Joe Rogan Experience #1200 - Ross Edgley
Joe Rogan (host), Ross Edgley (guest), Jamie Vernon (guest), Narrator, Narrator
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Joe Rogan and Ross Edgley, Joe Rogan Experience #1200 - Ross Edgley explores ross Edgley Reveals How He Swam 2,000 Miles Around Britain Joe Rogan interviews ultra-endurance athlete Ross Edgley about his 157‑day, 2,000‑mile swim around Great Britain, exploring the physical, psychological, and environmental challenges he faced. Ross details how tides, whirlpools, cold water, jellyfish, and storms shaped the attempt as much as his own fitness did. The conversation branches into sports science—strength vs stamina, work capacity, movement efficiency, nutrition, and recovery—and how these principles apply across endurance sports, strongman lifting, and MMA. They also dig into mental toughness, motivation, and how athletes manipulate their bodies and minds to push beyond perceived limits.
Ross Edgley Reveals How He Swam 2,000 Miles Around Britain
Joe Rogan interviews ultra-endurance athlete Ross Edgley about his 157‑day, 2,000‑mile swim around Great Britain, exploring the physical, psychological, and environmental challenges he faced. Ross details how tides, whirlpools, cold water, jellyfish, and storms shaped the attempt as much as his own fitness did. The conversation branches into sports science—strength vs stamina, work capacity, movement efficiency, nutrition, and recovery—and how these principles apply across endurance sports, strongman lifting, and MMA. They also dig into mental toughness, motivation, and how athletes manipulate their bodies and minds to push beyond perceived limits.
Key Takeaways
Environment can be a bigger opponent than the sport itself.
Ross emphasizes that tides, currents, whirlpools, and storms often dictated whether he could move forward at all, forcing meticulous nightly planning and constant adaptation rather than just relying on fitness.
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Work capacity and movement efficiency matter more than raw speed in ultra-endurance.
He designed a slower, highly efficient stroke using big back muscles and minimal wasted motion so his body could tolerate 12 hours of swimming a day for months without structural breakdown.
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Extreme efforts require treating nutrition like a full-time job.
To sustain 15,000 calories per day, Ross relied on calorie-dense, relatively easy-to-digest foods plus whey, MCTs, amino acids and supplements, adjusting when salt destroyed his tongue and texture became painful.
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Body type ‘rules’ change with the context of the sport.
While his heavily muscled 100 kg frame is a disadvantage in weight-bearing endurance like running, in cold non-weight-bearing swimming it provided heat, stored glycogen, and durability—arguably turning him into a “human whale” for this specific task.
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Mental toughness is trainable through progressive adversity, not just innate.
Ross frames fatigue as an emotionally mediated ‘central governor’ and talks about deliberately seeking brutal experiences—marathon with a car, Everest-by-rope climbs—to recalibrate what his mind and body consider survivable.
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Recovery and tissue health can lag far behind cardiovascular fitness.
After five months mostly off his feet, Ross returned with powerful upper body strength but collapsed arches and weak legs, essentially having to relearn walking and load-bearing despite sky-high endurance.
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Intrinsic motivation sustains you when external rewards disappear.
On dark, freezing, injury-riddled night swims with no cameras, Ross had to rely on personal reasons for continuing—curiosity, unfinished business with the ocean, and love of the challenge—rather than media attention or records.
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Notable Quotes
“I realized, as physically fit as you are, the ocean just doesn’t care.”
— Ross Edgley
“It went from swimming, as I understood it, to basically surviving in the water.”
— Ross Edgley
“For something like swimming around Great Britain, it’s just an eating competition with a little bit of swimming involved.”
— Ross Edgley
“Your body is the alchemist—you can change your own biochemistry with your mind.”
— Joe Rogan
“What you did by forcing yourself to do that for five months… I think you could do anything.”
— Joe Rogan
Questions Answered in This Episode
How would Ross redesign the training plan if someone else wanted to attempt a Great British Swim knowing what he knows now?
Joe Rogan interviews ultra-endurance athlete Ross Edgley about his 157‑day, 2,000‑mile swim around Great Britain, exploring the physical, psychological, and environmental challenges he faced. ...
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What specific psychological techniques did he find most effective in managing fear and monotony during pitch-black night swims?
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Could the “human whale” body type he describes be systematically trained and studied for long cold-water expeditions?
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How might Ross’s ideas about work capacity and adaptive energy change strength and conditioning programs for MMA or other combat sports?
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What long-term health consequences—positive and negative—does Ross expect from subjecting his body to this level of chronic stress and extreme nutrition?
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Transcript Preview
Four, three, two, one. (hands smack) Dude.
(laughs)
(laughs) First of all, what possessed you to wanna swim around the entire UK? How many thousands of miles is that?
Yeah, uh, 2,000 miles-
Jesus.
... altogether. Yeah.
2,000 miles of swimming?
Yeah, yeah. It, it seemed like a good idea at the time. And then, (laughs) halfway around, I realized how big Great Britain was. (laughs)
But you, you've done some long swims before, but not, like, nothing even remotely. Like, what's the longest swim you did before this?
Yeah, I did, um... Oh, this is a bit of a strange story. I did, um... I tried to swim between Saint Lucia and Martinique, uh, two Caribbean islands. Um, it's only 40 kilometers from point to point. Um, and, and for charity, I was trying to swim, uh, from point to point with a, with a 100-pound tree attached to my trunks. Um, so I was pulling the 100-pound (laughs) tree, uh, six-foot waves crashing down. And, and I actually didn't make it from point to point. I was, like, five kilometers from the end. And, um, when I didn't make it, I decided to swim back the other way. So, I ended up swimming over 100 kilometers with a 100-pound (laughs) tree. It took me 32 hours, um, but still didn't make it. So, so it's-
Why... What, what went wrong where you didn't make it?
Tides, currents, you know. And, and I-
Oh, you just got swept away?
Yeah, yeah. And espe-
Especially attached to a tree, right?
(laughs) Exactly.
How big was this tree?
Uh, so 100 pounds. But it, I mean, it floats, but it was more the drag.
Right.
S- so if, if there's any influence from tides or currents, and it's pulling you in one direction, I mean, I was basically gonna miss Martinique. So I, I don't know, I was, I was heading to Cuba, you know, or somewhere like that.
Ugh.
And then on the way back down, you know, I was g- uh, they turned to me again, and they said, like, "You're gonna miss Saint Lucia. You're, you're, you're gonna end up in..." I don't know, whatever's further south than Saint Lucia. (laughs) Um, and I think I realized, as, as physically fit as you are, um, the ocean just, just doesn't care. You know?
Yeah.
It just doesn't care. And so, after that... This was last year, this was November last year. Um, kind of felt I had unfinished business with, with the ocean, um-
(laughs)
... came b- came back to England, uh, rung up, um, friends of mine at the Royal Marines. I said, "Guys, look, this is gonna sound so, so strange." I said, "But I just, I need to get it out my system. I just need to see how far I can swim in 48 hours." So, I swam 48 hours. Um, I can't remember what it was in the end. I think it was 160 kilometers, something, something like that. And I finished, and, and I had basically drenched foot. So, where your, your, your feet and your hands are, are so kind of... They've got so much water in, it's almost going moldy, you know?
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