English adventurer and endurance athlete Ross Edgley has become the first person to swim 1,780-miles around Great Britain. He left Margate on 1 June, and has not set foot on land since, swimming for up to 12 hours a day and eating more than 500 bananas. He has battled strong tides and currents in cold water, braved storms and jellyfish, leaving him with shoulder pain, wetsuit chafing and a tongue partially disintegrated from salt water exposure.
He is already in the Guinness Book of World Records after completing a rope climb the equivalent height of Mount Everest in 19 hours in April 2016, two months after doing a marathon while pulling a car.
He prepared by eating 15,000 calories a day to bulk up and swimming 30-50 km a day. All his food on the journey will be liquidised and fed to him in a piping bag because his tongue and throat are likely to swell in reaction to the salt water; and the temperature of the water could give him acute jaw-lock. He swam for six hours, slept for six hours on the support boat and then swim for six again; and seemed sanguine about the dangers of the trip. ‘Inevitably, the body is going to break down after a so many days at sea. I’m making peace with that. I’m probably going to return a broken man.’
Born 13 October 1985, he’s a Sun Libra, a sign surprisingly often found in athletes, giving the lie to the ‘lazy Libra’ tag. His maverick Uranus is sextile his Sun and square a high-octane and passionately enthusiastic Mars and Venus in Virgo. His Mars Venus are also sextile an obsessive Saturn in Scorpio. And an ultra-determined Pluto Mercury in Scorpio is in a confident and rules-don’t-apply-to-me square to Jupiter. His get-it-together 5th harmonic is well aspected and innovative; as is his can-be-fanatical 11H. His stamina-giving 16th harmonic is also marked.
He started out with the challenging tr Pluto square his Sun and finished up with tr Jupiter conjunct his successful-enterprise Mars/Jupiter midpoint.
When he set out on June 1st (no time that I can find) Uranus was opposition the North Node squaring onto Mars in Aquarius which has caused so much disruption out in the world during his swim. He just found a better way of handling it to set a new record. Plus fittingly enough a Water Grand Trine which could have been delusional with Jupiter trine Neptune, but it was tied into a Kite with Pluto the driving planet, so determination turned a dream into reality.
Pic: Red Bull.
An incredibly tough man. I knew a few Librans and they were superb athletes.
Good luck to Ross.