myself. And I think it’s really weird how in Iceland, for instance, I was so grateful to Loch Ness. Basically, with Loch Ness, I was in the water about 56 hours. Water barely gets up to over four degrees, because it’s just so big, it’s so deep. I think it was about 56 hours in. Everything was going fine, but then it’s almost like looking through the eye of a needle. It just got smaller and smaller and smaller, and then it just went black. And then all I remember is waking up, and I saw my mum and my girlfriend at the head of the hospital bed. And I looked at them and I went, “Oh, it’s not gone well, has it?” And they went, “No, Ross. It’s not. It’s gone really badly wrong.” But I think what’s really interesting is when I then did the Iceland swim… Oh, and that was hypothermia and cellulitis as well.
Ross Edgley: So I got-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, sure
Ross Edgley: … a cut, basically, that ended up a skin infection that if it gets in your lymph nodes or bloodstream can be fatal. So it was this strange combination where my skin felt like it was on fire from the cellulitis, but my core temperature was freezing. Very strange. But fast-forward to Iceland, and I credit Loch Ness for teaching me because there’s pictures that went sort of semi-viral of my neck chewed up, my tongue falling off. And it was so strange that the team were like, “Oh, that looks horrible.” I was like, “No, this is fine.”
Ross Edgley: It’s not cellulitis. This is good.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: And as cold as I was, I was like, “I’ve been colder. I know what hypothermia feels like.” So it’s really, really strange. But I do enjoy learning the theory of everything and then actually sort of being the human guinea pig to go, “Oh, this is what it feels like.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Tell me about how you play that dance of checking out of your own decision-making. You’ve got an incredible team. I want to know actually all about the team because they’ve got to just be a bunch of amazing individuals. But you have to, I assume, you have to check out of consciousness at some point early in the race. And you said something a minute ago about you knew before you walked in Italy it was going to go bad.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Before you start, is it an hour in? Is it 24 hours in when you’re doing these things? So tell me more about that entire process of when you can go, “Great. It’s a good day. Let’s go full peg here.” And then at some point, you have to just check out and go, “It’s on them.”
Ross Edgley: Do you know what? I’m so glad you asked that. I think looking at the work, Tim Noakes, and the central governor theory or psychobiological model of fatigue, as it’s sort of more commonly known now. Just this idea that the brain and the body are so interlinked, and when fatigue happens and the body shuts down, scientists were trying to study, is that the body giving up? Is it the brain giving up? And now they understand it’s complete interaction between two. I think what’s really interesting about that is Tim Noakes when he was saying, “If we were running a marathon right now, we’re 18 miles in, the legs are burning, lungs are on fire, depleted of muscle glycogen, overheating in the California sun, everything.” The brain’s a hypochondriac. It’s getting you to pull that physiological handbrake, going, “Ross, what are you doing? You can’t keep up with Andy. He’s too quick.” And he’s pulling that physiological-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Good. Yeah. Totally
Ross Edgley: … pull that-
Dr. Andy Galpin: If you say Robin, I might believe you
Ross Edgley: But pulling that physiological handbrake, and it’s because the brain’s a hypochondriac. It’s basically getting you to stop before you do damage to yourself. And I think what’s so interesting is knowing that, I then tell myself, “You’re far more powerful than your own mind allows you to believe.” Psychobiological model of fatigue. So when in Loch Ness, when in Tresemme, I’m like, “Is that cellulitis? Is that hypothermia?” And I tell myself, “No, no, no, no. You’re far more powerful than your own mind allows you to believe. Psychobiological model of fatigue. Keep swimming, keep swimming.” And I think at that point, and again, I don’t say this proudly, I’m aware it’s a personality defect, but friends of mine at Loughborough University have just said, “Usually the brain stops you. It basically says there’s that handbrake. With you, because you push beyond that, it’s like the whole body, the whole system just hits, like just shut down.
Ross Edgley: He’s not listening.” And so I think from there, we now have protocols in place with my team. So Jer Kennedy, one of the greatest ice swimmers to ever live, just understands hypothermia. He does swims no wetsuit in minus, so saltwater goes below zero. He’s that guy. So it’s amazing with him in the Yukon, for instance, he’s checking me for hypothermia, and he knows we’re going to push it so close. But equally, at the point where I’m dribbling and not making sense, he will be like, “Ross, you’re done.” Chris Morgan as well, Olympic swim coach, just an absolute legend. Again, when I did the 510 kilometers in the Yukon, he must have kayaked 400 of that-
Dr. Andy Galpin: No kidding
Ross Edgley: … just next to me the whole time.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Cool.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. I mean, they checked him for hypothermia as well.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Ross Edgley: And the whole time just wouldn’t leave me because it was so much easier to feed me bananas every 20 minutes and stuff. So we have a team in place, and then even my girlfriend as well. So I’ve been with her 13 years, and during the entire Yukon swim, the expedition itself was 70 hours, so the team did not sleep for 70 hours. And the entire time, every 20 minutes, 30, 40 Gs of carbs, I look over and my girlfriend is there just launching me bananas. And she’s also so aware that if I’m not making sense, something doesn’t seem right, she goes, “Okay, guys, I’m a bit worried now.” But if we’re still joking and still have a sense of humor, she’s just like, “Okay, as bad as he looks, his tongue’s falling off, but he’s still okay.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So it’s such a team event, and I’m not self-deprecating at all. I literally couldn’t do it without them, and they are incredible. I’m just the one who swims. They’re the ones who keep me going.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Are they keeping track of any objective metrics? I mean, you wear a heart rate monitor. Are they putting a core temperature probe in or are they just trying to look for visible signs of nonsense?
Ross Edgley: They’re trying to look for visible signs, especially because we’ve got so much. When we swam in the, one, the Yukon, but also Iceland, you just have so many hats and gloves and everything that just trying to have heart rate monitors and things, it’s going to cause chafe points. It’s too much. So it’s quite intuitive. It’s quite subjective.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: I’d love more objective data, and I think that’s something we’re going to explore for future swims. But so often it’s just that years of experience and just sort of knowing, right, Ross isn’t making much sense now. Which I know we spoke about before over breakfast today, that I think it was John Keeley, a friend of mine at the English Institute of Sport, and I always love this. He said, “Too often we’re trying to apply a simple mechanical solution to what’s a complex biological reality.” It’s this idea that you can go, I’m coaching this athlete. There is the best workout on paper, reps, sets, everything, all perfectly, but they’re not looking at the behavioral science of it or the subjective element, the intangibles. And I think that’s one thing that the team are so good at, the intangibles with me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I don’t care about logistics. I don’t care about the finance. I don’t care about the stuff. I want to know scientifically which of these swims or other events have been the most difficult for you and the team?
Ross Edgley: Oh, good question. I think Iceland, because you are essentially trying to swim around a giant rock that’s trying to kill you. A giant volcanic rock that’s trying to kill you.
Ross Edgley: And I think you’re almost controlling the inevitable catabolic breakdown of the body. You know that it is just like my legs, like sheer atrophy, just shrunk like an astronaut in space. They were really bad, like lost complete weakness in everything. My Achilles tendons have shriveled up. It was knowing that that’s happening, and we’re just going to try and swim 1,000 miles and make it round before my physiology implodes. I think it was that. I think the Yukon was very intense and hard, but it was over quite quickly. It was quite acute. Whereas with Iceland, it was just six hours on, six hours off, so you work with the tide. It doesn’t matter if the tide changes at 2:00 in the morning or 2:00 in the afternoon. You wake up, crack the ice off your wetsuit, put it in. And again, that psychobiological model of fatigue that you are just having conversations with yourself, like, “What are you doing?”
Ross Edgley: Even your circadian rhythm as well, your body’s 24-hour biological clock. You wake up at 2:00. It’s like, “What are you doing? Why are you jumping into the Arctic Circle? This is a terrible idea.” And you just have to override that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I can maybe bucket your races into two big categories, these 24 to 70-hour ones.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Is that fair?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Yes, exactly.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Most of them have been in that range.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But then you did, how long did it take you in terms of hours or days to swim around Great Britain?
Ross Edgley: 157.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Days?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Days. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you’re swimming for 15 hours a day?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Pretty much, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Plus or minus.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Six hours on, six hours off with the tide, so 12 hours total.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you’re getting back in the boat when you’re not, or you’re-
Ross Edgley: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep. Okay.
Ross Edgley: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So that’s way more of a… There. And then Iceland was this-
Ross Edgley: 112 days.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, 100-plus days. Were there any other races in that 100-day range, or are those the two big ones you’ve done?
Ross Edgley: They were the two big ones. Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, okay.
Ross Edgley: Several months, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So if we think about these as the one shot, no sleep, straight through, versus these several months-long things. What have you found physically and in preparation that differed between those different types of challenges?
Ross Edgley: Oh, good question. I think with the Yukon swim, it’s just basically all out. So even looking at things like caffeine consumption, we were back-loading caffeine. I tried to almost, forgive the term, raw dog it as long as I could.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: And then 24 hours in, all of a sudden, you’ve gone through your first night swim and your body, your brain’s going, “What are we doing?”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sorry to cut you off, but you’re not getting in the boat on these ones.
Ross Edgley: No.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s what I should have clarified.
Ross Edgley: Yes, yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because you go 70 straight hours, that means you are swimming for 70 straight hours. You are not getting out of the water.
Ross Edgley: They were the rules, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I’m sorry.
Ross Edgley: You cannot get out of the water. You can’t touch the boat. The boat can’t touch you. No one can touch you. You swim.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You didn’t even touch the boat.
Ross Edgley: No, you’re not allowed to touch the boat, yeah. And no one can touch you. So that’s why so often you see the videos, they are just throwing bananas over the side like I’m a seal.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay. So I’m sorry to cut you off. That was an important distinction. So back. You don’t start off with caffeine. You go 24 hours in first, get through that first night, and then you hit the caffeine.
Ross Edgley: It’s kind of like, and we were just talking about that study on the sub-2-hour marathon.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: His pacing was perfect, and it was the way that he just knew, with military precision, when to hit the NOS on the car.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: And then to take off and sprint for the finish. I’m not comparing myself in the slightest, but it’s similar in that it’s pacing, pacing, pacing. Looking at caffeine consumption, sleep deprivation. It was strange. We were trying to punch light into my retina as well to try and trick my body on the second night just to go-
Dr. Andy Galpin: No kidding
Ross Edgley: … “Oh, actually, this isn’t so bad.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Just shining flashlights in your eyeballs?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. I was just like that, trying to trick my body. We were trying everything, and I think there are new things that I would like to try. Good studies on creatine and sleep deprivation. I wasn’t supplementing with creatine. I didn’t think that would help with time.
Dr. Andy Galpin: In any of the races, you haven’t used creatine at all?
Ross Edgley: No. So I would love… There’s, again, this weird part of me is that human guinea pig who’s just like, “Oh, I did the Yukon,” but I’ve learned a lot since then.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So yeah. I think it’s this idea with the nonstop swims, you are just gearing up and then a sprint finish, and you know you’re just leaving it all out. And it’s got to be this perfect pacing. Whereas with the swim around Great Britain and Iceland, it’s so different because you might do the swim on day one, and you’re just like, “You’ve got to pace yourself, Ross. It’s not going to be over quickly. We’ve got 100 more days of this.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm.
Ross Edgley: So you might have an amazing swim. You wake up. You could punch 400 milligrams of caffeine and go, “I feel unbelievable,” but you are going to pay for that on the second six-hour swim in the tide. And that took a while. On the Great British swim, there were times where… Oh, if you’ve never had it, it’s amazing. A deep-fried Mars bar. It’s a deep-fried chocolate.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No kidding.
Ross Edgley: Oh my God, Andy, it’s amazing. In Scotland. They claim to have invented it, and I’ve no reason to believe they haven’t. I had six of these just deep-fried chocolate bars with 400 milligrams of caffeine. It was coursing through my veins. I was like- … “I feel amazing.” I gun it, swim, and I was honestly just crushing PBs, swimming with the tide. It was amazing. The stars aligned. The next swim, my body was like, “What were you thinking?”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm.
Ross Edgley: Just in a hole. So it’s this idea of pacing on those longer swims. It’s not going to be over quickly. And also as well, I think it’s really interesting, I think, on the nonstop swims, the goal is just performance. On the longer swims that go over months, you’re having to consider health and performance because if you just fry your central nervous system, adrenal fatigue, your immune system is waving the white flag, you’re not going to make it to day 100.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So it’s really strange how there’s just this complete emphasis on health as well. As well as hitting my calorie requirements, just making sure that I’m also just hitting micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, because otherwise you’re not making it to day 100. I think that’s the difference.
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Dr. Andy Galpin: I eat one almost every single day and always have two or three with me in my backpack when I’m traveling, and I literally mean always. It probably sounds funny, but I eat them as dessert all the time. When you try them, you’ll know exactly what I mean. If you’re interested in trying these bars for yourself, you can go to davidprotein.com/perform. Again, that’s davidprotein.com/perform. I have both of your first two books. Your team didn’t send the third one out in time, so I haven’t read the new one yet. But I don’t think in any of the books you’ve gone over the specifics and details of … the eating and the training and the other stuff yet. You’re covering different stuff in that new book.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Is that right?
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Great. So this is where we’re going to cover it. Let me start with the short ones. You’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but I want details now. You’re eating every 20 minutes.
Ross Edgley: Yep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What are you eating? How much? What is the target? What are you trying to do versus what’s happening-
Ross Edgley: Mm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … in reality? So, okay, Ross, here is our plan, what happened in real life. And then hit me with supplements, hit me with all the juice right now-
Ross Edgley: I love that
Dr. Andy Galpin: … of those short ones. Then we’ll do the long ones.
Ross Edgley: I love that. I love that you ask that because on the shorter ones, you are just looking at things that are kind to your digestive system. This study that’s doing the round, that 120 gs of carbs every hour on the hour.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. James Morton’s group just published this in the last two or three weeks.
Ross Edgley: He’s a-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Well, maybe two weeks, yeah
Ross Edgley: Yeah. James is a legend. I’ve done some studies with him at Liverpool. He’s amazing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: I love that guy.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: And it’s so interesting. So with that, it’s very much just looking at your digestive system, what is going to be kind. You don’t want any fiber, you don’t want any fat, no protein. Your body just doesn’t need it. It’s just something that’s really easily assimilated. I did experiment a little bit with MCTs, some medium-chain triglycerides, that act less like a fat, more like a carbohydrate. Just not a lot because you’ll have digestive issues and your stomach’s not going to thank you for it, but just enough that we’re trying to just force a few more calories through every single feed. That I found was amazing. That with, like I said, nootropics, Cognizin, caffeine, amazing. For the longer swims, it was really interesting, but we needed to become more reliant on dietary fat because we just weren’t making up the calories from carbs alone. You couldn’t fit that many carbs through the digestive system every hour on the hour for months at a time.
