Yeah, yeah, no, it makes such a big difference and also then like kind of playing around with other things like up through the training and everything I got stuck hundreds, hundreds of times by jellyfish like it’s and then it’s always like a jellyfish and then I kind of started thinking so when these jellyfish come into contact with me they release all the energy that they have into me. So why don’t I channel channel that energy into pushing me on and making me stronger rather than making it an issue you know so really trying to take turn negatives into into positives. Welcome to the effortless swimming podcast to show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water become a better swimmer and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to episode 199 of the effortless swimming podcast. I’ve got a special guest today, Neil Adjus. He recently broke the world record for the longest nonstop swim in the ocean which is 125 kilometers over 52 hours.

So Neil first of all congratulations on an incredible swim and you actually broke the record of a friend of mine and someone who I actually used to train with Chloe McCartle. She held the record at 124 kilometers so you bested her by a bit over a kilometer but an incredible swim. So this all happened in July so fairly recently. So how do you feel a couple months later after doing such an incredible swim? I’m still trying to really process it. A lot of things have changed. A lot of people recognize me in the streets as well so it’s learning how to be in that space as well, because it’s I’m not such a person who likes a lot of attention on myself but it’s good because gives me a chance to grow and learn from it as well. So I’m from the island of Linosa which is an Italian island to Malta which is where you’re from. So, and you’ve done a few big swims in the past like you’ve swim around Malta which is I think 70 kilometers.

And then you did the Cicely to Malta which was 102 kilometers. And so did you get much publicity? Did you get a lot of attention then in Malta or did this completely change it for you? Yeah, no it did definitely. For me it was really much I was just wanting to swim around Malta and that was kind of my thing. Do that and I’m done and I’m done from swimming and I’m just going to move on. But so many things happened throughout that swim that it became really really interesting of how much can I actually challenge myself, my body, my mind. And before I knew it I was about to start to swim from Linosa to Malta which was 125 kilometers. And leading into the swim how much time did you give yourself to train and prepare for it? I mean the training is really really mild training throughout the year and then the real stuff starts from January so I give myself a six month period. And this is mainly because the training gets so intense that you can’t do it for so long.

So a lot of swimming at night, lots of hours, six, seven, eight, ten, twelve hour sessions. So that can only go on for a certain period before you kind of start to break down mentally as well. And there’s a lot of sacrifices that come to it. If you’re doing a ten hour session then you’re not going to be very active to the rest of the day. So you need to plan out your schedule well and pre-plan everything. It sounds like how did you actually structure your week? Did you look at it say on a Sunday or on a weekend to go out? This is where I can fit my training. This is where I can work, spend time with the family. How did it work for you? For me I do most of the pool training during the week so from Monday to Thursday and then on Friday and Saturday I’d go in the sea and it was a build-up from doing like two, three hour swims one week, then the week after would be one, four hours, then two by five, one by six, two by seven, one by eight, two by nine, one by ten.

And it finished up with three, twelve hour swims one consecutively. Wow. And how did you manage your emotions and your energy during that time? Because I train for a 20 kilometre swim which is nothing compared to 125 kilometres. And I remember being pretty tired, pretty exhausted a lot of the time just with that kind of training. So for you, how did you manage that? I really have a really nice good recovery for us. I recover quickly so I get to move into space quite quickly and it’s not the first time that I’d have an eight hour swim and then rest for a couple of hours and go and go and work because kind of I’m trying to balance both wells at the moment. Yeah, and so we’re talking before the call, you’ve got a swimming business, like learn to swim. Yeah, learn to swim from six months up to adults, fitness and some athletes, like I’m training somebody to swim around Gozo in a week’s time. So that’s pretty exciting. That’s like our sister island which is 37 kilometres and he doesn’t come from much of a swimming background.

So to get into ready for this challenge was exciting. That’s awesome. Is that the first person that you will have coached to do some longer swim like that? Yeah, but I’m my own coach as well so I prepare my own, all my programmes and all my stuff as well. But yeah, giving it to someone else, it’s the first time. Yeah, that’s really cool and I mean the experience that you could draw on based on your previous swims would give them a lot of confidence going into it I imagine. Yeah, and let’s talk. It’s a good balance between the physical side and also the mental side because when you’re in the swimming for so long then you have a lot of time to dwell in your thoughts and you can start spiraling very quickly about how tired you are and how difficult this is and how there’s a period where it’s going to be at night. So it’s really dark and you need to be ready to understand what you’re getting yourself into and prepare yourself from more angles.

