I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Either way, there was no point in me getting irritated – I had to stay focused and accept there could be another couple of hours’ swimming. I changed my mindset to think of this as a positive: I had never swum for this long before.
I don’t think Chris knew what the tide was going to do; he was just trying to keep me in good spirits. He explained and pointed out to me that we were going to head down the coast to a place called Portlock, which was three miles west of Sandy Beach, the nearest finish point. The boat was directing me parallel to the coast but didn’t seem to be getting any closer to Portlock.
The sun was going down by now and I remembered what Jim had said about starting in daylight due to the sharks being nocturnal. I knew we were going to finish in the dark. I continued to remain calm and embrace the challenge. As darkness came upon us, it was over thirteen hours since I had started swimming. My crew passed me some new goggles with a small light attached to them. I also had a light stick attached to my swim shorts with a safety pin from the start of the swim but I didn’t want to turn it on as I was conscious of attracting the sharks.
I had a kayaker on board ready to come in – he was on standby in case I was still in the water after dark. The sun went down fast and he appeared in the water next to me, which was great as I no longer had to look up and sight to see where the boat was.
The kayaker had not been in long when suddenly, with no warning, I felt like I had been slashed across the stomach with a knife. I nearly shot out of the water. I felt an instant red-hot burning feeling across my torso and inside my leg. I started to shout in agony. I am normally good at masking pain during my swims, firstly because I don’t want to give it any power over me, but also because I’m conscious of not giving the boat pilot an excuse to finish the swim early. This time was different. I couldn’t help it – the pain had taken hold of me.
I couldn’t see anything due to the darkness. I just knew I was in a lot of trouble. The pain was not like a jellyfish sting; it was a cross between being electrocuted and slashed. I was on fire – the sort of pain your brain struggles to tolerate and is desperate to stop.
The kayaker said, in a panicked voice, ‘It’s either a box jellyfish or Portuguese man o’ war. If you start to labour breathe or hallucinate I’m going to have to get you out.’
I monitored my breathing and thought, ‘I’m labour breathing now, but I have swum thirteen and a half hours so wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.’ I touched my stomach and found something was stuck to me. It was tentacles.
The swim was over – well, that was my brain’s instant reaction to the situation. The thought flooded my mind and there was no room for anything else. I had trained myself to cope with many obstacles in open water, from cold temperature to tiredness, sickness and stomach ache, but you can’t replicate this type of pain in training and you wouldn’t want to. I was upset and panicking at the same time, at the thought of the dream slipping away. I knew I would struggle to afford to do this again, so I had to find a way to carry on. I attempted to regain my composure and remember how much I wanted to conquer the swim, but it was hard to think of anything else other than the pain.
I decided to make a deal with myself to swim just one more minute. I had applied this many times in training as incentives to continue. For instance, if I was feeling the temperature, I would say, ‘Just thirty more minutes, Adam, and then you can get out.’ Once I achieved that, I would persuade myself to do another thirty minutes, then another, until the five- or six-hour session was done. The disappointment I would feel if I gave up was always much worse than any pain.
The situation I found myself in now was far more extreme, however. I was in agony and a big part of my brain was desperate for it to end. I had faced these dark thoughts before and found a way through them. I would see them as the devil on my shoulder trying to tell me, ‘You’re in too much pain. Get us out of here – you can’t continue!’ But on the other shoulder is an angel, and she was saying, ‘Remember how much you want this … Don’t give up – don’t you dare give up!’ At this point the devil was much bigger and more vocal than the angel, but the will to succeed was hanging in there and trying to become bigger and more dominant.
I had previously programmed my mind to think about my swims in a way Clem had taught me; he would say, ‘Each swim is a means to an end and not the big thing – it is part of a process.’ I taught myself to focus on the positives, the end goal and not the moment. But right now it was such a shock to the system that I found it too hard to focus.
