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1.36 Pm “You never think you can finish it until the last half mile,” says redmond after reaching land. “You spend three days afterwards thinking, ‘Did we really get it done?’”
in a water park, and you actually feel like it’s effortless in the end. It’s the nearest thing to being dead when you’re alive.”
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ust after 1pm, Redmond is making his final, slow, methodically relentless push to the shore. He looks like a strange, xenomorphic beast – a blubbery, aquatic juggernaut, flabby around his barrel-like stomach, but muscular and enlarged around his massive shoulders and arms. He looks fluorescent white, almost pink, against the dark navy blue of the early morning water. From his armpits to his shoulder blades, there are whiter patches where viscous lanolin is smeared; it’s much less foul-smelling than the goose fat he usually slathers over his body. The overall effect lends him the look of a two-tone porpoise, strangely bonier and fatter in alternately strange places. now he’s nearing the coast. Only there is no smooth sandy beach to land on, the rock-filled breaks are numerous and treacherous – two swimmers have already cracked ribs here this winter. But he fights his way through the thick kelp beds, around the spraying rocks, and after 12 hours and 20km, he hits ground and begins making a wobbly ascent to the
“ it’s a funny sPort. the whole swim is Just for that one blinding second of brilliance; you couldn’t describe it to anybody”
shore. Yet he can’t quite stand up – his blood pressure is shot, his massive, pillarlike legs as shaky as a newborn giraffe’s. Then he stands. “I never want to see this bloody place ever again,” is the first thing that angrily spills from his mouth. Redmond flops on board with a loud thud. Thanks to the pallor of his Irish skin, the lanolin smeared across his wide body and the ample blubber he has built up to survive the cold and dire energy needs of the swim, he looks like a beached manatee (for his marathon swims, Redmond’s body fat swells from 10 to 18 per cent). He sits motionless, a glistening mound of bluish flesh heaving with each shallow breath. The skipper throws a set of thick towels around him and tries to get him up, but Redmond isn’t moving. “That was the hardest swim I ever swam,” he says with a protracted sigh that betrays the fatigue in his bones. “I couldn’t get over the current, I really didn’t think we were moving a lot of the time. Christ, everything was hard. The dark…” Soon Redmond is in the shower, shivering violently as steaming hot water pours over his body. His head falls heavily into his hands, where it remains as the water cascades over his shortly cropped scalp. He can’t believe he has finished. Clutching his head in his hands, it’s not clear his mind is even in his body at the moment. “I don’t wanna swim again. For a long time. I don’t even want to see water; the sooner I get off the boat, the better.” He curses under his breath, muttering something about an “abject hatred of swimming”. But as rotten as he’s feeling – eyes bloodshot and swollen shut from the brine, stomach empty and knotted, shoulder limp and battered, body convulsing, muscles in shutdown – there is a sparkle of recognition, even if he’s not totally there to witness it himself. “It’s a funny kind of sport; that one second touching the rock and everything becomes quite crystal clear. Simple. The whole swim is just for that one blinding second of brilliance; you really couldn’t describe it to anybody – the finish,” says Redmond, more to himself than anyone, still in some sort of post-traumatic shock. “It’s cataclysmic – it’s like a blinding flash in your head that you’ve made this swim. You try to imagine it over and over again, what it’s going to be like and every one of them is different. You’re hooked into it, and you can’t help yourself. You have to go again.” follow redmond’s progress on www.oceans7.org
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