Did you have any sort of strategy for dealing with that? I had a friend of mine who did the Lake Taupo swim in New Zealand which is 40 kilometres or 42 kilometres and he said one of his strategies for occupying his mind was to retrace certain roads that he like his childhood roads and he found that he could get quite a few hours to pass just trace like pretending he was driving down these roads in his head. Have you got something like that? What I do, what I did is I’ve created like tools and skills that I use when I’m in certain situations like I do a lot of meditation and work a lot with energies that are available to me because it’s a completely current neutral unassisted film so I can’t touch the boat, cannot hold on a floaty while I’m during my break while I’m eating so I try to use the sun for energy, the moon for warmth and connect with these natural sources that are available at that time.

Let’s talk about the swim itself. So what time did you start the swim and in terms of the water temperature and the conditions and that sort of thing because we’ve had quite a few swimmers who have done some reasonably cold water swims but without knowing too much about the area, it’s a little bit warmer over there, isn’t it? It’s not really an issue with the warmth of the water? To be honest, being in the water for 52 hours it does become an issue especially at night when you’re low on energy and the cold does start to kick in. It’s about an average of about 22 degrees Celsius. I’m not sure if you guys work in Fahrenheit but it’s about an average of 22, 23 degrees. So I try to really manage the warmth with my food intake so every half an hour I’d stop for a minute so I have to drink a little bit and eat a little bit to keep me warm and so I don’t need to eat too much if I don’t stop for five, six hours then I need to eat a lot and then I can get an insulin crash

and so that just really keeps my level really constant and steady. And so what time did you start the swim? Yeah I started at 6pm. 6pm, right and so was there a certain strategy for that or was this just about the conditions being all right? No it was a strategy to get the first night out of the way while I’m fresh, while I’m really alert and won’t be able to lose myself too much but going if I have to do another longer swim like that I think I’d start in the morning because I ended up not sleeping for about 65 hours by the end of it so hallucinating and it was quite intense but thanks to the team I had around me and we managed to make it to the end because the current was really intense in the first. It was meant to be for four or five hours but it ended up being for the first 16 to 20 hours so I swam the first 100 kilometres in 42 hours and I had swam the Sicily-Monta swim which is 100 kilometres in 28 hours

so I lost 14 hours and that’s how I ended up swimming for so long. It wasn’t really in the plan for me to swim for that long. Yeah and did you know the current was strong? Could you feel it? Did the team let you know it was just? No, no I just used your swim. No, no you could feel it but I had done some rough water swimming before and what I’ve learnt is that you really don’t fight with the waves you let them push you around, throw you around and you need to keep that constant speed of what you would usually be swimming at so if you’re swimming at which is usually what I would swim is like a 1 minute 50 per 100 for the entire swim I need to swim at that pace and then with the waves I was swimming at 3 minutes 100 as a point Wow and what about your cadence? Is there a certain cadence that you were just trying to stick to? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll be checking myself as well where I’d be swimming around 42, 43 strokes per minute, not more

If I’m doing more than that then I’m expanding too much energy I saw a video of I think it was from the swim or maybe it was your previous long swim but yeah, like the stroke in your style was just really long every stroke, a fairly low cadence and just very minimal energy exerted and obviously that works so well for the distance and the time that you’re doing and is that something that you had to change from your pool swimming background? Is it something that you worked on developing to be able to conserve energy? Yeah, it’s something that I had to change from the pool obviously because in the pool even if it’s the longest distance you’re swimming at a much faster speed but what I really learned how to do is really use my hips to really get as much momentum from something that doesn’t create lactic acid and also I adjusted my pool under the water so it wouldn’t be that perfect with that bent elbow completely it would be more with a slightly straighter arm to get less strain

onto my shoulders really so I can do more rotations

Did that come from having an issue with that in the past or is that something that you just knew you wouldn’t be able to sustain without perhaps getting injured or having some shoulder pain as you were swimming? I think it was just from experience that I kind of realised that if I’m doing a perfect stroke then I’m actually putting more strain on my shoulders so it would make more sense to just put it lightly off not so perfectly aligned and that will give me a lot more in distance when I’m swimming so long