The issue was that I couldn’t even flatten out in the water as the pain was so intense. My legs dangled straight down towards the seabed. I asked the kayaker how long there was to go.
His reply: ‘Oh, dude, it’s about an hour.’
I tried to swim for one minute without stopping and I couldn’t do it. I stopped again for a moment to get my thoughts together. I then tried to drag my body and swam for a few seconds and stopped again. The boat came towards me and passed me down an antihistamine pill. I then started to vomit, which lasted for a few minutes. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I asked to be given a minute and the boat kept drifting forwards, waiting for my next move. The kayaker was alongside me and said it was a good thing to get the poison out of my system.
Once I felt like the vomiting had stopped, I made another deal with myself: if I could swim past the boat, it would be like a checkpoint and I couldn’t stop until the finish. The boat was 15 or 20 metres away, and once I composed myself from being sick I dragged my torso forward, still unable to lift my legs up, and with every stroke having to touch my stomach for comfort from the burning.
As I did this I started to feel very strange, like my chest was tightening up; I felt my spine tingling and then it went numb. I found out later that it was almost certainly a man o’ war, and that they have 75 per cent of the toxins of a cobra snake. They pierce thousands of barbs into you – these barbs can be deadly and shut down a human being’s organs, resulting in anaphylactic shock and death. Up to now on these swims I had visualised positive images and success. The image I had in my mind now was me paralysed on the boat. I tried to joke it off and said to myself, ‘If you’re going to paralyse me, at least let me finish this swim!’ It was hard to joke about this very serious situation.
I managed to drag myself level with the boat and when I made it I forced my legs up and did a fake smile to hide the pain and deflect how I was really feeling. I suddenly felt a big shiver down my spine. I’m sure the pilot thought I was going to give up and for once in my life I felt really proud of myself as I was going to continue when it looked like there was no hope of finishing.
I’m normally so hard on myself, never truly satisfied in anything that I do, analysing my performance and thinking how I could have done better, always striving to improve. This was different and looked like a lost cause, but I wasn’t going to quit. This was part of the challenge, a test of how much I wanted to complete the swim and how capable I really was. I felt like maybe this situation was supposed to happen, to prove I was truly worthy of conquering this swim and indeed the Ocean’s Seven. When I was training for the English Channel, the question of how I thought I was capable of swimming all day with a bad shoulder and no previous experience had crossed my mind a few times. I would then switch the thought by thinking, ‘It’s just one arm in front of the other …’
This was the same and in order to push through and keep going, I thought, ‘No other swim will ever be as bad as this and if you can conquer it, you can conquer anything.’ The little talks to myself seemed to be working and spurred me on.
I sensed from the worry in the kayaker’s voice that he thought the swim was finished. I knew I had an acceptable excuse to get out if I wanted to, but I definitely didn’t want to. Up to this point, nothing had really affected me in this swim. Of course, it was tough and I had swum further than I had ever done before, which drove me on even when I was pushed back
wards for a number of hours. But I still felt I had controlled the swim up to now. In one moment it had been turned on its head, but it was still up to me to say what happened next. I tried to not think too far ahead and to concentrate hard on shutting out the pain. It was impossible to block it out completely. I focused on positive thoughts and how much the swim meant to me. I could only hold the thought for a couple of seconds before the pain once again dominated my mind and body. I knew it was going to take every bit of mental power to block it out. I started swimming in two-minute bursts, counting strokes, saying over and over again, ‘Pain lasts for a minute, success lasts for a lifetime.’ The issue was that I couldn’t stop touching my stomach due to the burning. It gave me a little comfort but it also slowed me down.
I went back to thinking about when I had swum the English Channel, telling myself, ‘If the boat wasn’t there I would make it. I haven’t a choice. It’s only an hour – I can handle an hour of pain.’ I also didn’t want to be reminded every day of giving up, of the pain being victorious over me. My brother Mark said to me after one of my channel crossings, ‘My fear for you is if you don’t make a swim, what it will do to you.’ I had immediately shot back, ‘Don’t worry because I will make them, so you don’t need to be concerned.’ If I had been incapacitated and it was physically impossible for me to carry on, I would have had to accept it, but right now I could still move, albeit with horrific pain. As long as I could still swim, I had to keep doing one arm and then the other.
