“When I swam around Great Britain,” says record-breaking ultra athlete Ross Edgley, “I got to share a two-day swim with a shark. A lot of people were like, how?”
Short answer: it was a basking shark. “They're gentle giants,” adds Edgley, grinning.
This common misconception that all sharks are terrifying killers is partly why Edgley – who's just added a world-record 510km swim up the Canadian Yukon to his list of outrageous achievements which includes swimming around the whole of Great Britain – decided to team up with National Geographic for his new TV special, Shark vs. Ross Edgley.
Pitting himself against four of the ocean's most impressive sharks, Edgley joined world-leading experts to see how close he could come to matching their feats: specifically, polaris jumping as high as a Great White, swimming as fast as a Mako, surviving the feast and famine of a Tiger, and experiencing the G-Forces of a Hammerhead.
“It was one of the greatest experiences – diving with sharks to understand them,” says Edgley. “There's this ridiculous, visceral, primitive relationship.”
It wasn't just the sharks he learned a thing or two about during filming. From the way we digest food, to the future of hybrid athletes, Edgley's competition (if you can call it that) with sharks has yielded plenty of fitness tips for land-dwellers, too.
GQ: So, why sharks?
Ross Edgley: When people hear ‘shark’, there's a blanket approach. They tar them all with the same brush. So we threw around the idea to make myself a sporting guinea pig, and use it as a Trojan Horse to bring shark science and ocean conservation to an entirely new audience. Me putting my body on the line – the Tiger shark bulk, for instance – will be so worthwhile if just a few people start to comprehend that there are so many species with amazing capabilities.
How did you approach trying to polaris jump like a Great White?
I asked Alison Towner, one of the world's leading experts, for her opinion. She said, “Ross, that's really good for a naked ape”. That's essentially what we are: I'm 40-45 per cent muscle, and have this clumsy skeletal system, whereas [Great Whites] are 65-70 per cent muscle, they have this flexible cartilage and all of that muscle goes through these propulsive forces into their tail.
We now see the concept of hybrid athletes, but for so long people thought you shouldn't be able to bench 210 kilos and then swim 100 kilometres. Why? You see it in the animal kingdom. [A Great White is] as powerful and fast as Usain Bolt, but then equally can migrate from Australia to New Zealand, thousands of miles, like [Eliud] Kipchoge.
Everything on its body is designed to hunt. In strength and conditioning, that's the SAID principle: specific adaptation to imposed demands. You get good at what you repeatedly practice. So if it didn't help me polaris out of the water, I didn't do it. Deadlifts, bicep curls: none of that was going to help me. Instead, it was a lot of mobility.
What work did you have to do to swim like a Mako – the fastest shark in the world?
At Loughborough University, they looked at my hydrodynamics compared to that of a Mako. I knew I wasn't great – I knew I was an odd shape, but they did a 3D model of my body, looking at the drag forces and hydrodynamics. Even if I was able to travel as fast as a Mako, because of the weird shape of my body, and the drag I'm causing, my energy expenditure would be obscene – for a 10k swim it was something like 100,000 calories.
There was a lot of core work and pull-ups. There's a direct correlation between pull-up one-rep maxes and Olympic sprinters' top speed. Guys like [former Australian world champion 50-metre freestyle swimmer] Cam McEvoy have known that for years: he's doing pull-ups with 70kg [weight].
How did you cope with the G-forces Hammerheads deal with?
We dived with the Hammerheads, and watching them move, Mike said that you can't experience that on land – we're going to have to send you up in a plane. I didn't realise just how bad I would be. Honestly, at 2G I was feeling it. I asked [RAF fighter pilot] ‘Greeners’ Greenfield how many he'd done, and he said up to 12.
It was hands down the worst challenge… I get travel sick, so trying to understand how a Hammerhead turns on a dime, and the forces that it experiences… I would do all the other challenges, even swim around Great Britain again, before going back in a plane to withstand G-Force with an RAF fighter pilot. I don't want to spoil anything, but it was a battle to keep breakfast down.
And you took on a fast and bulk over 48 hours, taking in 40,000 calories, to try to replicate the behaviour of Tiger sharks, right?
The human digestive system can digest 120g of carbs every hour. Ultra-endurance athletes are trying to force that through their stomachs. There are actually studies coming out about how competitive eaters could teach endurance athletes how to absorb and tolerate more without having gastrointestinal problems.
That's the human example, but Tiger sharks are a whole other thing. They travel for thousands of miles where it's just like crossing a desert – it's complete famine. But then when they do find something, they can gorge so much that the food is literally up to their throat.
In a day, I can probably put 25,000 calories away, but on the show I did 40,000 in 24 hours. I think I did about 10 litres of custard to get the calories in. I thought that was good. As part of our research, we went to the Bahamas with a giant lollipop the size of a pillow. To measure how much they can digest, we fed the lollipop to a Tiger shark, weighed it, and discovered that if it was whale blubber, it could eat 25,000 calories in one bite.
There must've been a realisation throughout all of this that, OK, yeah, I'm not the apex here.
When I'm ‘competing’ with the shark, they're doing it casually. It's not competition, it's just Monday for them. It was the same with the basking shark in the Outer Hebrides. It was looking at me, kind of going, Why are you making such hard work of this? I'm taking eight strokes, and all it needs is one flick of its tail, and it just went 50 metres. Sharks taught me how to swim and how to eat. It's really impacted what I think is possible, by trying to bio-mimic a shark even though I know I'll come a distant second.
When you returned to regular training, did you find that you'd weakened in the areas you hadn't focussed on?
For sure, and I still am. The programme was about two years in the making. When people saw me in the gym, they were like, What are you training for?! And I'd reply, To propel myself out of the water like a shark. They're doing bicep curls in the corner, I'm there doing dragon flags, levers, and a lot of strange shoulder mobility stuff. When you dedicate yourself to a specific goal, make peace with the fact that other things are going to become slightly worse. That's OK if the goal is important enough to you. And for me, it was important to try and polaris out of the water [laughs].
Now you're less shark again, was all the training worth it?
When David Attenborough talked about all of the problems that face us in ocean and wildlife conservation, he said it's not a scientific issue as much as a communication one. If we can get more people to understand ocean conservation – and sharks, specifically, the most misunderstood animal out there – that will impact policy. But they need to be interested in the first place.
Shark vs. Ross Edgley airs on Nat Geo Wild at 8pm on Monday, 22 July