And throughout the swim were there any times where it looked like maybe you’re not going to make it or where the team was a little bit concerned for you in terms of like your state of mind or like how you were feeling or how you were swimming did anything like that arise over the 52 hours? Yeah definitely it happened in the very beginning the first night it was really rough and wild to see so the energies will be moving around will be a lot more darker and a lot more normal to what we’re used to so I was feeling a bit uncomfortable in the water and not too happy but together kind of we raise each other’s level and each other’s capacity where I kind of keep them going by them watching me do this swim continuously there they go for their rest through their break and then they wake up and they find me still there so they’ll be like I can’t be tired this guy’s still swimming so they raise their level of their capacity

and they do the same to me you know they push me more and I push them more and together we manage to do these and accomplish these swims. And who’s on the boat as you’re doing the swim? Yeah so I have a pretty big team it’s a team of 22 people and they’re on three separate boats so I have three sailing boats and one and one rib and the team is so big because when you’re crossing from one country to the other you need to have a protocol and a preparation for everything because if something happens you have no access to anything you didn’t prepare yourself for so I had three doctors who could perform a small operation if needed and they would be on a roster as well so they can’t remain awake for the whole time because if something happens they need to be alert and ready to take certain decisions and then I had the rib next to me that’s where the my team the closest from my team come on it and they’ll be at the driver the motivator and the feeder

and these have a roster of only two hours each maybe sometimes three and they keep changing because they cannot be on the boat and looking tired and feeling tired because then they start to take energy from me so every two hours they would change and someone new and fresh will come and so I keep taking their energy and that’s why they get so tired so quickly so there’s a whole massive time isn’t it? Yeah there’s a lot of detail we really need to go down to the really last detail to be able to be doing this for sustain it for so many hours and then there’ll be the chef to cook for the whole team and then there’s the observers to making sure that everything is done legally for the documentation and the world record to to count which I know you mentioned that I am the world record holder but we’ve just submitted a documentation which should take a few months to be confirmed before it is actually my world record away from Chloe’s so we’re still waiting on that

but we only submitted it now it’s like a little mini thesis it’s a little book with every detail of every minute of every moment with the current with everything with there’s a whole it’s a whole book How long did that take to to prepare and with this did you have to I imagine you’d have to look into everything that they need to ratify the swim like there must be there I guess there’s some sort of format to follow for that that you had to figure out before you left Yeah yeah we contacted them before and they gave us all the things that we needed to to basically rules abide by and obviously he’d already said it’s always good more information go over and above because that gives us a better understanding of what of what happened so there’s details of down to every single medicine that the doctors gave me if it was a panadol over my headache aloe vera for my nose for the for the salt exposure menus of the crew what I ate every 30 minutes how many strokes every minute photos

it’s like a whole like a little work of art you know that they they created the team and documented everything amazing it’s like another marathon swimming itself that’s a huge man works to put that together and they’ll be three of those and they’re going taking it in shift as well so there’s people driving other people from the rib to the sailing boats so those will be changing as well that somebody has to drive them from the sailing boat to the rib that’s next to me so everyone is there for a reason and with one of them not being there the whole system collapses basically because then people have to do more than one job and then they are they can’t handle it it’s too tired these guys are coming not as prepared as I am I always tell them I have the easy job because I’ve trained for what I’m going to do and I just put one hand in front of the other they have to do all the worrying for me I don’t need to think about anything even the food it’s it’s the

the meal plans that I have are all preset so I prepare the meal sets of what I want this this that the other this this that the other and so I don’t need to think about what do I want to eat right now it’s not what you want to eat it’s what you’re given you eat it you move on and you keep going for your next 30 minutes well that’s the thing isn’t it you don’t want to be thinking about the crew or the boats you just want to be focused on your job and did you have someone who was sort of the the commander who was in charge of all of all of that so you could focus on your swim yeah yeah there’s the Gordon was the guy in charge now he’s guys like he’s such a perfectionist and does his job so so perfectly and I’m like the kind of opposite of him and so we kind of meet in the middle I remember before the Sicily swim he’s like we need to start planning I’m like oh we just grab a boat three of us can go and we’ll cross from Sicily to Malta

and we’ll do it and he’s like that’s not gonna work you need to have a setup you need to have a team you need to so yeah it really wasn’t for Gordon it would be not possible to to do these swims even applying for permits to be able to cross from one country to the other the entry because of COVID needed to be checked we had COVID test to take with us and everything so it was a whole really big big project a quick note from our sponsor this episode of the podcast is sponsored by form swim goggles with these goggles you don’t have to look at the pace clock anymore or be one of those swimmers in the pool always grabbing for their watch with form smart swim goggles you can see all of your key metrics while you’re swimming distance pace stroke rate they’ve got it all and the swim data is displayed on the Google lens and you can customize the display to see the metrics that you want to and I was worried that it was going to be distracting but you can