Ross Edgley: So again, MCT is brilliant, but also as well, it just got to the point, especially over the north of Iceland where you don’t really have access to that many sport supplement shops, we were just putting sticks of butter in a coffee.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Or just the soup as well, just entire sticks of butter into that. But what’s strange is almost intuitively, right now if you said, “Do you want a buttery soup?” I’d be like, “No, that’s disgusting, Andy. Why would I do that?”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: But having swum for six hours, getting out, oh, it would warm you from the… It was also molten, like it’s burning you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Ross Edgley: But just thawing out your internal organs. So I think it was that as well. And then what was really interesting, and I’d never really encountered this before, but on one of the first few swims, I’m still trying to make up my protein requirements as well, again, knowing that you’re just going to need that immune support, catabolic breakdown of the body. But I was finding when I was having protein prior to getting in and swimming, as soon as I got in because of the cold, my body was just like, “Right, this is stupid, Ross. Do you want the blood around the stomach for digestion, the muscles? What do you want from this? This is completely conflicting.” I’d get nauseous. It was really weird. So I had to then sort of backload my protein. So it was just carbs and fats all the way throughout the swim, and then in the six hours I was off, sometimes the guys would just leave an entire roast chicken on my pillow, and I would just get there, tear chunks off it- …
Ross Edgley: eat it, and then just pass out. And that became almost the nutritional protocol. Yeah, carbs, fats on the longer swims, protein afterwards to make sure it doesn’t interfere with the performance, and then just pass out sleeping on a rotisserie chicken.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Well, look, we’ve all been there. We’ve all been there.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Pretty normal.
Ross Edgley: Standard Saturday.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. That’s exactly right. So these shorter swims, what was your carbohydrate target? Were you guys trying 80 grams an hour, 100 grams an hour? Where were you?
Ross Edgley: 120 gs, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Then-
Ross Edgley: And my body was tolerating that quite well. And that’s what we were doing with James, actually, at Liverpool John Moores University. And we just found it was fine. It was the type of carbs as well, though. No fiber. Anything like that, it’s just trying to force as much through without any digestive discomfort.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What besides bananas? Are we strictly throwing down, what? 20, 25 grams per banana?
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And you’re not crushing four or five of those every 20 minutes.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. No. But I think what was interesting, even with them, because sometimes the bananas weren’t giving enough, so there’s that clip that sort of went semi-viral. We had literally a bucket of chocolate spread and just putting that in as well. Energels. But I think as well, when your tongue is just being battered by the saltwater-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm
Ross Edgley: … it’s so strange. What you want and what you need, it just changes. I couldn’t have anything like chili. Sometimes the guys would make the nicest curry afterward. I would be in tears because it had taken a layer off my tongue.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So then to add chili, it was just like someone had a hot poker in my mouth.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So yeah, I would just sit there sometimes just lathering yogurt on my tongue or butter. It got weird.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Were you trying to get a lot of that through powders, gels, drinks?
Ross Edgley: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What percentage of that versus the foods?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Quite a lot, I think. I tried to do whole foods as much as possible. But I think what was so interesting is when you’ve only got six hours off and then you’re swimming for six hours, a lot of your nutrition intake is just intra. So when people go, “What’d you have pre and post?” I’m just like, “No, when you’re swimming for 12 hours a day, everything’s intra.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So yeah, very reliant on, yeah, proteins, gels. Sorry, carb powder and gels, rather than trying to make up anything that was kind of whole foods.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Did you guys, in the preparation, tinker with different forms of carbohydrate, resistant starches versus nons and others? Or were you just really, that didn’t fall high enough in the priority list to figure out, let’s just get a bunch of options in the boat, and as we’re going, we’ll kind of just make sure we’ve got things?
Ross Edgley: Glucose and fructose worked really well. But I think even when I was out there, I don’t know if it was intuitive or what, but even honey just started to feel better. I don’t know if it was because it was less synthetic. I don’t know if it was taste.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: But that felt really good as well. Yeah, so we were just doing massive coffees with just literally … cups of honey in there as well.
Dr. Andy Galpin: On the shorter swims, any other supplementation or things like that, that you guys tinkered or would tinker with that type of stuff?
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Every single day, the amount of pills that I was taking, so just vitamin D, glutamine, anything that would support omega-3s, mitochondrial health, just anything that would… I was asking so much of my body, so I was like, “Right. Okay, here you go. This is me being kind to you and me-”
Dr. Andy Galpin: You were taking vitamin D and omega-3s on those-
Ross Edgley: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … those shorter swims?
Ross Edgley: Oh, lesser on the shorter swims, but certainly on the longer ones. Yeah. It was on the longer swims. We had these tiny little cabin. It was a performance yacht, so you are just wedged in like that, and your room is no bigger than this table, widthwise. You are crammed in. But I had to make that my home. I was like, “This is going to be home for as long as possible.” You can’t just grit your teeth and get through this, Ross. Everything needs to be meticulously planned. So there was just routine, and I think that’s one thing that I really learnt from the Royal Marines, that they say, “Ross, it’s not fitness, it’s routine.”
Ross Edgley: The Iceland swim wouldn’t have come unstuck, and I wouldn’t have failed it because of my VO2 or lactic threshold or anything like that. It would’ve been something else. It would’ve been a lack of routine. It would’ve been rhabdomyolysis. It would’ve been my immune system shutting down, coinciding with a storm, and then I miss that particular swim, and I don’t make it round the body. It would’ve been something like that. And I think that’s what’s so strange about the expeditions that I do, that you’re taking swimming how most people understand it, and you’re just completely removing it from the realms of conventional sports science, and you need a different psychology, physiology. Everything is just different. And I find sometimes I have more in common, and I can learn more from friends of mine in the Royal Marines or the SAS or the SBS because I can speak to… If I speak to friends at Loughborough, Olympians, friends of mine, the greatest swimmers ever, and they’ll talk about, oh, technique, tumble turns, two-beat leg kick, three-beat leg kick.
Ross Edgley: I’m like, none of that matters. I need to speak to the Royal Marines and say, “What do you do when you haven’t slept for four days?” And they’re like, “Ah, Ross, let me chat to you.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So, it’s that, yeah. I find that I’m trying to learn more from them, than conventional swimming.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Outside of MCTs, did you kick around with any other exogenous ketones or try to go on a much higher fat profile? Especially, I would assume, for the longer ones-
Ross Edgley: Mm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … that was more of a thought process versus the shorter ones.
Ross Edgley: I’m glad you brought… Yeah. I did. I experimented with them powder ketones. They were quite good, and I didn’t know how much was just my brain chemistry enjoying it. So it’s just kind of like you’re-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Super rational. Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Right? Yeah. Again, psychobiological model of C. I don’t know how much was just like, “Oh, wow,” or like, “My body feels amazing. This is a new energy source.” Or it was my perception to fatigue-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep
Ross Edgley: … pain threshold. I don’t know. It was doing something. Yeah. And I quite enjoyed them as and when I needed them, and it just needed that zone two aerobic pace. You are just trudging. There was other times as well, though, where it was anaerobic. It was glycolytic. They would turn around, especially over the top of Iceland. The whole thing is almost like a bay, so you get whirlpools and countercurrents.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, no.
Ross Edgley: Yeah, the amount of… There was one time they said, “Ross, you’re in a giant whirlpool. You’re in a countercurrent. You need to swim, you need to swim hard.” And I was like, “Okay, fine.” So I set my watch, and for four hours, I am just gunning it, gunning it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: God.
Ross Edgley: And then I look up, and I remember I turned to the boat, and I just said, “Guys, how have we done? That’s pretty good, right? That’s four hours.” Usually in four hours, I could crank out, that’s 15K. And I look at them, and they can’t look me in the eye. And that’s when I knew something was wrong. And I said, “What’s going on, guys?” And they went, “You’ve just been swimming on the same spot. You’ve not moved.”
Ross Edgley: So there are times when, yeah, ketones, being fat adapted is amazing at that lower intensities where it’s aerobic. There’s other times like swimming through a whirlpool, swimming across a shipping lane where they go, “Ross, you need to gun it a little bit now.” And that’s where it’s just like, okay, caffeine and carbs are your best friend.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. How long did it take you to get out of the whirlpool?
Ross Edgley: Well, I got out after that because if I stopped and was having a banana and was feeding, I was going backwards.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ross Edgley: So at that point when they said, “You’ve been swimming on the same spot,” I won’t repeat exactly what I said. My language was quite colorful. And they just said, “Ross, the whole time we’ve been arguing.” I went, “Yep.” They went, “You’ve gone back 200 meters.” I was like, “Oh my God.” So we got out, and that’s the thing with a stage swim. You plot down, okay, that’s where you swam to. I got out. I can recover.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, like you drop a GPS-
Ross Edgley: Exactly
Dr. Andy Galpin: … to say, “This is exactly where we were.”
Ross Edgley: Exactly. Yeah, and you just have to join up the coordinates. So that’s very different to the nonstop swim. But equally, during the nonstop swim, that happens sometimes as well. So down the Yukon, it is a maze inside a minefield, the way that you get countercurrents, log jams. I remember I was swimming at one point, and a log was going back the other way. So the team in the Yukon, they were amazing, just big Canadian men who hunt bears and kill wolves. And they could read the river so well. But again, there were times where they were like, “Ross, I need you to sprint to the other side of the river.” I’m 40 hours in, and they’re like, “Because if you don’t, you’re going to hit a log jam, and the swim’s over.” So after 40 hours, my shoulders are killing me, everything is hurting, and they’re like, “I now need you to sprint.” So it’s strenuous.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And your definition of sprint is give me three hard hours.
Ross Edgley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: It’s really strange because, like I said, coming from a sports science background, you learn so much about pacing strategies, nutritional strategies. But when you are caught in an Arctic storm with a jellyfish hanging off your face or there’s bears and wolves, that sort of, it goes out the window. It’s no longer sports science. It’s survival.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. We don’t exactly have a case study to use for that. There’s no randomized control, double-blind placebo study for 60 hours into a swim, bear jumps on you
Ross Edgley: Oh.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What do we do there? In your shorter swims, how much total caffeine do you think you use across the entire length?
Ross Edgley: Oh, I definitely think we were getting into the grams. Yeah, no longer milligrams. Yeah. We-
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’ve moved down a unit.
Ross Edgley: Yeah, we did. Yeah. Certainly towards the end. So, like I said, we were on the Yukon swim, let’s use as the example, because I went 24 hours without caffeine, and then was just back loading it. But then in the final, I mean, it was 56 hours in total, so over the next 30 hours, yeah, we definitely got into the grams. Yeah. And trying to drip feed it as well, I think that was the interesting thing. With it, knowing that you’re almost on this psychological rollercoaster.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm.
Ross Edgley: And the endurance athletes listening, they’ll understand this. We always have a rule. It’s like if you think you’re about to give up, if the dark clouds are coming over, if you think you cannot go on, stop, eat some carbs, maybe a little bit of caffeine, and then make a decision again in 20 minutes, because you’re just not thinking rationally.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm.
Ross Edgley: You cannot trust your own brain.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I think you’re thinking exactly rationally, actually.
Ross Edgley: Probably.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I think that’s the problem. Your rational stuff has gotten to your brain.
Ross Edgley: Probably, yeah. But it is just so weird. With the right amount of caffeine at the right time, with the right amount of carbs, it is so interesting how then the birds are singing, there’s a rainbow, there’s dolphins, and you just go, “Ah, this isn’t so bad.” And I think this is what’s so interesting, even looking at the neuroscience and the sort of the chemistry of it. I think this is a complete oversimplification, but I love Huberman’s talk about the anterior midcingulate cortex with David Goggins. And I think, for me, it’s very much in those moments, weighing up pain and purpose, grit and quit, like a weighing scale. And sometimes that weighing scale just needs a lot of caffeine-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … to positively interact with neurotransmitters and go, “Ah, this isn’t so bad.” So, I think it’s interesting treating myself as almost like a chemistry set, and just knowing when to sort of push and pull on certain levers, knowing that if I take this, that’s going to push that button in my brain, and we’re going to get a few more miles out.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Ahead of these races, how long does it take you to just figure out the fueling aspect of it? Are you pretty much, say, a month out, figured out what you’re going to do, and you’re sticking with it, or are you tinkering every day, every week until you get going?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. We’re pretty dialed in weeks before. So, for instance, for Iceland, we had the nutritional strategies completely dialed in, but also, I just wanted to put on as much fat as possible. It’s almost like biomimicry.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ross Edgley: I wanted to become a whale, a seal.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. And again, when I go to Loughborough University, we have amazing swimmers. Adam Peaty, greatest breaststroker the world has ever seen. You look at him, I always say he is a dolphin. He is poetic in the water. He glides. He’s just sleek. His abs are ripped. I’m like a chubby, hairy whale by the time I arrive in Iceland. And I think that’s so interesting that there is that idea of biomimicry. That’s what Adam does. He is a dolphin. He’s a mako shark. But I don’t want to become that. I need to become that migrating chubby whale. And I think with Scotland, for instance, Tom Stoltman, so three times World’s Strongest Man. When I arrived in Scotland, I was big. Kind of similar to how I am now. I’m about 90 kilos at 5’9”. So, it’s quite a lot of weight for my frame.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re like a hobbit who took a lot of steroids.
Ross Edgley: That’s ex- I have-
Dr. Andy Galpin: But like a super athletic one. You look athletic. You’re not just jacked.
Ross Edgley: But I felt big at this. I was like, I turned up to Scotland.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: I was thermic when I was swimming. I felt pretty good. Tom Stoltman was 190 kilos. Granted, he is-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Wait. What?
Ross Edgley: He’s 190 kilos. Granted, he is 6’8”.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I don’t care. I don’t.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Wow.
Ross Edgley: He is such a big human. He’s so big. So, we joke, but I basically said, “Tom, you’re now in charge of my nutrition.” And literally for my training camp, I would just go and eat with him. And it was just amazing seeing what he would put away because mass moves mass when it comes to strongman. And, yeah, he’s just an amazing human, but just, if aliens came down to this world, you would struggle to convince them that me and him were the same species. He’s that much bigger. So, I managed, with Tom as my inspiration and nutrition coach, I got up to over 100. So, I was about 103 kilos when I started Iceland, and really was just seallike. Looking at my body composition, I just got in and it’s amazing when you talk about the habituation of stress and the cold, but body composition is just one of the biggest things. I could just sit there just with this layer of fat. I honestly think adding those 12 kilos, if I had to put a figure on it, it’s like another two to three mil in a wetsuit.
Ross Edgley: It really is-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Really
Ross Edgley: … that insulating. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Of that 12 extra kilos, how much do you think of that was fat?
Ross Edgley: I would say-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Nine?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Honestly-
Dr. Andy Galpin: 10?
