DAVID BURNS AND Maghnus Collins have been undertaking adventures for the past eight years, but they are about to embark upon what looks like being their biggest challenge yet.
With assistance from Phillip Hatton (Expedition Lead) and Leish McPartland (In-water Support), on 1 June near Dalkey, weather permitting, they will begin the 360 Swim — effectively a 1600km round Ireland swim, which has never before been completed.
This arduous journey is expected to take between 90 and 120 days, with the duo set to be backed by a land-based and water-based support team.
If the names of Burns and Collins sound familiar, it’s probably because they are veteran athletes representing Sand2Snow Adventures — a company that has raised in excess of €100,000 for charity.
The duo’s achievements include the following:
- Longest ever distance kayaked on the Yangtse River
- Completed 25 consecutive high altitude marathons in 26 days across the Tibetan Plateau
- Ran 250km across the Sahara Desert
- Cycled from Cape Town to Ireland (17,500 km) unsupported
- Established The Race — regarded as one of world’s 10 toughest endurance races.
It’s a long way from their days in college together, when they agreed to go on ‘one’ adventure before planning to work in a normal 9-5 job.
“We started pretty much by accident wanting to cycle half the way across Africa — from Cape Town to Ethiopia,” Derry native Burns tells The42. “We ended up cycling all the way home to Ireland — it took about 11 months in the end. We hadn’t really planned it, but we really got into the man-power side of it — the physical effort of adventures.
“It opened doors and you’d see potential where you hadn’t seen it before — runs, kayacks throughout the world. What we like to look for is something that we might not be able to finish.”
After completing one elaborate challenge, Collins and Burns consequently attempt to outdo themselves with an even tougher expedition thereafter.
“We looked at doing possibly a long-distance swim and we weren’t sure if Ireland was possible to swim around and that was something that excited us when we first thought of it — doing something at home,” he recalls.
“We’ve done trips around the world before, but we’ve never done something big in Ireland. It was kind of written off that something big in Ireland could be done because it’s so small. Usually, we’d be away for months on end and it’d be hard to do an event in Ireland, but we started to think about swimming — how long it would take and how hard it might be. That was the initial inspiration — the fact that when we first thought about it, we weren’t sure if it was possible and how to plan it logistically.
“And the fact that it hadn’t been done before — you had to start from scratch on the planning side of it in terms of how you had to do it logistically.”
Burns adds that “day and night will become irrelevant,” as they look to “go with the tide”. At most, they will be doing 12 hours during a 24-hour period, encompassing six hours on and six hours off.
“That’s the target — though at the start, our fitness probably wouldn’t be there to do it,” Burns adds. “And getting used to the cold and being able to stay in the water for that length of time [will also be difficult].
“Because it’s going to be such a long time and to try to keep costs manageable for it, we’ll be supported by a jet ski and a yacht. We’ll only use the yacht for limited occasions, just for crossing Galway Bay, or something like that. What we have then is a caravan, like a motor home basically, which will trail us.”
And why, does Burns think, has no one ever completed or even seriously attempted this audacious feat before?
“The length of time is a big one,” he says. “We could lose up to five stone in body weight staying in the sea for this length of time. It isn’t something that has been done. People are used to doing challenges on the land, big endurance challenges in the mountains, whereas I think swimming ones are only starting to be done now.
“Generally, it’s not something many people would think of. A big swim would be seen as the Channel, or something like that. It’s going to be a lot of hardship over a long period of time. It’s something that we’ve built up to over eight years. It’s probably not something that anyone would think of doing if they hadn’t done anything like it before.”
Sand2Snow Adventures / Vimeo
And Burns is convinced that, notwithstanding all the amazing challenges that he has completed with Collins in the past, this will be incomparable and more difficult than anything the duo have ever attempted previously.
“There’s that difference between something that’s tough mentally and something that’s tough physically — I think this very much falls into both. At least when you’re doing long-distance cycles or runs, you have landscapes changing all the time, you can talk to someone beside you. Whereas even though I’ll be doing this with Maghnus, there’s not much opportunity to talk. Both of us will be swimming the whole distance.
I think it’s the isolation side of it that will make this a real mental challenge.
“We could be consuming over 7,000 or 8,000 calories a day — more than people would in the Tour de France. It’s just about putting your body in a place where it’s able to cope with that amount of hardship over a long period of time.”
On 1 June, the Swim 360 Team will begin the daunting expedition from Dublin, swimming clockwise and south along the East coast of Ireland. Hyper weight loss and the constant threat of hypothermia will be just two of the obstacles facing the team who aim to raise funds and awareness for their charity partners, the RNLI Lifeboats and Gorta Self Help Africa. The expedition will be sponsored by Costcutter and you can find more info on it here.
Originally published at 06.30