Another technique I used to deflect the pain was to recite in my head inspirational movie lines by the likes of Al Pacino or Sly Stallone. My favourite quote from Rocky is ‘It ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward … That’s how winning is done!’ This one in particular went round and round in my head. I also turned back to On a Clear Day, when Frank is in the middle of the English Channel and his friend says, ‘You don’t have a choice – you never did!’ I had said this to myself on several occasions during my swims and it had always reminded me of how much I wanted to complete them.
I would use anything I could mentally grab hold of in my mind for a few seconds to keep me moving forwards and shut out the burning. I even visualised the burning as a warm ring: whilst I had it I couldn’t be cold or have hypothermia. I started shaking as I swam from the effect the sting was having on my body. I couldn’t keep my head in the same place – it was twitching from side to side with the pain. I would say to myself, ‘I’m so lucky … I’m so lucky to have this!’ I tried any desperate attempt to keep going.
As I swam on, I managed to complete what was probably twenty minutes, though it seemed like for ever. I asked the kayaker how long to go and he said, ‘About twenty minutes.’
I asked, ‘Are we making any headway?’
‘Slowly,’ he replied, ‘but we are.’
I wasn’t sure whether he was telling me the truth or trying to keep my spirits up. Every time I looked up we seemed to be moving sideways with the current and were no closer to shore. I made another deal with myself: as long as he gave me some hope that we were making progress, I would continue. I kept asking him, with ever more frequency, how long to go, and he kept telling me twenty minutes. I didn’t complain – I would just thank him and carry on. I was determined not to moan and to save as much energy as possible.
I reached an hour and was convinced we must be there, but sadly the reality was that there was a lot more swimming to go. I still couldn’t see land close enough. I had battled too hard to give in now and believed the swim would finish soon. I could hardly pick up my arms. I was exhausted physically and mentally.
What I didn’t realise was that the pilot was off course once he passed Sandy Beach. At this point we were past Portlock and Linda was speaking with Jim on the phone trying to get him to land near the Kahala Hotel further down. She walked along the entire beach with Wilson and Glenn, looking for us. Seeing the lights from the boat, she realised we were outside the reef and couldn’t get in. Jim told her that he was going to land at Diamond Head Beach, which Linda thought was a bad idea as it was a very big beach with no car access – she would never find me. In the end she suggested Diamond Head Lighthouse, which was a little further on but had better access; she would have her car lights on, shining into the water, so Jim could track towards the shore.
Chris tried to help with a piece of cardboard and a pencil at one point by trying to work out where we were in the ocean using the map, as Jim said his three navigation systems were down.
It was very slow going and after another forty-five minutes of battling the current, the kayaker told me there were just five minutes to go. I thought, ‘Oh my God – I’m going to make it! The pressure is off. I’m going to do it!’ I swam on, counting lots of sixty strokes and the time down in my mind.
After ten minutes I thought I saw a beach and tried to put my feet down, searching for solid ground. I couldn’t stand up, though – I tried again and still no sand under my feet. I looked to the side of me and knew then that it wasn’t the finish. The boat was still next to me and there was no beach. I was devastated. It was so demoralising. I wondered why the kayaker had told me I had five minutes to go, but I had no energy to debate it and just kept swimming.
I was still coming in for my energy drink every thirty minutes, but it became a little pointless as I wasn’t taking any in, just squirting it into my mouth and spitting it out. Finally I came in and my crew shouted, ‘Last feed!’ and I knew I would be finishing within thirty minutes. It was like music to my ears. I so badly wanted the swim to end and I started counting down the time in my head.