Ross Edgley: … yeah. A lot. Yeah. Because certainly from my DEXA and MRIs and stuff, it’s obvious that my muscle mass kind of stays the same, but it’s just this accumulation of fat all around the vital organs and in the best possible places that I just become seallike.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The recomposition is so interesting because even if that little passing comment that your lean muscle mass or lean mass and muscle mass, as best we can tell on DEXA, stays the same.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s super interesting given the type of training you’re doing.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It actually should, or potentially would go down.
Ross Edgley: I was going to say, definitely lost it in my legs. Yeah. So afterwards, there’s a really good video on YouTube, actually, on the GB Swim. My physio comes on board, and he’s trying to teach me to walk again. The arches in my feet collapsed. I had no strength. He was trying to get me to do calf raises, and my leg, just body weight, calf raises, I am shaking, like I’ve just got nothing. I’ve no strength in it. But if you look at my triceps and my lats, because also as well, that’s the thing, with long distance swimming Your leg kick accounts for 10% overall propulsion. It’s basically serving just to anchor you so you can rotate properly. Looking at that serape effect, engage the obliques and rip. And I think what’s so interesting is I barely used them. I kicked my legs three times around Iceland, potentially. They’re just dragging behind. So there was a real atrophy in my legs. You could see, they almost looked like baby’s feet afterwards.
Ross Edgley: Just no, like the ligaments tend to just… It was just soft. And then it was the same as well with my, you could see the quads were just spongy.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How long did it take for those to come back to pre-swim?
Ross Edgley: A while. I remember after Iceland, we were going to do media interviews, and the boat pulled into the harbor. We were probably, oh, maybe a meter and a half that you had to jump off the deck of the boat onto the pontoon. And they were filming. I jumped, and I’ve never experienced anything like this. The only thing I can describe it as is like an astronaut coming back from space.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: I jump, like I said, a meter and a half. You got me to do that now, absolutely fine. My legs just buckled. I just literally imploded. And I think it is really interesting as well because so many people, it’s so nice that after the swim, my beard is glistening in the sun. I’m now immortalized-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … in Nordic folklore. But the reality is so different, and people are like, “Oh, what a beast,” and stuff. I’m like, “Yeah, but I have literally become a sea-dwelling mammal.” I am awful on land. Awful. If you got 100 kilos on my back on a squat, it would’ve folded me like a deckchair. Yeah, so it’s really interesting that idea, SAID principle, specific adaptation to imposed demands. I got really, really good at swimming in zone two for 12 hours a day just at this pace. Get me to do anything outside of that, and my body was completely unadapted.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How long until you were like, “Okay, I could feel like I could move like a human again on land”?
Ross Edgley: I would say at least three. I say that because we finished September, and still by Christmas, I was really sort of struggling to run. Cardio respiratory system was like, “We’re absolutely fine. We’re not even breathing heavy.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Ross Edgley: But my legs, the fatigue in my calves, I’ve never experienced anything like it. And even weird adaptations as well. Like I still sort of now, but I would just be sweating, and I don’t know whether that was brown fat cells adaptation, habituation. I don’t know. But I could be in a really nice restaurant after the Iceland swim, and the crew are there. Everyone’s enjoying a lovely meal. Andy, it’s like someone threw a bucket of water over me. I’m sweating them, and this couple’s having a romantic meal. And I am just sweating.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Just dude with a giant beard and huge biceps just pouring sweat next to them.
Ross Edgley: Genuinely.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So really, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Just so romantic.
Ross Edgley: It was so bad. So it really took a while to climb down. And I made it back by three days for the birth of my first child. I’d have been in so much trouble if I didn’t make it back. But I made it back.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh my God.
Ross Edgley: And so I turned up at the hospital, and Hester, my girlfriend, she’s amazing. She had to tell all the doctors and nurses because I’ve still got a beard, I’m sweating. And they’re like, “Oh, no, he looks crazy, but he’s safe.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. That’s the dad? He’s the dad?
Ross Edgley: He is.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Hmm. Great.
Ross Edgley: Exactly.
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Ross Edgley: I think on the Iceland swim, at the end, we had an area to cover. It was 100 miles, and it was on the south coast. So on the south coast, dating back ages ago, there was a huge volcanic eruption that basically just wiped out the south coast. So that’s why there’s no harbors there.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh.
Ross Edgley: There’s nowhere to hide. You also have Europe’s largest glacier. What happened, it was Hurricane Erin was coming through the Atlantic. So that was coming on the east coast. And then over on the west coast, a place called Grindavik had a volcano that went off that just literally wiped out a town. They had to evacuate an entire town. We couldn’t get close to that because of the poisonous gas. And then, like I said, you’ve got Europe’s biggest glacier sending shards of ice about as big as this table, that when you’re swimming at night, you can’t see you are just hitting them.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh.
Ross Edgley: Got bad. And I think it was at that point, that’s when I was probably most worried. Granted, rhabdomyolysis, on the south coast, it was a little bit warmer. I would say seven degrees. Down the east coast, it got down to two. So it was a bit warmer. So that wasn’t a concern, but it was just then avoiding a volcano- In a hurricane that had been sent through the Atlantic while avoiding giant showers of gas. That was the real concern because I was like, now something could go wrong, a ligament, a tendon, something snap, and that could go wrong. And I think because we were talking about this over breakfast, I think for so long in endurance sports, strength training was almost like a dirty word.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm.
Ross Edgley: It was just completely demonized. Whereas now, and again, you’ll know because you helped me so much when I was rehabbing my shoulder, but that idea of mechanotransduction and just how strength training will make connective tissue, ligaments, tendons so much stronger, and now we’re creating more robust endurance athletes, and their bodies aren’t breaking down. So I think for me, it was at the end there, having complete faith in my training and physiology and the months and months of preparation just going, “Trust the tendons in your rotator cuff because you’ve rehabbed them properly, and just go and swim in an Arctic storm.” And then that’s what we did. Yeah. But that was probably, things could have gone wrong quickly as opposed to things going wrong slowly over the north coast, if that makes sense.
Dr. Andy Galpin: No, that actually is great. That was super helpful. Then tell me about the training. I want to know three major areas. One, performance-wise, right? You have to be able to perform. You have to be able to swim for long amounts of time as well as go fast. So I want to understand how you’re thinking about that from a training perspective.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The other thing that you mentioned was short and long-term injury. So how are you thinking about connective tissue, soft tissue, and how are you not having a rotator cuff tear 90 days in, a lat tear? Where are the injury sites and how do you care about… So performing at your best, avoiding those, in this case, you actually have to think about long-term injury.
Ross Edgley: Mm. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: There’s not many races where you have to think about long-term overuse injury.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And then third, how do you actually do that in a way that you can ensure you can pace yourself days and days and days? So how do you set this training up to hit all those?
Ross Edgley: I love that. So, there’s a few things. I’m going to geek out a little bit now on sort of-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, my God. Sorry
Ross Edgley: … swimming sport science. So, Cam McEvoy, I’m a huge fan of Cam McEvoy. For those who don’t know, he’s the current world record holder for 50-meter freestyle, and he’s just also just gone into the 100 freestyle at the world champs and crushed it as well. His story is amazing. So basically, I believe it was London 2012, he was the golden boy of Australian swimming. Just everyone was like, “He’s amazing.” He did okay. I think he made the final but fell out of love with swimming. COVID then happened as well afterwards, and the story goes that he was just like, “Ah, I don’t want to swim anymore. I’ve lost the love for it.” And he started to get into calisthenics, weight training. And as he was looking at calisthenics, there was things like holding a front lever. There was people as well doing crazy pull-ups with just 100 kilos dangling from their weight belt. And now we know there’s a direct correlation between your one-rep max on pull-ups and your swim sprint speed.
Ross Edgley: He was one of the first to identify this because for so long in swimming, even if you were a sprinter, there was just this, we call them garbage yardage.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ross Edgley: That you’re just swimming hours.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Junk volume. Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Exactly. Just junk volume. And I think Cam sort of sat there and went, “Hang on. This makes no sense. Usain Bolt would never have run more than 400 meters to win the 100 meters. So why are we doing the same in swimming?” So he really pioneered this training. I’ve seen recently, we were saying at breakfast, Cam’s now doing speed reps with 80 kilos. It’s-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Pull-ups?
Ross Edgley: Pull-ups. He’s-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Unreal
Ross Edgley: … so strong. So he’s completely revolutionized the sport. Brett Hawke as well, huge fan of him, coach, and he’s doing exactly the same as well. And he was sort of pioneering that. The reason I bring this up is because I think seeing what Cam has done and going back to what me and you were talking about at breakfast, when I look at the training of a lot of swimmers, I look at Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky, and I’m like, “I can’t do that. I’m built like a hobbit.” “I’m still waiting for my growth spurt.” So when I’m reading Leon Marchand, when I’m reading all of these and looking at these cases of swimming, I’m like, “That doesn’t apply to me. I can’t do anything about the length of my limbs. This is what I have. This is what God has given me.” Whereas what we were talking about over breakfast, I love that the best athletes are often the best at what they do best. You play to your strengths.
Ross Edgley: And I think for me, looking at my training, I can’t look at what Michael Phelps does. I don’t have his wingspan. I don’t have his hyper-flexible ankles. His-
Dr. Andy Galpin: His obnoxious torso.
Ross Edgley: Oh, 100%. Yeah, he’s a speedboat.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: And even his lactic as well, his lactic threshold. I’m not going to do that. I can’t do that.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: That’s not me. But inspired by Cam McEvoy, it’s this idea, although I’m a distance swimmer, looking at improving my one-rep max on pull-ups so I have a greater strength reserve. So your strength reserve just basically meaning if you’re able to do a pull-up with 80 kilos, it just means doing pull-ups with nothing is a smaller percentage of what you’re capable of. So that means that when I’m swimming, if I’ve got a huge one-rep max on pull-ups, every single stroke is almost like a unilateral single-lap pull-down, and it’s a smaller percentage of what I’m capable of. We were talking about this as well. A good friend of mine, Eddie Hall, ah, this is the best example, but he basically entered a CrossFit sort of competition and ended up breaking the world record. 60 kilos on the barbell, was it? And I think it was, ah, I’m butchering this story, but he did something like 50 reps.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Bars to overhead.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Something like in a minute or something, right?
Ross Edgley: Oh. And the previous record, CrossFit is poetic technique, there to the chest, slight push press there. Eddie, because of his obscene strength, for him, 60 kilos with his strength reserve was just such a small percentage of what he was capable of. So, we were talking about it. It wasn’t a delt raise and it wasn’t an upright row. But he’s just-
Dr. Andy Galpin: So some combination of that
Ross Edgley: … he’s just rich because he’s so strong.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you’re talking about a guy who’s deadlifted 500 kilos.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And he probably weighs, in that competition, what do you think he weighed in there?
Ross Edgley: I think-
Dr. Andy Galpin: 180?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Which was 170 because he was retired. Yeah, which is lean for him.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So that’s a big, big mass.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Moving a big, big mass.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. And what’s weird, on the note of Eddie, for those who haven’t seen, he was an unbelievable swimmer, and still is. So when me and him go swimming, people look at him, and he puts on his bungee smugglers inside, and people are like, “Oh, this is hilarious. This guy thinks he can…” And then he gets in, and you’re like, “That’s a great white shark.” “That’s obscene.” And so again, there’s that idea again of the strength reserve, but he understands hydrodynamics. Despite his huge body, he knows how to move in water.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, he’s an athlete. He’s not just strong, he’s an athlete.
Ross Edgley: He is a specimen, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. So I think that’s one thing, looking at my training, that’s one thing. So that, coupled with looking at, like I said, mechanotransduction, ligaments, tendons, connective tissue. So for me, a lot of band work, a lot of plyometrics, a lot of, we were talking about it as well, reflexive eccentrics.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Tell me more. Yeah. Sure.
Ross Edgley: So with reflexive, let’s use a delt raise for instance, holding out very lightweight, might even be five kilos, dropping it, catching it. Reflexive eccentrics, getting the tendons to respond to that eccentrically. The reason for that is then when I’m caught in an Arctic storm, it doesn’t matter if waves are trying to contort my shoulder and pull it out of place. Because of the reflexive eccentrics, my shoulder is just like, “Nah, that’s fine. We’ve experimented with forces like this in the gym, so this is nothing.” And I think also, going back, sorry, very quickly just to the one-rep max on pull-up, one of the best things, and I wanted to ask you about this, actually. I found what has just rocketed my one-rep max on pull-ups, a lot of supra-maximal isometric holds. So before my heavier set, at the moment, it’s an ugly 60 kilos that I can do for one-rep max. I’m not Cam Macaboy here. So an ugly 60.
Ross Edgley: But before that, I will basically put on even a weighted vest on, holding maybe 90 kilos, three seconds. You’re playing with the central nervous system. That idea of between not fatiguing too much, but switching on the central nervous system, waiting maybe two minutes, getting that rest perfect, and then just ripping. I found they work really well for me. Have you experienced that with your athletes, with yourself? Do you use them at all?
Dr. Andy Galpin: So overload eccentrics have been around for a very long time, grossly understudied. A colleague of mine actually finished up at USC recently, and he was all into this. So he did a nice study on eccentric overloads, and it was very similar to the current literature base.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Very effective.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: They’re, in fact, typically more effective than traditional loading patterns for strength development.
Ross Edgley: Wow.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And now this was looking at squat movement patterns, and things like that. So if we’ve lost you, what we’re talking about is if, imagine, which you said kind of quickly, it doesn’t matter the exercise, but let’s say your one-rep max is 60 kilos. Instead of doing 60 kilos, you would do 70 kilos, but only do the lowering portion of it, right? So you’re overloading. Typically, the literature has experimented with everything from about 105% all the way up to like 120%.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Which, again, how do you do more than 100%? It’s because you’re not doing the 100% as based on the full motion, right?
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’re talking about you do a partial motion of only the eccentric, the lowering, which you can produce more force with, so you can go above that.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It works. Now, it’s difficult to get to. You don’t want to hop into this if you’re early in training, if you don’t know the movement pattern, but very effective. You also won’t see this in literature, but in the training communities, you can handle it pretty often. Like, you can dose it a good amount with good frequency and volume because you’re not exposing yourself to those full ranges of motion.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So neurologically, you can come back from it pretty quickly, but MSK-wise, you can actually handle it.
Ross Edgley: Wow.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s totally fine. So musculoskeletal, in terms of bones stuff, you’re not just getting beat up and trashed as much. So it is something that I actually think more people should play with. Experienced, all the caveats, right? Work yourself into that. But I’m not surprised to hear you say that because I would say that that growing body of evidence, if people would’ve done more work in that area, we would have stronger evidence.
Ross Edgley: Wow.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s not because it doesn’t work as well. I just think people haven’t spent as much time there.
Ross Edgley: I love that because I also think that idea of supra-training, meaning above and beyond your 100%, one-rep max-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … whatever it is. We were talking earlier about fell running. So fell running means you just get from A to B, and it doesn’t matter if you pick the route. You can run across bogs, marshes, rocks, doesn’t matter. And what’s so interesting is for all of the literature, they understood this idea of supra-sprinting. So, if you can run the 100 meters in 10 seconds, that is your PB. That is you at 100%. All of a sudden, if we start doing it downhill-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm
Ross Edgley: … you’re going to run faster than 10 seconds. And this is something that they understood for so long. Some of their descents are crazy. They will throw themselves downhill. And all of a sudden, when you look at just how their bodies, that kinetic chain, how everything is working, they’re just moving at speeds and teaching the legs to move at a speed that you wouldn’t do if it was nice flat surface. But I’m a huge fan of that. And I do that as well with swimming, a lot of bungee cord work. And you just feel amazing. So 25 meters, bungee is just pulling you, so it’s so tight. You jump in, you just take off, and it’s just treating the body to move at a rate that you wouldn’t do if it was just 100%, it is supra.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You got to give me more details here. I’m fascinated. I think you probably would’ve caught some people’s attention because I asked you how you train for 100-day swim, and you immediately went into one-rep max pull-ups.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Which immediately, it was like, whoa, time out. So the fact that your brain went to that-
Ross Edgley: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … tells me, number one, you’re just a weightlifting junkie like the rest of us.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But I would assume the first thing would’ve been Out of your mouth was this many hours, this much volume, this many yards, and so forth. You’re obviously doing that part.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: First of all, am I correct on that assumption?
Ross Edgley: 100%. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: I’m glad you brought it up because I led with the one rep max-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … and the super isometric holds. The zone two aerobic, just building a huge aerobic base is a massive boring part. And again, I spoke about when I go down to Loughborough, I have friends who are training for the Olympics, for the World Championships. Again, they are there doing their prehab, rehab. They are dolphins. They are mako sharks. I turn up, and I’m not exaggerating, sometimes just with a tray of donuts. And for 12 hours, just back and forth. And that is it. That is the really boring nature of it as well. And I think it’s quite nice. For a lot of my training, I will look at that 80/20 rule, 20% of the time aerobic, 20% anaerobic. I almost, again, looking at biomimicry, I look at sharks. And sharks, great whites, are able to propel out the water 30, 40 kilometers an hour, rapid, strike their prey. But when they’re migrating from Australia to New Zealand, they’re doing it about three kilometers an hour.
Ross Edgley: It’s so slow. It’s paced. And so I almost call my training almost like cruise and kill.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, cool.
Ross Edgley: There’s never anything in between for me. It’s always just like it is zone two training, aerobic, looking at mitochondria, capillary density, drilling that. Or when you do go all out, you are coughing up a lung at the side of the pool-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm
Ross Edgley: … just gunning it. But for me, I don’t exist in that weird bit in between because I think my training just needs a really clear cellular signal. What are you adapting to? And I think too often sometimes people don’t have that clear cellular signal. It’s almost that Robert Hicks in 1980s, studies in molecular biology, and he found that concurrent training dilutes the potency of the stimuli. So you’ve got to either be a strength athlete, a speed athlete, but make sure it’s really clear. I think for those listening, I always think too often if you stop someone in the gym, in a single sentence, they need to be able to say what they’re doing. If you say, “So, what are you doing?” And you just go, “I’m squatting today, strength, my body’s ability to generate force.” Cool. Amazing. Okay, someone else is over, going really slow, zone two training, aerobic, heart rate never over 130, 140 beats per minute.
Ross Edgley: Cool. But too often, people go into the gym, and I think they’ll go, “Oh, I’m going to do my zone two training. Oh, but Andy Galpin’s over there, and he’s doing biceps, so I’m going to go and train with him.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Obviously.
Ross Edgley: And then, “Oh, Ross is on the punch bag. I’m going to go do that.” So it’s that idea of, for me, every single session must have a really clear adaptation cellular signal that I’m chasing. Be so specific in it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: With the training piece of it here, zone two, you said that a couple of times now. Are you actually tracking heart rate or ensuring you’re in zone two? Or are you just using that colloquially as saying kind of like low intensity, be able to move for hours?
Ross Edgley: Both. I do find, especially in the water, a lot of heart rate monitors, wearable tech, especially in water, it just sometimes I’ll just be like, “No. I am chilling and swimming.” And it’s like, “You’re at 180.” I’m like, “I’m not.” And I think anyone listening, it’s like, yeah, use wearable tech, but be so in tune with your body. And I think we’ve lost that a little bit, that intuition, that an athlete needs to be really in tune with their physiology and understand. So yeah. I think so often it’s just actually using, when I’m swimming, this is going to sound so strange, but if I’m talking to myself when I’m swimming, I’m like, I’m speaking in complete sentences. This is therefore aerobic, the same way that I would do that if I was running. So I think it’s relying on some of that, and then afterwards, sometimes analyzing the wearable tech, but with a pinch of salt.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. So you’re really using zone– I’m putting these words back in your mouth, but you’re using zone two loosely.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Maybe even zone one-ish, zone in three.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s really more of a feel and a pace.
Ross Edgley: Yes. Yeah. I think so, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Is your team, when you’re actually in the race, are they giving you feedback on that and going, “Hey, Ross, too hot here.”
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: “Or pick it up. You’re actually not…” Outside of the weather moving you around.
Ross Edgley: 100%. Yeah, and I’m glad you brought that up, actually, because so often, especially with the sort of swims that I do, you are working with Mother Nature. You have to be working with it. So that’s something sometimes it’s one of the biggest differences with swimming. When you see amazing, like the 10K swimmers, they’re amazing. But it’s in a lake. There’s rarely a tide. We’re still in a pool, 15,000, whatever it is. With me, there’ll be times where I am working with the team, the captain, the crew, and they are understanding tides, currents, almost like a shark as well. So a shark’s physiology is so in tune with oceanic cues. It understands there’s a change in temperature, salinity. There’s a current. There’s a tide. It understands water columns. It uses them. And I think when I’m swimming, it’s very similar that the team will turn around to me. When we were going over Iceland, over the Arctic Circle, you couldn’t see land.
Ross Edgley: For I think two weeks, we didn’t see land. But they would be talking to me and saying, “Ross, you are in an amazing current. You can just let it do the work. Ease up.” Equally, they’ll turn around and go, “Ross, you’re in a countercurrent. You need to swim hard.” So I think it’s really interesting that they will say, “Ross, you’re coming in too hot. You need to ease up.” But so often it is the weather, it’s the tide, the current. That again, we’ve almost lost that a little bit. I loved with, in the new book, when we talk about Nordic folklore, the way that they would use tides, currents, even ravens, to help navigate. So they found Iceland. Floki basically arrived, let off a raven. As soon as it came back, he knew there was no land. Let off another raven, came back, there was no land. Let off a third raven, didn’t come back. There’s land somewhere. And sometimes they’d even stop rowing, and they’d try to smell the bird feces off a cliff and go, “Right, we can…”
Ross Edgley: Or they’d listen to the crashing of rocks. And so I think that’s one thing that so often I have to fuse being an athlete with being an adventurer as well, and actually understanding to work with Mother Nature, not against it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Did you ever get to spots, especially in the last one, where they said, “Hey, man, go,” but you’re like No, internally, I’m saying no. Either I can’t, or I don’t think I’m going to push past that Rubicon of fatigue recoverability.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Any times like that where you guys had to navigate or, I’ll say, not argue, but-
Ross Edgley: I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. Oh, there was disagreements. Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. But I think what was interesting is sometimes, especially when you’re so fatigued, you just need really clear instructions, and sometimes I wouldn’t argue. So if they said, “Ross, I need you to swim,” I can’t explain why. I would just trust that there is a storm coming, and we need to make it around the headland before we get absolutely smashed onto the rocks or something. So I think it was having complete trust in the team that so often I am well aware that when it comes to the hierarchy, I’m low down the pecking order.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: And I do as I’m told. Yeah, and you just have to trust them with that. Again, the Yukon was exactly the same, and certainly Iceland was the same as well. It was just, yeah. You can work with the laws of Mother Nature, but if Mother Nature, Poseidon, whoever you want to go, if they go, “You’re not going round,” then you go, “Okay.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: How did you figure out internally when you were at a spot of, “I need to communicate to the team.” Whether not– Probably not risk or danger-
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … but just more of, I need more food, or I’ve eaten too much, or I would imagine you had heartburn and-
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … things like that. How did you balance that with also going, “You need to check out of this?” Because it’s like you still need to go another 50 kilos before we can slow down here.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How do you learn to pay attention, but at the same time, turn it all off?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. I think removing emotion from it. So I’m so glad you asked that because there was one point in particular as well. So it’s called the overfall. So basically, it’s almost wind over tide, and it’s really shallow. So the wind is going one way.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, rough.
Ross Edgley: The tide is going another. And Andy, the only way I can describe, it’s like the water is detonating. They are just crashing and colliding, and it’s also really shallow as well, so the waves are just everywhere. I’m swimming through that, and the only thing I can see is I’m sighting off the boat as well. But as I disappear behind the crest of a wave and the wa– I’m like, I have no idea where I’m going. I’m lost at this point. That just plays with your orientation as well. So at that point, I just lost my breakfast, just brought it up everywhere. It is just sort of around. I’m now just swimming in my own sick. What was worse as well is at that point, because of the rocks and it was so shallow, jellyfish were basically being slammed onto the rocks. So it’s almost like a food blender. So I am swimming in my own sick, mixed with jellyfish tentacles at the same time. And not only that, because they’re so small, they’re going up your nose, in your ear.
Ross Edgley: Jellyfish stings are bad, but if you’ve had one up your nose, it’s-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … that is not a good day. And I am swimming, and at that point, I’m just very aware that I can’t even get back on the boat. I can say I need help, but no, they can’t pick me up.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm.
Ross Edgley: The back of the boat has a metal ladder that I climb up. In those sorts of waves, four-meter waves, it’s a guillotine.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: It’s just smashing up and down. So it’s really weird to know in that moment you’re the only person who can save yourself. And the team, who are incredible, are just looking on, going-
Dr. Andy Galpin: “Hope you don’t die.”
Ross Edgley: Yeah. And what was worse as well, like I said, it was tide and current, so the tide was with us. So I’m literally trying to outswim my own sick, which is moving surprisingly fast as well. And now I’m just in there just going, oh, this was 60 days in, and I was just like, “What am I doing?” But yeah, in that moment, sometimes the team are amazing, but there’s also some times where they look, and they’re just like, “I’m so sorry, we can’t do anything for you right now, Ross. We need to just get out of the overfalls where it’s a little bit calmer, and we can get you back on the boat. But right now, we can’t get you back on. It would be so dangerous.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Do they ever look down at you and go, “Hey, you’re doing a great job. Don’t worry, only 50 more days.”
Ross Edgley: They do. That plays with your mind. It goes to some weird places. I think, again, just looking at the neuroscience of it and the ventral striatum, the part of the brain with dopamine, risk, reward, expectation, and reward. And when you would get in, and all of a sudden you’d be like, “Okay, I swam really hard. Surely that’s 20 kilometers. Surely you’re going to say we’ve made amazing progress.” And they look at you and go, “No, Ross, that was a terrible swim. You swam two kilometers.” That just dopamine goes, “This behavior isn’t working. What is going on?” And that’s when going back to that anterior midcingulate cortex, you’ve got to find a part of your brain and convince it to keep going because in that moment, the ventral striatum that deals with expectation and reality is just going, this isn’t– It’s almost like a computer. This is how I think about oversimplification, but it’s going, “Error, this isn’t working.”
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Did you work with a sports psychologist at all? Have you in the past?
Ross Edgley: Yeah, I have friends who are sports psychologists, and also in the Royal Marines as well, and that I’ve taken so much from their teachings that has helped so much.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Did you find yourself in any spot wondering, thinking, “The risk here is too much?”
Ross Edgley: Yes. But again, I think things would go wrong very slowly. So it’s not like, to use an example, Alex Honnold.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ross Edgley: Things could go wrong so quickly for him. One wrong footing, it’s gone wrong. With me, well, there are sharks, but nothing dangerous, basking sharks-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … Greenland sharks. So remove that, remove the wildlife. Things are going to go wrong slowly. Yeah, it’s going to be a ligament, tendon, something that snaps. It’s going to be hypothermia, which you can identify early. So, I think it was knowing the risks are there, but as a team, we could catch it before it got bad.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How do you get back into those cold suits every day for three months-
Ross Edgley: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … plus?
Ross Edgley: I think There’s a huge habituation of that stress inoculation training. When you’re throwing yourself off a boat in the Arctic every six hours, for over 100 days, your body, it does become normal. You become numb to it a little bit, I think. The only other thing I can relate to, going back to the psychology, one of my friends in the Royal Marines, they call this dislocated expectation. And when the Royal Marines are going through their training, their 32 weeks of training, I’ve been fortunate enough to actually see them towards the end of their training. They will go on a 30-mile yomp with 50 kilos on their back. They are caked in mud, just drenched, cold, fingers numb. And I’ve been in the van where one of the PTIs will turn to them, and they’ll just go, “Guys, well done today. Don’t worry, guys. In 10 minutes, you’re going to be warm. You’ll have a nice cup of cocoa, get yourself a shower.
Ross Edgley: You’ve done really well today. You’ve done really well.” And they all go, “Oh, that’s amazing. Thank you, sir. You said we did well. That’s really nice.” They drive them up to Lympstone, where the Royal Marines are based, and as they drive up, they just drive straight past. They go, “Nah, nah, I’m joking, guys. No, you’ve still got 10 more miles. Let’s go.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh.
Ross Edgley: And they call it dislocated expectation, this idea.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Brutal.
Ross Edgley: Brutal, right? Brutal. And I think understanding that, and then also as well, one of my friends on the swim, he was amazing, Tom. Special Forces, Canadian Special Forces. It was so interesting. I, again, dislocated expectation. I was losing swim after swim after swim, dislocated expectation. And I got back on the boat, it was 2:00 in the morning, and I am just in a hole. I’m sitting there, I’ve just got this bowl of pasta steaming in my face. I’m just like, “I am in a bad way.” And Tom looked at me, and he said, “Ross, in Special Forces training, we are not trying to test how well you can win. We’re trying to test how well you can lose over and over again and keep going.” I said, “What do you mean?” And he told me this story that’s stuck with me ever since. He said there’s one particular exercise where they basically have you on an assault bike, and they just get you to redline, so your heart rate, 180 beats per minute.
Ross Edgley: You are coughing up a lung. You’re gasping for air. They get you off that. They take you into a room. In that room, there’s some 6’6” guy, close guard operative, dressed up, got pads on and everything, and behind him, there’s a door. And they look, and as you’re there gasping for air, they’re in your face, and they go, “Right. Your colleagues are behind that door. You need to get behind that door. Get past him and get past that door. Do you understand?” And they go, “Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And they go. They start wrestling with this guy, 6’6”. All of a sudden, the guy looks over, and there’s someone with a clipboard. The guy with the clipboard gives a nod to the 6’6” guy. Bang. Knocks them clean out. They’re there on the floor. Bang, wiped out. Bring them back round with some smelling salts, and they’re in your face. “Do you want to quit? Do you want to quit?” The way that Tom tells me this story, he’s there just going, “No.