I reached thirty minutes and I still hadn’t finished. It had happened again! I was waved in for another drink. I was really irritated – I had been told twice I was going to finish and still nothing. They shouted at me again to come in and I said, ‘Forget it – I’m not swimming over to you.’ The boat was 25 metres away and I wasn’t going to waste energy swimming over, so I ignored the shouts and carried on.
I know it wasn’t their fault and that they too had assumed I would have finished by now. The reason I hadn’t was because of how tough it was at the end with the current still working against me. But there is nothing worse than being told you’re going to finish and then not doing so. I had experienced this in the English Channel too. Right now I didn’t know what was going on and it felt like the swim was never going to end.
The kayaker once again told me I had twenty minutes to go, and as it turned out on this occasion it was around that long until I saw a beach again. I had to look a few times as I didn’t know whether it was real or what to believe any more. I questioned myself – maybe I was seeing things out of desperation and going delirious. I looked for a second time: it was definitely a beach.
The kayaker shouted over, ‘Follow me.’ Rather than straight ahead he was going sideways. This confused me more and I shouted, ‘But the beach is there!’
He responded, ‘It’s too dangerous.’
‘OK,’ I said, but I ignored him and went for the shortest route forward. I was worried about being swept down the coast and missing the beach.
I trusted the kayaker, he had navigated me through the current successfully and without his and Linda’s support I could have still been out there for days. The reason he wanted me to follow him was because I was surrounded by sharp rocks. But I didn’t care how dangerous it was – I wasn’t swimming one more metre than I had to!
I was faced with rocks protruding upwards everywhere and as I swam up to the first one I caught my arm and chest. I decided to take my goggles off to work out how to get across and stood up. As I stood up, the light attached to my goggles flew off my head and I recalled Chris joking earlier in the day, ‘Make sure you don’t lose the light!’ I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded me losing it but I would have felt bad, so I started feeling around with my foot for it. I looked back and the boat had turned around; I thought they must be going back to the harbour. There was a
lso no sign of the kayaker either. It was all very strange as I was now alone. I picked the light up with my foot and climbed over the rocks, cutting my leg in the process. I scrambled out onto the beach in a time of seventeen hours and two minutes in total disbelief. I had done it.
There was a lady standing on the beach, I didn’t know who she was but I was so glad to see her smiling face and I said to her, ‘Well, that was fun!’ She put a garland of flowers around my neck and gave me a big hug – it was Linda. She made a phone call to the crew and I heard her say, ‘He’s out and he’s talking – he doesn’t need an ambulance.’ The boat and kayaker had left when Linda had confirmed she could see me. I was so grateful to her for her support. I wouldn’t have made it without her.
As I walked up the beach, my friends Wilson and Glenn gave me a hug and we took some photos. I also had a TV camera fixed on me from a Hawaiian TV station, though they didn’t say a word. I thought I had better say something inspirational, which was a bit of an issue as I was struggling to speak with all the ulcers in my mouth caused by the salt water. The only words I could think of were those I had been repeating over and over in my head to get me through after the sting: ‘Pain lasts for a minute, success lasts for a lifetime.’ Although it didn’t quite come out like that as I struggled to pronounce my words.
After a few photos, Wilson and Glenn took me in their car to the harbour. I had no clothes to change into and was just in my swimming trunks. I felt really bad as I had blood dripping from my leg and was drenching the car seats, but Wilson didn’t care. I love Hawaiian people – they are so laid-back and extremely caring.
I met up with my crew and I gave the kayaker a hug. I felt like I owed him a lot; without his expert navigation through the current, I’m not sure I would have finished. He said, ‘You are one seriously tough guy, dude. Man, you scared me out there – I thought you were a goner! I’m glad you had that shark defence unit on – did you see the shark surfing on the wave when you were finishing?’
Man vs Ocean - One Man's Journey to Swim The World's Toughest Oceans Page 12