Ross Edgley: No, I’m still good.” He gets back up. Wrestle, wrestle, wrestle. Again, the guy with the clipboard gives a nod. Bang, knocks him clean out. Does it about three times, and then they go, “Okay, okay. Enough, enough. Congratulations, you’ve passed.” But what was interesting is one guy, Tom was saying, actually made it past, got to the door, and it was bolted shut. You were never going to get past. Even if you got past, you were doomed to fail. That’s not what they were testing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: It’s how well you could lose time and time again. And I think hearing that story, like I said, 2:00 in the morning, jellyfish on my face, tired, it became something. I was like, “Right. I’ve got to get really good at losing. That’s what I need to do.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: For your two longer swims, what was the hardest day?
Ross Edgley: The swim around Great Britain and Iceland were very different. In the swim around Great Britain, I talk about in my first book, I think the hardest was coming around Scotland. And I can talk about it now without crying, I think, touch wood.
Ross Edgley: But it was coming around the top of Scotland. My dad was diagnosed stage four cancer. He told me about it when I was going around the top of Scotland. My first instinct, I was like, “I’m done. I just want to go home. I just want to be with you. I just want to hug you. I want to be with the family.” And he’s so stoic and so strong. He just said, “You can come home. You can give me a hug, but it’s got to be via Margate. You’ve got to finish what you started.” So, I think it was that. And when you look at my swim metrics, I swam down the east coast just fueled on just anger, a bunch of emotions that aren’t necessarily… Not something that I would usually use. But in that moment, I am just gunning it down. And then at the end, when you see on the GB swim, my dad is there. I hug him. All those emotions come out. And then what was strange is I lost my dad four years ago, and then with Iceland, I knew I was becoming a dad.
Ross Edgley: So, I sort of existed in this strange world of losing my dad and becoming one myself. So then with Iceland, it was knowing I needed to make it back for the birth of my son. And I said at the time, it’s strange. I want this swim to almost be a tribute to my dad and a letter to my future son. And I’m determined to make sure that it’s a good one and that he can look and, certainly my new book as well. I said I just want my son to read that when he’s older. If ever he’s going through a hard time, he can just read it and just go, “Oh, wow. That’s how my dad got through it.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Today’s episode is sponsored by LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has an ideal electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, but no sugar. Hydration is critical to performance, both physical and mental. And countless studies have shown that even a slight degree of dehydration, even as small as 1%, can lead to decreases in physical output and mental performance. We also know that electrolytes are critical to proper hydration, which I’ve been harping on for years. But you can’t do that, proper hydration, by only drinking water, especially if you sweat a lot. You need to get the right amount of electrolytes in the right ratios, and that’s why I’m a huge fan of LMNT. In fact, many of you might remember that I featured LMNT in my YouTube series on hydration nearly six years ago. I featured LMNT in these videos because their blend of 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium really is unique and different than any other electrolyte on the market.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And it has great scientific support. I use LMNT on nearly a daily basis, especially when I’m doing really hard training in the heat and I’m sweating a lot. If you’d like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/perform to claim a free LMNT sample pack with the purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that’s drinklmnt.com/perform to claim a free sample pack. What I love the most about your new book is that it’s called “How to Hero,” not “How to Be a Hero.”
Ross Edgley: That’s right, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: “How to Hero.”
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How did you pick that title?
Ross Edgley: So there was a few different sort of points that I arrived at that. I think one of the biggest ones was I’d just finished Lake Tresemaino, so that was the second time I’d been in hospital, like we said, with rhabdomyolysis. And it’s strange, you have good friends, and then you have great friends. So my good friends were saying, “Ross, I think it’s time you retire. I think you’re done. You’re getting a bit old now. Get some slippers, dressing gown. Just retire. Just pack it up.” And then you have great friends. I’m very fortunate, one of my great friends being Chris Hemsworth. Chris, and I never forget this conversation, I was like, “I’ve got rhabdomyolysis. I got heatstroke. I’m in a pretty bad way.” And he looked at me and just went, “Amazing.” And I was like-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, for you, asshole
Ross Edgley: … I was like, “Excuse me?” And he goes, “This is amazing. Hero’s journey.” Joseph Campbell said the hero’s journey, every single story from “The Odyssey” from “Harry Potter,” it follows this hero reluctant to leave his sort of comfortable life, that call to adventure, and then all of a sudden allies, enemies, picks up a sacred sword, battles dragons, finds his innermost cave, slays the dragon, returns with the elixir to improve his village. And I think what was so nice is Chris in that moment was just like, “This is the hero’s journey. You’ve got to slay another dragon. This isn’t the end. This is the third act.” And then it was the University of Iceland who said, “Look, if you could swim around Iceland tracking eDNA samples so we can track biodiversity in a level of detail we’ve never seen before.” It was all of those things combined. That is how I arrived at “How to Hero” because it’s just this idea of anyone reading it.
Ross Edgley: It’s not about me. I’m the human guinea pig, but in reality, again, Joseph Campbell said the hero’s journey can be a profound vehicle for moral instruction. It’s not just a story. It’s how to live your life, what to do when hardship arrives. I think all great athletes will tell themselves a story to get through anything. Further to that point, we talk about it in the book, Carl Jung talking about your shadow self, a part of your psyche that you keep hidden from the world. You don’t want people to see that you’re aggressive, jealous, hypercompetitive to the point of it being unhealthy. But Carl Jung believes that everyone has to sit down with those demons to actually address that part of your psyche and almost use it in a weird way to go, okay, it’s like having a monster, Jordan Peterson. Having a monster, that’s not the bad thing. It’s knowing when to put him back in the cage. We were talking about some athletes-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm
Ross Edgley: … who are just fighters, for instance, who are driven by something like an ego, maybe something a bit darker, makes you a bad human, makes you an amazing athlete.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’ll hold off saying the names of the people you used as an example.
Ross Edgley: Right. But what have you used for yourself and the athletes that you’ve coached? Do you find just it’s so specific to each athlete?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, of course, it’s specific to each athlete. You said it so well at the beginning. You have your game plan. You have the little bit of science. You have the science we’ve collected on you, your personal stuff, and then we have the reality of competition, the reality of life. We’ve had situations where the night before a huge competition, an ex-girlfriend rents the room next door and pounds on the wall the whole night.
Ross Edgley: Oh my God, man.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Plus the stereo at 1,000, right? We’ve had current wives take mouthpiece, take your cup without telling, and then you’re running around right before events, and you’re like, “Well, where is it?” You’re like, “Oh, someone stole it.” Right? So you have all this stuff, and then you have the reality of not just their mental stress, but an actual external event.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’ve had weather things hit. And now it’s like, okay, you drilled this perfect warm-up routine. You have the perfect timing of your nutrients. You have everything lined up, and then all of a sudden, it’s like you got one to five minutes into the game, and then you get a three-hour delay.
Ross Edgley: Hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Okay, what do you do? All the sports are so different because these exposures are there. And one thing that is resilient to that stuff is, number one, whether it’s the technical stuff or the nutrition or the fueling supplementation, this is why you have to have practice.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because you have to learn a little bit of the chaos where you go, “Okay, on paper, we’re going to do A, B, and C, but now I’ve actually tinkered with this before, and this upsets my stomach,” or this. You have to not just find what works, but you have to push different things to figure out also what doesn’t work.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You don’t know what to do, but you can cross off some things of what not to do.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s helpful. And then the second one is psychological, getting into a spot, and this is why I asked about have you worked with sports psychologists because I think you’re just naturally at this spot of how do we pay attention to what matters?
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: As an example, one thing I will use quite often is if we are the underdog, the more chaos, the better. Perfect example of this was the Olympics over COVID. Typically, what happens for the Olympic cycle, years out, you know exactly what you have to do to qualify.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And the sports are different, right? Some sports, you have to hit a specific time, and you qualify. Others, you just have to be first place or second place, right? So it’s all a little bit different. But you know those rules, you know when the competitions are, and you typically lay these three and a half year plans out. And then as the time gets closer, the plan gets more specific because you have less variables. COVID threw that all out the window. And now we’re not competing, and then it’s like, well, when are we going to push the Olympics to? Maybe a month or a year from now. Okay. Well, you can’t hold on to pure strength qualities, pure speed qualities. You can’t hold that for that long.
Ross Edgley: No.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So now you’re playing the game of okay, do we try to hold because we think this is going to start here pretty soon, or do we actually go back a little bit, rebuild some baseline fitness? All this technical stuff you’re thinking through, and it’s a lot of pressure. And then we actually don’t even know what we have to hit, when we have to hit it, when we’re going to compete again, all this stuff. But a lot of people underperformed because the system was so chaotic that they weren’t able to handle that. They weren’t able to roll and move and adjust with weather, all this stuff. Where all of our people who were not already at the spot or projected one, I was like, “Great.”
Ross Edgley: The underdogs.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The more chaos, the better.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because straight up one to one, I don’t think you can beat her. It’s probably not going to happen, right?
Ross Edgley: This is amazing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We needed some miracle anyways. We got a miracle. It’s called chaos.
Ross Edgley: That’s it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And let’s play into that. Let’s be free and we’re going to go shoot the shot as much as we possibly can. So being able to look at this and say, we’re still going to look at our data and we’re going to use our analytics and everything, but the reality of it is you’re going to show up and everything is going to go nuts, and I want you to just live in that moment and go be. Which is probably a little bit what you feel like when you’re in the water of like, we’re going to swim this many laps or this much distance, rather, and then you get there and there’s some weather and you’re just like-
Ross Edgley: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … whatever.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So actually on that, how close to pacing do you guys have it planned out? How far in advance, how close, and how specific do you guys get with, hey, we got to do 1,000, so we’re going to try to do this many kilometers per day. Or are you really– Tell me about that detailed planning.
Ross Edgley: Very intuitive and being adaptive to what’s happening. But sometimes, certainly at the end, we just had non-negotiables. I was like, I need to make it back, or otherwise, I’m not there for the birth of my first child.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So with that, it got to the point where there was just non-negotiables at the end. And the team were amazing, and we swam in some conditions that were really quite close to the edge, even avoiding, in Grindavik, the volcano and the poisonous gas as well.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How are you handling sleep?
Ross Edgley: Great question. With difficulty. Yeah, I think sometimes it was knowing whatever I supplemented with, if it was caffeine, that’s going to interfere with the sleep later. So there was sometimes if I was like– And not only that, not just caffeine as well, sometimes if I got stung too many times by jellyfish, because one’s not too bad, two’s okay, but three, four, the toxins start actually getting into your lymph nodes. You start scratching under your armpits and around your groin. The toxins are seeping in and actually attacking the body.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Totally normal.
Ross Edgley: So there’s times, yeah, where sleep was just hard, whether it was taking too much caffeine, being too stimulated, even sometimes just the boat just rocking. I think all of those things, it got really hard. But whether I just got really, really exhausted or I started to habituate those conditions, in the end, I could just fall asleep anywhere, and even in really bad– So it was a performance yacht, so it’s a monohull, so it is just getting smashed by waves. But your bunk, you basically can fold yourself up so you’re pressed against the wall, almost like, I don’t know, a cheese toasty, where you fold it. That’s essentially what you’re doing with your bunk. And you could just, yeah, you could sleep anywhere.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you get off, you pull in the boat, you eat some food, and you go to sleep every time. Did you sleep every other time?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Tried to sleep every single time.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Every single time.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So you are on literally a six-hour plan-
Ross Edgley: Mm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … for 100 plus days.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. And-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Wake up, fuel, get back in the water, fuel-
Ross Edgley: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … and just rotate nonstop.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Sometimes as well, I tried different– Ashwagandha. That I felt, quite subjective, did help me calm down if I had a bad swim. Maybe it was cognitive, I’m not sure, but sometimes I’d just be going through the numbers in my head, and I’m like, “I’m not going to make it back.” That calmed me down a little bit, I found. That was good. ZMA. Cherry extract as well, because with my circadian rhythm, my body not quite producing enough melatonin go to bed.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Any? Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Cherry extract as a natural source of that was quite good, I found. I think they were the main things. In the past, I’ve tried CBD oil, but I just didn’t, and sometimes you can wake up groggy. Same with from ashwagandha, that I could sleep-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … and then I wake up and I’m just like, “Oh.” Just feeling really groggy.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Did you end up getting in basically the same six-hour routine every single time, or were you kind of, with things like cherry juice, were you like, “Oh,” kind of when I feel it, or were you set, so you’re like, “All right. Get out, I eat this, I take this, I go,” and you just repeated that the entire time?
Ross Edgley: Tried to repeat it, but certainly towards the end, on the south coast, because it wasn’t tidal anymore, we would just swim for sometimes 18 hours. Just swim, swim, swim. And that was actually nicer in some ways, because during the six hours on, six hours off, I just never got that deep, restorative sleep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Always exhausted, yeah.
Ross Edgley: Always, yeah. Just nothing was ever fully rejuvenating, ever. Everything, physically, but I’m also talking neurotransmitters as well, just serotonin, dopamine, just what is going on. So when I was doing those 18-hour swims, for instance, and then I knew I could sleep for a little bit longer. Or 16 hours, sorry, rather, and I could get eight hours’ sleep. Didn’t happen often, but, oh, that deep sleep. And sometimes I’d wake up a different person. Like, the sun was shining. It was okay again. It was so strange noticing That. That again, it goes back to what I was talking about with swimming, people going, “Oh, what’s your VO2? What’s your lactic threshold? What’s your…” And it’s just like, no. It’s sleep.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Do you have an ability to sleep? And again, the Royal Marines were saying this, they were like, sometimes a superpower is just being able to just sleep standing up and just getting that rest when you can get it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How did you hydrate?
Ross Edgley: That was less of, certainly compared to Tres Hombres, it was less of an issue because I was so cold, so I wasn’t sweating all that much. And again, when I’m having so much of my carbs through powdered form, it was quite easy that I was constantly taking on liquid. So that wasn’t too much of an issue. I think electrolytes and hydration were actually okay, yeah, in Iceland, because it’s just not as hot.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Were you guys just taking pure salt with you? Were you taking actually any electrolyte supplements? What did you use for them?
Ross Edgley: Myprotein were amazing. They ended up giving me different electrolyte formulas depending on what we were working with, if I was cramping too much and stuff. But again, it wasn’t the same as Tres Hombres. Tres Hombres, you could tell not only just cramping, but cognitively as well. It was a fatigue that for all the carbs and caffeine, it’s not working. You know it’s something else-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … in the circuitry of the brain. It was that, yeah. Whereas Iceland, not as much. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What were you guys aiming for per 24 hours for calories?
Ross Edgley: What’s so interesting, chatting to Professor Luke von Loon from the Myprotein Advisory Board, he was saying because I came back only two kilos lighter, he was like, “Your calorie requirement, you must have been hitting some crazy caloric intake. Otherwise, you’d have come back-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … emaciated skin.” So I think we were putting away 10 to 15,000, yeah, a day. Pretty consistently. Just because of the laws of thermodynamics, I wouldn’t have come back the size that I did.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Was that the plan going in, 10 to 15, or were you just, “We’ll fuel as much as we can.” What matters more there? Practical and logistic of what can you just get in your mouth and eat, or getting closer to the number?
Ross Edgley: 100% just what is practical in that moment. I think there’s so much theory, philosophy. You can have the best diet in the world on paper, but when you are caught in an Arctic storm or just trying to make up the calories, it’s like, what can you actually, in real time, what can you do? There’s optimal and perfect, and there’s real-world conditions, and I think it was just so intuitively eating at that point. I think what was interesting is when I swam around Great Britain, I was 32, 33 years old, and my body bounced back so much quicker. I could do it on deep-fried chocolate. We got around certain parts of Scotland as well, and the hospitality in Scotland was amazing, but they wouldn’t let me go past, there’s a place called Tobymory, and they wouldn’t let me go past without having shots of whiskey.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh my God.
Ross Edgley: I was just like, “Oh, okay. We’re doing this, are we?”
Ross Edgley: But I was waking up and I was fine.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Ross Edgley: I was young.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Like you said, you’re made of rubber and magic. Whereas at 39, swimming around Iceland, everything creaked a bit more. If I had a deep-fried chocolate, I knew about it the next day.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm.
Ross Edgley: It’s so interesting that, yeah, whilst I did Great Britain with youth, I had to rely on experience and sports science knowledge. Even when we were storm-bound as well, rehab, prehab, foam roll, just everything to make sure that when the storm cleared, I was ready to go again. But on the GB swim, just, yeah, just had a quick nap, deep-fried chocolate, jumped straight in.
Dr. Andy Galpin: How much longer are you going to keep going?
Ross Edgley: I think I can still be doing this until 50. And then beyond that, I think it’s so interesting. I wanted to quiz you on this, actually, because I think the new generation of athletes, it used to be a death sentence. If you were 40 years old, that was a death sentence for your career.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah.
Ross Edgley: You maybe, in football, were at best coming off the bench to try and sprinkle some magic or something like that. But now you have Ronaldo, you have Messi. Not only that, when you start looking at basketball, LeBron, in a sport with plyometrics, speed. Kipchoge, recently Melbourne Marathon, whatever. Recently, just insane. So do you think now older athletes, through sports science interventions, whatever it is, do you think it’s now because of our understanding of sports science, people are just extending their career so much?
Dr. Andy Galpin: So it’s a really interesting thing. There are a number of things that are happening. Number one, yeah, sports science technology, all there. Number two, the sports themselves have gotten more intelligent.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Load management, all that stuff, right? So they’re not practicing them as much. They’re paying attention to those things, and there’s good and bad and better ways to manage load with athletes. The athletes themselves have gotten wiser regarding the fact that when do they make their money in their career? It’s at the end. So the returns on your money are so much higher in those every year you can extend. So a lot of the athletes that we coach come in really early in their careers because they feel fine. Nothing is broken. But they’re looking at it already as a 21-year-old, 23-year-old, 25-year-old, thinking, “If I can spend all this time and I get one more year at the end of my career, I’ll make most likely the most amount of money I’ve ever made in a year in that year. If I can get a year and a half, I can get two more years.”
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: The athletes never used to think like that, because contracts weren’t structured that way. So there’s a technical thing here, where it’s just the way that collective bargaining agreements work now, the athletes are really incentivized to go like, “Hold on now.”
Ross Edgley: But you’re so right, because there was an article not too long ago with LeBron saying, and don’t quite quote me on the figure, it was like he spends two million on his body.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Two million on recovery, yeah.
Ross Edgley: It was two million, right? Yeah. And everyone was like, “But that’s obscene.” And I’m like, “Not really. Not in the slightest.” When you look at the economics and the commercial aspect, if that extends his career for one, two more years, that more than pays for itself. That’s how you treat a business.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: And I think it’s quite similar. I think you’re absolutely right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Trevor Bauer was the best example.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? He went from a okay, pretty good career, to winning a Cy Young, breaking baseball record for salary, because he was the most I have ever seen invest In all this stuff way before he had to.
Ross Edgley: Wow.
Dr. Andy Galpin: He did not have to, but he poured everything into it, and he was just super logical about it. He’s like, “I’ll spend X, it’ll return Y.”
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: In any other segment, if you’re 10X-ing your return, you’d be like, “Of course you would do it.”
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But then when sports people are like, “Well, why?”
Ross Edgley: Oh, I agree.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’re now at the spot, too, where no one can predict an injury.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s an outward lie. But we’re getting much closer.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And we can see things that are really obvious red flags. And so just avoiding those.
Ross Edgley: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You avoid the catastrophic injury, the ones you can control. Obviously, acute trauma injuries, we can’t do anything about that. But it’s the shoulder injury over time, it’s the stuff like that where if you’re paying a little bit of attention, if you’re using an appropriate balance of technology and analytics-
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … you can see that stuff.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You can’t see it, but what you’re seeing is your risk has gone to this, it’s gone to this, your risk has climbed to this. And now you can make more intelligent decisions. You also have little stuff like here’s a perfect example. The most iconic figure for resilience and durability is Lou Gehrig. He’s the guy that ALS, it’s called Lou Gehrig’s disease, right?
Ross Edgley: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: He’s also called the Iron Horse because he broke the record. It was like 2,100 games that he played without having a day off. I think it was the equivalent of 10 or 12 years. Oh, no, it had to be more than that. Probably something like that. Now, this is almost near 100 years ago now, right?
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And this is when guys are having hot dogs and cigars for recovery, right? And you’re not getting on airplanes, you’re driving on buses, and if you’re on an airplane, everyone’s smoking. You have all this stuff. Well, you fast-forward to now, you’re all on PJs, you have three massage therapists on there, you’re getting acupuncture 15 minutes after the game. That stuff matters, too.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So it’s not only the sports science, it’s not the recovery beds and all the blood work we can do. It’s not necessarily those things. It’s the simple fact that what you’re exposed to environmentally is significantly different now.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’re not drinking lead-filled water in your recovery. There’s really dumb stuff about the air quality in the buildings now. They’re paying attention to it and be like, “Oh, yeah, let’s do this stuff different.” That stuff alone-
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … aggregates over time, and it doesn’t solve anything. It just de-risks the whole situation.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And so then you combine that on top of, yeah, smarter training choices, combine that on top of business decisions that get made on the court sometimes, and then you combine all that on top of the realization that my career is more making money towards the end there. And in large part, I think that it has pushed the boundaries a little bit further of what we can do.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Layered underneath the fact that now if something does happen, surgically, we’re smarter. We don’t make decisions where guys come back from surgery and this is a wrap on their career. So I think all those are why we get there.
Ross Edgley: I completely agree with you there. Certainly, my shoulder’s been absolutely battered over the years, and I remember after the swim around Great Britain, I had shoulder surgery. The cartilage needed repairing. Also, I believe it’s a subacromial decompression as well, where they had to shave the bone basically down. And I remember at the time they were like, “Ross, you’re so lucky. If this was five years ago-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … we would’ve had to open you up.” And so you can probably just see there, it was just pinhole. That was literally it. And I was back four months later. They were like, “But Ross, five years, just five years ago, it would’ve probably been a death sentence for your career. You’d have had an amazing career. You swam around Great Britain and everything, but you’re done.” But it was the fact that they managed to get me back on the start line. I was like, “Oh.” And so I completely agree with what you’re saying. I think we’ve advanced so much now that what previously would’ve been the end, it’s just like, “We’ve just got a few more years.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. My squirrel brain is remembering a question, a better answer I would like out of you, actually, because I asked a question, you gave me a terrible answer.
Ross Edgley: Get any of them.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I want a better one out of you.
Ross Edgley: I blame the coffee.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I remember talking to Cam Haynes, and he was telling me about how Truett, his son, trained for his world record in pull-ups.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So, I think he did 10,000 in 24 hours.
Ross Edgley: That’s amazing. Yeah, he’s a legend.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And he’s like, “What people don’t realize is he would be like Saturday morning, have a coffee and have breakfast, and 7:00 a.m. start doing pull-ups, and then not stop until 7:00 p.m.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: He does 12 hours of pull-ups.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: If you want to do 24 hours of pull-ups, you probably have to do at least 12 hours of pull-up.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And I’m like, “Oh my God.” So I assume, and in addition to all your one-rep maxes that you have to do there, you said you do zone two stuff, but give me more detail about that. Are you showing up to the pool with donuts and being like, “All right. I’m going to go swim for 15 hours?”
Ross Edgley: Yeah. It’s strange because I think there’s a huge period where I like to swim in a pool, and I feel like a goldfish because you are just for hours back and forth smashing donuts. But I like that the sports scientist in me can control all the variables. So I’m aware of heart rate, my pace, feeding strategies, everything, and I can strictly control it. But as we start to get closer to the actual event, you need to just start drilling specific conditions. Then all of a sudden, that’s when I’m going to Scotland, and that’s when I need to be swimming in water temperatures that are similar to Iceland, looking at kit, tech, and everything else like that. Because even just swimming in saltwater versus pool and freshwater, buoyancy’s completely different. So you need to be drilling exactly what you’re going to be doing on race day. So I think that’s the thing. It’s this period of, it’s not general physical preparedness, but it’s looking at fitness qualities, and then as you start to get more specific, specific preparedness for the actual event itself.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Give me a high-level week for you of your training. Break it down. Are you swimming five days a week? Are you swimming two days a week? Are you lifting What does it look like?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. So towards the final preparation for Iceland, it was sometimes just jumping off a pier in Scotland and just disappearing, sometimes for 10, 12 hours. I’d have a tow float just loaded with Energels, and I would just swim miles out to sea and then just swim all the way back. And that-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Just rocking solo swims.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. And I love the example that you just used there with the pull-ups and trust you, that is what it is, is the SAID principle, specific adaptations to imposed demands. You just get really, really good at what you repeatedly practice. And for me, it was just like, you need to swim for at least 12 hours a day, every single day in water that is just above freezing. That’s it. And there’s no shortcut, there’s no way to biohack it. Again, in the earlier stages, when we’re talking about one-rep max on pull-ups, making sure that the shoulders are bulletproof, prehab, rehab, everything like that, but as you start getting close to the event, it’s just like, no, you need to be so well-drilled in what you’re going to ask your body to do for over 100 days.
Dr. Andy Galpin: A month out. When do you stop lifting, I guess, is the best question.
Ross Edgley: I keep lifting right up until the event, but just massively reduce the frequency. So when I’m in my final month, it might just be one a week. That’s literally it. Whereas in the earlier stages, you’re still playing around with more weight sessions, more cardio. But yeah, certain towards that. And that is more maintenance as well. You just want to make sure that everything that you’ve trained, like I said, that connective tissue, the strength, you’re just maintaining that right up until.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So that one session a month out, 45 minutes, are you doing full body? Are you doing swim-specific stuff? Are you doing heavy? Are you doing blood flow? Give me more detail on that one day a week.
Ross Edgley: Very swim specific, not full body. And I think sometimes it’s just completely playing around with the stress and stimuli during the session. So in any given session, start off with some plyometric work, make sure that the central nervous system is switched on. That might just be as simple as medicine ball throws, medicine ball slams. For instance-
Dr. Andy Galpin: All upper body based, for the most part.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Because I’m not looking at my dive distance. I just don’t need it. Again, my legs barely work. So medicine ball slams to start off. Then I think what’s really good about that is so often that linked with wearable tech, I’ll look at my HRV, resting heart rate. That coupled with doing some plyometric work, looking at rate of force development, I can just tell if I’m not quite firing. And that will then inform my decision for the rest of the session as well.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I see.
Ross Edgley: Then, like I said, a lot of priming, neural priming. So the supra maximal isometric holds that I mentioned before. Say I’m working up to a one-rep max on pull-ups, or putting up three reps, I’ll make sure that I’m working. I think I was going heavier than 105% on my one-rep max. I think I was maybe at 110. So then you’re moving on from plyometrics, neural priming, speed, rate of force development, over to strength, just pure maximal strength, your body’s ability to generate force. After that, working on kind of strength prehab, looking at the shoulders specifically, like I said, connective tissue. And then sometimes finish. I love the swim erg. Sometimes I’ll just put on podcasts.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: And I’ll be able to just literally just rip into that for hours. But I have quite liked blood restriction training. I think, although it’s only on the triceps, it just helps finish off that stroke. And it’s such a small muscle, and it contributes to such a small amount of propulsion when swimming, but it’s that small muscle that will fatigue first. And then that’s what will impact on bad biomechanics. So I think blood restriction training, for me, some good studies on capillary density, mitochondria. I just quite like to finish there. So it might sometimes be minute on, minute off, 20 minutes to finish at the end of that session as well.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And your swimming, I presume is mostly volume. Putting it in there at this point, right? Are you doing any speed swimming? Are you doing any anaerobic threshold swimming just to touch it?
Ross Edgley: So, yeah. So I will start some of my swim sessions, even when they’re just like a horrible 10-hour session with sprints. I think my biomechanics, I think especially with swimming, you can just get lazy. Your elbow starts dropping, your hip starts sinking. By introducing a few sprints, and Brett Hawke is a huge advocate of this. Even long distance swimmers, he’s like, “When you are swimming at speeds, it’s just developing good biomechanics and understanding of hydrodynamics.” So sometimes it’s almost a form of neural priming and just making sure that my hydrodynamics are good before I actually go into my longer session. But I’m not actually looking to be that much faster. Yeah. It’s just knowing that is improving techniques. And actually, what’s interesting about that is sometimes when I’m then swimming, again, controlling all the variables, if my 50, 25 sprints, I’m moving better in the water but not trying harder, I know the adaptation is-
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s your strength reserve all again
Ross Edgley: Exactly.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Let me ask the opposite direction. Let’s say it was tomorrow, right? You just got done today with the world’s most important podcast, and you said, “Okay, great. I’ve got a race or another event I’m going to do in six months.” How would your training look different tomorrow versus what you just described, which was a month out?
Ross Edgley: Oh, so really in the early stages.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. You’re six months away.
Ross Edgley: Yeah. I think sometimes looking at any muscle imbalances, making sure that everything is bulletproof before you then subject it to the amount of volume that you’re going to ask from the body, and I think that’s what’s really important. I think even endurance athletes now, there’s this idea of sometimes training to train, and that is general physical preparedness. Or looking at the Soviet Union model, that so often they would be looking at an athlete throughout his entire career. I think work capacity is so often overlooked. Your body’s ability to perform and positively tolerate training of a given intensity or duration. And what I mean by that is if Me and you were handed two athletes who were going to go and run the London Marathon, and they had exactly the same VO2, lactic threshold, their biomechanics. Everything was pretty much identical, but one had a higher work capacity. The one with the work capacity, you can flog them like a horse.
Ross Edgley: The volume and intensity that you could give them, and the rate at which they can improve would be so much more. But sometimes, like I said, there’s this idea of training to train. So even before you get to pre-season, there should be this period where you are training their body to train to actually positively adapt to that volume and intensity. So for me, early on in training, sometimes it will be that. And that is very much general physical preparedness. Sometimes I’ll still be running at that point as well. I’m not just completely swimming. It’s even just going, I’m going to get my aerobic training from a light jog as well.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Would your lifting be the same, in terms of are you two days a week now, three days a week? Are you doing different movement patterns?
Ross Edgley: A lot more strength-focused. Yeah. I think just making sure. It’s just almost improving the chassis. Do you know what I mean? It’s making you a more physically robust athlete, knowing what’s about to come. I just think so often athletes ignore that period and then wonder why they get injured later. Have you found that? Do you find sometimes you’ve got to train athletes to train?
Dr. Andy Galpin: 100%. You were asking earlier about the athlete longevity. This is another aspect of that because if you now don’t show up to those things ready to go-
Ross Edgley: Mm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … you’re going to be asked and expected to compete from your job, where now the intensity matters. You’re going to do all the things that increase injury risk because of those things. So we have to do the same thing. We have to do the same thing for fight camp. This has been another monumental change in our boxers, our wrestlers, our fighters, our kickboxers, is if we are traditionally thinking about a fight camp is the last six to 10 weeks, we cannot start your physical preparation in that. You were so eloquent about how you said earlier, that six to eight weeks prior to, we need to be fighting, and we need to be getting better only at fighting. I cannot be getting you in shape. I cannot be helping you lose weight. I can’t be trying to get you stronger. We need that walking in so that we can go the next seven weeks, we’re going to optimize and maximize output on that very specific skill.
Dr. Andy Galpin: It’s too much. It’s too many qualities, as you said earlier, to get done at once. And now we have competing interests, which means volume goes up. We’re also in generally a hyper or hypocaloric state, if not a eucaloric state, which means we can’t just throw on extra calories to get around this. And then all the other things that go into, “You’re five weeks away, you’re four weeks away, you’re three weeks away, and now you’re on a billboard, and you’re in a…” It’s like just all the timeliness that goes into those competitive sports. We can’t deal with that. So we need to walk into those things, and I actually believe that keeps all the soft tissue in a much better spot, so we can go after speed, power, technique, skill, game plan, tactics, all that stuff, repetition, and get a higher rate of health, and then higher performance ultimately.
Ross Edgley: 100%. And I think even some of the best athletes as well. We were talking about The Last Dance, and I know very little about basketball, but I just love that. And you can see Michael Jordan in the off-season was exactly the same. Some of his weight training, you kind of look, and there’s a brilliant documentary as well with Kipchoge and a lot of the Kenyan runners, and similarly, it kind of looks quite primitive. You see him on the leg press, and you’re like, “What? That’s terrible technique.” I’m like, “Well, his sub-two-hour marathon begs to differ.” So it’s that idea of sometimes just-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Michael Johnson sprinting, same thing
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Like, oh, he has bad technique?
Ross Edgley: Oh.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But really, he also has the fastest ever in the history to do that.
Ross Edgley: Oh, my God. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Another technical question for you. What kind of yardage are you swimming in the, I don’t know, call it month, three weeks, two weeks before a race? What are you getting per week?
Ross Edgley: It gets really weird. I think towards the end, we’re trying to put away at least 10K a day, sometimes the 20 and 30-kilometer days. And I am down at the pool for the entire day. I’m setting up with them. They open, and I’m finishing. No, I’m really fortunate. People at Loughborough University, even the Royal Marines. I did a 48-hour non-stop swim with the Royal Marines because you can’t go to a leisure center and say, “Can I swim through the night?”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Whereas friends of mine who were Royal Marines were just like, “Oh, Ross, look, if you can get some friends to be lifeguards,” and the PTIs were qualified friends of mine, “Then you can swim for 48 hours.” So I did a 48-hour non-stop swim, which was just, again, drilling. Even hallucinations and stuff. That was the first really long swim I’d ever done. And I’d never forget, I was swimming, and this was going through on the second night, and I ended up hitting the lane rope because I was all over the place.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Sure.
Ross Edgley: And as I hit the lane rope, I was absolutely convinced that somebody had jumped in and was swimming with me. And so I turned, and there’s these large sort of lane ropes. I turn, and in my head, even now, I thought it was a person. And I just like hit it. I went, “I do apologize. I’m so sorry. I’m doing a swim, 48 hours. But I am sorry. There’s food at the end. Help yourself to donuts. And I appreciate the company. Yeah.” Carried on swimming, and then I stopped for some donuts, and the PTIs are all looking at me, and they were like, “Ross, are you okay?” I went, “Yeah. Why? What’s wrong?” And they went, “Well, you were just talking to the lane rope. You just offered him some donuts.” And I turn, and sure enough, there’s no one in the pool, and I was like, “Ah. Oh, dear.”
Ross Edgley: But that’s weird. Again, I think looking at Sports science, no one talks about hallucinations from sleep deprivation. That is something I’ve had to learn from friends of mine in the Royal Marines. Often for me as well, the hallucinations are quite nice. In Loch Ness, for instance, it’s so long, the loch, and you’ve got trees that sort of surround it. And I remember it was going into the second night, 2:00 in the morning, and I look over and there’s these trees, and the silhouette looked like it was the Titanic, like a cruise ship. And I’m sitting down, I’m treading water and I’m eating a banana, and I look up, and then the branches of the trees start waving. And I remember looking and I was like, “That’s really… How have they got a cruise ship down the loch?” But I didn’t question it. I was like, because the branches that were waving, they looked like people who’d come to the side of the cruise ship-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … to wave me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So my girlfriend, Hester,’s watching, and the crew, and I look up and I am really moved and touched and I’m like, “Guys, thank you so much. This means so much for your support.” And Hester’s looking on like, “He’s talking to some trees,” like thanking them for their support. So they’re always quite nice, the hallucinations is what I’m saying. They’ve always been quite nice to me.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: So yeah, I don’t mind them so much.
Dr. Andy Galpin: What do you think you’d be doing right now if something had happened to you and you couldn’t physically be doing this? Would you be coaching?
Ross Edgley: I think I would. I think in between swims, when I’m doing my swim, my entire crew and everyone is amazing and they’re all there for me, and that’s incredible. But outside of that, I love being there for other people. I think one of the best, not just because he’s an absolute specimen, but Chris Hemsworth. For Disney and National Geographic, we did Limitless.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I watched it.
Ross Edgley: Oh, it didn’t quite do it justice because we, the ice swim, for instance-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … we left Byron Bay, where it was like 40 degrees. It was the middle of the summer in Australia. Zero training. Took him to the Arctic Circle and threw him in the water. And they were like, “Right, you’ve got to swim.” And he just crushes this ice swim. I loved being there for someone else. I get so invested. And that was amazing. Again, not just because he’s such a specimen, and he adapts so well to any training that you give him.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I don’t know him, but he’s a junkie with this stuff.
Ross Edgley: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Right? Because he’s got another series out or something.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: He seems to be so into sports science.
Ross Edgley: Yeah, he’s a beast.
Ross Edgley: Because he’s such a good actor and he’s so good-looking, he probably doesn’t get the credit he deserves as an athlete. But even when you see him on the pads, like Muay Thai boxing, he’s an absolute specimen. He’s almost like a thoroughbred horse. You can just whip him. But it’s the same. You look at their entire family. So Liam, who has just taken over from Henry Cavill for “The Witcher.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Just jacked. And then Luke, the older brother as well, he’s just legs like tree trunks. And it’s Craig, their dad, he is, oh, he must be over 70 now. Still ripped. Comes out of the surf, six-pack, beer under his arm , surfboard under the other. And then Leonie, their mum, I think, I hope I got this right, but Dutch background as well.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah.
Ross Edgley: So you know that they’ve all just come from Dutch Vikings. Like in a different era they were running into your village with an ax.
Dr. Andy Galpin: 100%.
Ross Edgley: But now it’s just lucky that they’re actors and not Vikings.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You’ve said some of these in passing. I’m wondering if there’s any others that come to mind. Classic ex phys, classic exercise science rules, theories, systems, principles that haven’t held. You’ve mentioned things like progressive overload and specificity. That seems to be stuff you’re finding to be true.
Ross Edgley: Yes.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Any ones that you’re just like, “Yo, this is just…” Either disagree with it or it doesn’t work for me?
Ross Edgley: Yeah, I think there’s a few. A lot of people now will challenge Robert Hickson’s work-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … on concurrent training, and that was done during the 1980s. Robert Hickson states that concurrent training, if you’re training strength and stamina at the same time, you are diluting the potency of the stimuli. Okay, there’s not a clear cellular signal about what your body’s trying to adapt to. One argument over here. But then over here, you could argue that, and there are studies on this, where fusing cardiorespiratory endurance, improved capillary density, is then going to help the delivery of nutrients, oxygen, blood to the muscles to in turn help your strength training and your recovery between sets. Do you know? So there’s all these, not conflicting, I’d say interacting studies and components, and I just think we’re only just understanding it now, but when you look back through history, there are some people who inadvertently, accidentally, or maybe it was on purpose, you get people like Geoff Capes who are just this perfect storm of all of it.
Ross Edgley: And I think that’s one thing that I’m finding, because so often people will say, “You’re too big to be a swimmer. You shouldn’t be able to do what you do.” And I’m like, “Well, something’s happening.” And like we spoke about at the start, whether that’s fast oxidative glycolytic fibers, my kidneys, my bone marrow, there’s something. And I think it’s only just now we’re understanding that. Yeah. Same question. Have you got any athletes who have, and you don’t have to name them, but anyone who’s challenged conventional sports science, conventional wisdom, where you go, “Well, that doesn’t quite make sense.” Whether it’s an older athlete, whether Messi or Ronaldo or-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … just bucking the trend. Have you ever had anyone like that?
Dr. Andy Galpin: We have seen that, but probably not in the way one would think. We have had the athletes who have gotten career success because they could just eat volume like nobody else.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And I don’t necessarily mean training volume. Their metrics after a game just don’t move. Right? We were talking about CK earlier and stuff, and it’s like they ram up like you, and then they’re back down and nothing else two days later. Nothing else looks like they did anything. And because of that, their workload, not just like in yardage or miles per training, but the amount of games, amount of practice time they can accrue, and when they get five to six to seven years in their career, they’re so far ahead of everyone because they don’t fall. And we could do so much with their training, and we can do so many different things, but we’re trying to figure out what is that thing so that we can look for it. And we just don’t have any idea. That’s probably what comes to my mind the most.
Ross Edgley: How much of that is, because they say training is a realization of one’s genetic potential. So my question is, with those athletes, how much is nature versus nurture? Or do you think it’s both? Do you think-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, we’ve seen everything in between.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We have seen the cases where someone does everything wrong or does nothing-
Ross Edgley: Mm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … and they are just better.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: They’re just better.
Ross Edgley: I know what you mean.
Dr. Andy Galpin: In the skill sports, it’s easy to explain.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Because you show up and you’re like, how can you hit a golf ball like that? You’re not doing any of the things, and you’re just better at this really esoteric skill, and it happens to be an important one for the world right now.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But if that same thing was you were the world’s best lawn dart thrower-
Ross Edgley: Mm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … it wouldn’t matter. You don’t care. But it’s still just a very specific, unique skill. And then we’ve seen the polar opposite, where you’re very mediocre to below, and then after a number of years of very focused and diligence, you can get to that level of, like, holy hell, this is pretty good. And I actually genuinely then believe you have multiple paths to success here. So what we will always say in response to that question is, “I don’t even care.” Because the reality is we can only control the controllable piece.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Why not stack the deck?
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Why not do everything you can possibly do there? And then, yeah, sometimes some super freak will show up, but maybe they won’t, maybe they do. Who cares? All we can do is control that and get as good as possible.
Ross Edgley: I love your volume example because that’s almost like the Bulgarian training method where-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … they broke more champions than they made. They were like, “Let’s just throw bodies.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: They broke them all.
Ross Edgley: Right.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And let Suleymanoglu get through and-
Ross Edgley: Right
Dr. Andy Galpin: … a few amount of people be like, “Okay, great.”
Ross Edgley: Right. Because again, friends of mine at the English Institute of Sport and British Olympic Association, I always found this fascinating that this was 15, 20 years ago now when I was at Loughborough. But so often they’d be like in certain sports, they’d be like, “I really hope the Chinese don’t figure out what we’re doing.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: And I was like, “What do you mean? That’s such a weird thing to say.” And they were like, London 2012, Greg Rutherford, Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis, we had, I think it was called the Super Saturday. Do you know, we’re a tiny, muddy island, but we produce like amazing, Steve Redgrave, like it just, Matthew Pinsent, our rowers, amazing.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: But they have bodies they can throw at the system. So if they figure out what we’re doing, we’re in so much trouble.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: I remember hearing that. I was like, “Oh, I never thought about it like that.” Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah, you would imagine if the Chinese, as an example, put as many people through the Bulgarian’s weightlifting system.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: I think it’s the same concept, but then some, that was obviously done on a huge scale, the Bulgarian training system. But Eddie Hall was another great example. He was breaking training partners-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah
Ross Edgley: … who just couldn’t keep up with what he was doing. And they’ve openly said it, really good friends of his as well. They’re like, “Tore my pec here, done this.” Whereas Eddie was just like seeing them off, and there’s like a conveyor belt. I find that fascinating.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I think, honestly, that’s a big one of it. Who can hang? Who can hold onto it, right? Whether it’s the connective tissue or soft tissue or-
Ross Edgley: Yeah
Dr. Andy Galpin: … any of those other pieces to it, who knows? But can you hang onto that? That’ll tell you who’s going to be long enough to get those training adaptations.
Ross Edgley: I agree. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s it, right? We have to get to that spot, but you have to be able to be here-
Ross Edgley: I agree
Dr. Andy Galpin: … for a long time.
Ross Edgley: I had this conversation actually with Brett Hawk over social media. Again, amazing swim coach. I use the example of me being like a chubby whale and them being like amazing dolphins, you know, swimmers. But I do think an Olympic swimmer in the pool is more akin to a Formula 1 car. They’re amazing, but everything-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … has to be perfect. It’s so finely tuned. If anything goes wrong, then that’s like… Whereas myself and some of the other athletes in terms of their volume, I’m more just like this massive kind of rugged tractor, something, and you can throw volume at it. But yeah, I love what you said there because I think sometimes with athletes, and not even have anyone listening here, it’s the long game. It’s making sure you look at your macro cycle, your year as a whole and beyond that. And again, the Soviets, they were doing this ages ago. When they had an athlete, they would not just be looking at their year. They were like, “How do we just nurture them throughout their entire career?” Whereas now, I think sometimes specializing too early, too much intensity, too much volume without that sort of early preparation, that general physical preparedness.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Shoulder care.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: This is a huge thing. We work with a lot of pitchers in Major League Baseball, so they throw. We work with quarterbacks. Shoulder care is almost everything in those sports.
Ross Edgley: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: This has got to be your top-tier priority.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I want to know details. You said prehab, rehab, and you said training. I want to know how much vertical pressing, pulling, horizontal pressing, pulling.
Ross Edgley: Mm.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Give me the details of that prehab rehab. Give me the whole bulletproof shoulder playbook and keep it under two minutes.
Ross Edgley: Got it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You go for two hours, I don’t give a shit. I want to know, how do we keep these bulletproof shoulders?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. I think obviously you’ll be familiar with the studies around just passive-active hanging. I think that’s a huge thing for me, the idea of brachiating. We share a shoulder joint with the great apes. Even if you look at the anthropology of us humans, they are hanging, we’re not. We’re sat there to start having the same shoulder joint as them. We’re sat there typing away, hunched over-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … on our phones or something like that. That is going to sort of spell disaster. So I think it’s a lot of that, a lot of brachiating, a lot of passive-active, and a lot of hanging. Obviously, the shoulder joint works almost over 360, and I think so often for shoulder training, people are like, “I do delt raises, so I do shoulder,” and I’m like, that, mm. Even when people go, “Oh, I shoulder press a lot for my…” I’m like, mm, shoulder, it’s more triceps.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Do you know what I mean? It’s like truly to train the shoulders, I think you really have to understand moving over different planes of motions. So I think there’s a few things there. There’s almost the passive-active hanging, brachiating, using the shoulder joint how Mother Nature intended. I think there’s working it over completely different ranges of motion. Again, when I’m caught in an Arctic storm, I don’t want it subjected to any forces or movement that it’s not been subjected to already. And I love, for me- Reflexive eccentrics have been brilliant as well. I find that when looking at rebuilding the tendon is something you layer-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … at the very end.
Dr. Andy Galpin: That’s something we do with every throwing athlete, by the way, the reflective stuff. So if you were like, “What did he say?” Go back really. He already described it, so keep going.
Ross Edgley: Absolutely. Certainly something that’s very sort of swim specific, do that only when you’ve done everything else, when you’ve done that strength prehab, tends, everything. For a reflexive eccentric, I love laying down on my back. If you can imagine, with my back on a bench, medicine ball, and you are just throwing it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: I used to play water polo, so I can do that quite easily. But you imagine catching the ball each time. That reflexive eccentric, very similar to anything that you’re going to experience during a freestyle pull as well. So I think it’s layering it, but also, the most important thing is understanding that tendons connected to ligaments take so much longer to adapt than muscles. And I think too many people go, “Oh, I’ve been doing rehab now for a month.” I’m like, “A month? No, we’re talking months.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: And, again, having torn tendons in my rotator cuff, it took me so long to get back. I think for Iceland, for instance, I was fine as long as everything was just moving steadily. I could control the movement, but anything outside of that movement, it just didn’t have the same mechanical properties. That’s taken so much longer.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. How do you think about upstream, downstream? Biceps, pecs, deltoid, neck, anything like that, that you really have found as high value return for the shoulder? Or were you able to stay pretty close to just doing it on the shoulder?
Ross Edgley: Pretty much the shoulder. For some reason, everything else has been okay. Yeah, I think I always look at just that connective, that kinetic chain. And as long as everything else is working, what’s the weakest part of the kinetic chain? It was always rotator cuffs for me and stuff. So that’s always been quite fine. Whether that’s been luck, whether that’s been training, I don’t know. I think as well, I love what you said earlier, and I’ve got to hold my hands up. I do love just shifting weights. There’s just-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … like just a bro down, like a bicep bro down. And again, for so long, that was a dirty word. Even bodybuilding centric stuff, whereas Mark Felix as well, competed in World’s Strongest Man more times than anyone else. I can’t remember the exact age, but I swear it was in his 50s he was competing at World’s Strongest Man. Not the Masters, World’s Strongest Man. And one thing that he credits for that is just a huge career in bodybuilding for so long before going into Strongman. He credits that for his longevity, and I think when you look at injury rates, power lifting, Strongman, bodybuilding. Bodybuilding actually is so safe in that regard. So when you are doing, it’s such bro science, but your hammer curls, your concentration curls. People be like, “Oh, what’s he doing?” But I truly believe for connective tissue and longevity, bodybuilding centric work, there is a time and a place for it.
Ross Edgley: And I think even further to that, sorry, I’m going on a slight tangent here, but we did these studies at Loughborough University. It was amazing. You’ll be aware of these. When you were trying to identify an athlete’s strength deficit.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yep.
Ross Edgley: So to use an example of seeing certain MMA fighters at the moment moving up a weight category, whether it was Alex Pereira, great example, going from middleweight to light heavyweight to now heavyweight. And he said he needed time. He needed to fill out his frame. He needed to do it properly. When we were at Loughborough, and for those who don’t know about your strength deficit, let’s use the strength in your quadriceps, for example. You’ll be there on a knee extension machine. You’ll see what you can voluntarily contract. So it’s there, you’ll get maybe like, certainly at Loughborough, smelling salts, psyched up. Someone’s hitting you on the back of the head. Three, two, one, go. See how much force you can generate. And then they’ll see how much force you can generate involuntary. So they’ll basically electrically stimulate the muscle. Bang. What’s interesting is the difference between the two.
Ross Edgley: If there’s a large difference between the two, all of a sudden, you’re not recruiting the muscle fiber. The amount of muscle fibers, the strength. You can’t generate as much force as the muscle you have. It’s kind of like having a big car engine, but you’re not using it properly. And then equally, if there’s a really small strength deficit between your voluntary contraction and your involuntary contraction, it shows that you’re actually really, really good at voluntarily contracting your maximum muscle contraction, your maximum potential. And I think that was what was really interesting at Loughborough, is doing that, and then now seeing real world examples that they don’t actually see if they need that functional mass.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Sometimes they’ll just put on mass, but it’s like you need to be able to use it. So someone like an Alex Pereira moving up, bodybuilding centric work, hypertrophy to increase muscle mass. Maybe they had a small strength deficit, so they’ve got to increase-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Mm-hmm
Ross Edgley: … as well. But it’s knowing when to use it. Too often, even with rugby and stuff, I think people put on non-functional mass. They’re just not fully using it.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. You have such an obvious love of sports, of performance. You can in one breath rattle off some bodybuilder from the 1980s, a female distance runner from the ’90s, to a Strongman, and all over the place. Do you think that’s played any part in your journey? That’s the first question, and then I have a second one after that.
Ross Edgley: I think it has. I always think success leaves clues. So I always look and will take inspiration from anywhere and everywhere. Like I said, Emil Zatopek.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: I’ve done the swimming equivalent to his 100, 400-meter sprints. It was brutal. But I just love that because people didn’t know you could train that hard. Paavo Nurmi as well, The Flying Finn. That when he was running, he was one of the first to run with a stopwatch, and it didn’t matter what anyone was doing around him. He knew exactly the split times that he needed to be hitting. On the mark, military precision. And I think it’s taking inspiration from people like that. Like I said, success leaves clues. So however they’ve achieved it, adopt that. And then finally, like I said, modern example, Cam McEvoy. I’m a huge fan of his, but he is a sprinter, and I’ve taken the concept of strength reserve and tried to apply it to ultra-endurance.
Dr. Andy Galpin: So given your love of swimming Iron, all things physical sport, all of it. You watch all the sports, you’re all over it. Would you consider doing your next event as a non-swim?
Ross Edgley: Oh, that is a good question. I don’t think I would just because now at the grand old age of 41, I know I’ve got a few more years maybe to do something and to advance our understanding of sports science. So I love coming back and having my blood work and giving them to Loughborough University, to Professor Luc Van Loo, Craig Sale, all these geniuses who then dissect it, deconstruct it. If I went into running, ocean rowing has been suggested, any of these, I just couldn’t pioneer or understand. There are people far better than me at that, and so I’m just a little bit like, no, that’s their job. Not to sound spiritual or whatever, I do think it is my calling to float far and eat lots. That is my unique
Dr. Andy Galpin: Float far and eat lots
Ross Edgley: That is my unique skill set. And I think with however long my career is now, that is something that I’d love to look and leave behind a legacy where people go, “Oh, that’s what Ross did to advance our understanding of ultra-endurance.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Why does that even matter to you?
Ross Edgley: I think, to get too deep, but like Victor Frankl, the meaning of life is to give life meaning. And I think one thing that I found is Victor Frankl would say over fame, money, everything like that, it’s just purpose. And I think I’ve gone through periods where I’ve just trained. I go into the gym, and I’ll do bi sets. And I lack motivation. I just need something every single day just to drill. Jordan Peterson, “The meaning of life is to pick up the heaviest boulder and carry it.” So for me, also aware that my dopamine probably works a little bit differently to most. I can’t get excited for anything that isn’t a crazy swim. I love when I swim to someone, and they go, “Well, that’s ridiculous. That’s so stupid. That’s impossible.” And I go, “That’s the one, then.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah.
Ross Edgley: But if I say to somebody a swim, and they go, “Oh, that sounds nice.” I go, “Oh, it’s terrible then.” So yeah. I’m very aware. Yeah, purpose.
Dr. Andy Galpin: When are you going to announce the next one?
Ross Edgley: Yes. We’re looking at a few different ones now. I’ve said before, I’m almost like a mercenary for an amazing cause. So if somebody said there is a particular ocean, there is some wildlife, something that needs protecting-
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah
Ross Edgley: … and we need someone to float far and eat lots, then I’ll go, “Hold my beer.”
Ross Edgley: What’s so interesting, not to say I raw dogged past swims, but it’s now getting to sit down with people like yourself. It’s amazing learning so much more. There’s still a part of me that now just thinks with advances in an understanding of sports science, I think we can still go further. So yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Well, I’ve seen a percentage of your system, not the entire thing, and I definitely know we can go more. There is a lot on the tree left-
Ross Edgley: Mm
Dr. Andy Galpin: … to be picked.
Ross Edgley: That’s what it feels like, right?
Dr. Andy Galpin: Oh, yeah.
Ross Edgley: Even at 41, I’m still learning things. Some of my splits, I’m just, yeah. And even these longer swims. Since chatting to you, like I said, over breakfast, I was just taking notes like, “Oh.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Yeah. Excellent.
Ross Edgley: So yeah. That’s how it feels. Yeah. There’ll be a few more swims.
Dr. Andy Galpin: We’ll all be here for it. My final question for you. The vast majority of people, I think, are going to be incredibly entertained. They always are, right? There’s a reason you sold 17 million books and have 100 million views and all the things, whatever, and probably more, and you deserve more, to be clear. I want to connect the dots, though, between someone who’s going, “Well, that’s cool. Awesome. I’m never doing that. I’m never getting anywhere close to that,” because you aren’t. Fine. How does any of the stuff that you’re doing help this person? What can they use? What can they learn so they can do their own Great Britain swim?
Ross Edgley: Yeah. Do you know what? That’s such a good question to finish on because I have always said, I think my purpose is not to be an example. I say to people, and when I do talks with kids at schools, I’m like, “Please don’t follow me. I’m a terrible role model. Do not follow. I don’t recommend my lifestyle. It’s a 99.9. I don’t recommend it to anyone. It’s terrible. Really bad for your health, good for your soul.” That’s what I always say about these ultra distance swims. But I said, that I don’t think is my purpose in life. I think my purpose is just to get people, regardless of where they’re at in life and their goals, just to shift their barometer one degree of what they think is possible, just by one degree. And I think that’s what’s so interesting, that going back to psychobiological model of fatigue, I would just love for anyone listening, that when they are doing their first 5K, their first Ironman, their first marathon, and those dark clouds come over because they will.
Ross Edgley: When adversity strikes, they’ll just go, “Oh, do you know what? There was that strange guy whose tongue fell off with jellyfish on his face and everything.” And then I will consider every swim, every jellyfish sting worth it. I think that’s one of the biggest things. When people come up to me in the gym and go, “Oh my God, I ran a marathon because I saw you swim around Iceland,” I go, “Oh, that’s so good for my soul.”
Dr. Andy Galpin: Incredible, man. Well, I have had the position for a while that the biggest advancements we have in health and performance are a direct result of pioneers. You are absolutely at the top of that list. Been such a fan of yours for so many years. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve name-dropped you- … and been like, “This is the guy,” right? I really believe in your mission. If you said you do all these simply because you make money, I would’ve been like, “Great.” I don’t even care because we’re still winning. We’re winning by watching. The fact that you’re saying you want to do it for a charity or awareness or whatever, that’s, I don’t even care. Great. Good for you. But for me, I hope you continue, and I really hope that you continue to educate because you put so much out on YouTube and your social media. It’s entertaining, it’s inspirational, and I absolutely think that you’re doing the world a service and making the world better.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Another thing I want to thank you for is, I don’t know if I’ve been in a room with somebody who has such an unbelievably positive attitude- You’re incredibly kind. You’re so happy, and you’re so joyful, then that spreads. That gets to the world. The world sees that. So I’m just really grateful for our friendship and grateful that you came over here and did it, and I wish you to do the largest book sale in the history of the world.
Ross Edgley: Aww.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And I hope you do it.
Ross Edgley: Thank you so much. Can I count on you? So you’re going to come on the next swim. Is that what’s going to happen now then?
Dr. Andy Galpin: 100%.
Ross Edgley: I’m going to bring spare goggles for you.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Well, I will be in the boat.
Dr. Andy Galpin: And I’ll be the one eating the last bowl of that hot chili and went, “Oh, shit, that was Ross’s. Sorry, I got hungry.”
Ross Edgley: This is happening.
Dr. Andy Galpin: But I’m in.
Ross Edgley: No, I’m getting spare goggles and spare trunks.
Dr. Andy Galpin: You can bring me along. I will get in the water, and your race will be over because we’ll be calling for the helicopter.
Ross Edgley: Done. That’s legally binding.
Dr. Andy Galpin: I’ll do that deal. You do that deal?
Ross Edgley: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Deal.
Ross Edgley: You’re a legend. Thank you so much. Andy, this has been awesome.
Dr. Andy Galpin: Thank you for joining for today’s episode. My goal, as always, is to share exciting scientific insights that help you perform at your best. If the show resonates with you and you want to help ensure this information remains free and accessible to anyone in the world, there are a few ways that you can support. First, you can subscribe to the show on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. And on Apple and Spotify, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Subscribing and leaving a review really does help us a lot. Also, please check out our sponsors. The show would not exist without them and their exceptional products and services. Finally, you can share today’s episode with a friend who you think would enjoy it. If you have any content questions or suggestions, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I really do try my best to read them all and to see what you have to say. I use my Instagram and X profiles also exclusively for scientific communication, so those are great places to follow along for more learning.
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