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either your right or your left eye the goggles themselves come with anti-fog solution that’s used in dive masks so it’s great in terms of quality and there’s a protective case with a nifty drainage solution so after you swim you can store them safely and while the goggles connect to the form swim app on your smartphone to they will sync with the format and they can review all of the details of your swim and you can see what other swimmers are up to in the form swim community as well I’m a big fan of these goggles I was really impressed when I use them and I use them for vast majority of the sessions that I’m currently doing to find out more about the form swim goggles go to formswim.com and you can use our coupon code effortless at checkout and save $15 off your order back to the podcast and you mentioned you’ve mentioned sort of energy a few times with the with the with the sun and the moon and giving

and taking from your team and is this something that that sort of you become more aware of or you’ve sort of tuned into more with all of the ocean swimming that you’re doing or is this something that you have have sort of you know noticed for a long time where’s this come about the spirituality comes from from home really really trying to I always find it really important that in the beginning of every day you give yourself 30 minutes before you start work before you pick up your phone before you do all these things to just connect with yourself and being that that’s quite space and that’s from that quiet space where you don’t have any interruptions you get a lot of growth and understanding of what you need and how you need to be and then also I do meditations with with music and it’s strong very profound prayers from the chance from the from the tribes from the the Amazon and the South American traditions and then when I’m in a very dark place they play this song from

the boat and so it reminds me of my meditation reminds me of that quiet space and it’s that slowly brings me back to being in a good space. That’s unreal and and you can hear that in the water. No, it would be one minute while I’m on my break where I they play it and it’s instantly takes me back there and then I’ll be going over that for the for the next swim the next 30 minutes as well. Is there and from doing all this long distance swimming has there has there been things you’ve realized about yourself for the the way you’re you’re living your life anything that you’ve sort of realized from from doing this open water swimming and that you’ve you’ve changed how you approach life or perhaps what you do on a day to day basis yes definitely I think each time I do such a long swim it changes me completely as a person you know you come out with new lessons new teachings and new understandings of yourself and

and new ideas that you kind of take into your daily life for example I really like there was a point where it was about midway through the swim I was really feeling my shoulders really tired and I like started dwelling in these thoughts and like I’m not even halfway there how my shoulders already hurt for me how is this possible and then something else happens that catches my attention and all of a sudden you’re no longer thinking about your shoulders and they’re no longer hurting you so what if we can take that in a to our daily daily routine of how powerful is our mind where we get stuck on certain things and make that thing a bigger thing when we just kind of try and move on from it then it kind of disappears and it’s no longer it’s a non-issue yeah it’s so true isn’t it like I found myself the other day actually like so we’re in Melbourne we hold the record for the longest lockdown which is which is quite frustrating I found myself just getting really annoyed about it

and and then I think I like another few hours later I went and caught up with a friend just got chatting and you kind of just forget about it and just that change of change of what your focus is on immediately like it changes your mood and so you know the minds are very powerful thing and if you can control it and steer it and harness that like you were mentioning it’s it’s a very you know powerful thing because I think you know mindset is probably a huge component of completing the swim that you did like physically absolutely but you know for me I think it would be mindset over anything else because 52 hours and staying awake for that long it’s um that’s a massive achievement yeah yeah no it makes such a big difference and also then like kind of playing around with other things like I’m through the training and everything I got stung hundreds hundreds of times by jellyfish like it’s and then I kind of started thinking so when these

jellyfish come into contact with me they release all the energy that they have into me so why don’t I channel channel that energy into pushing me on and making me stronger rather than making it an issue you know so really trying to take turn negatives into into positives I like I like that approach there’s a lot of jellyfish in the bay here in Melbourne at the moment and a couple of friends have posted about it so I’ll have to remind them next time they complain about running into jellyfish and imagine doing it at night getting bitten by jellyfish at night you can’t see the next one coming you know so um yeah it’s it’s you start to get a little bit unhospitable in the water but I’m not saying that I’m looking for jellyfish to stick them on because they give me energy but um try not to make such an issue about a non-issue okay they heard yes kind of get over it move on yeah yeah that’s it and um and you also did the swim to

um raise awareness um well for for a cause and for a charity so would you like to talk a bit about that and did having that that cause in mind make it easy because it felt a little bit more sort of it was a lot felt a bit more selfless as a as a thing to do like is that something that really drove you to to want to create this swim and make it non-negotiable that you um you know just word you’re going to make it forget others of how much it hurt yeah there’s a lot of little things that that add up to me have wanting to carry on going and the the environment is one of them I started a foundation wave of change um that first started to it was just kind of okay let’s do this so when everyone’s looking at me I can pass on a message that will lead to growth and development from from everybody who can listen to it and from there then we really started to get people on board to really want to make changes in their life behavior patterns to just what are

they buying how are they buying how much are they using you know change replacing products with more sustainable ones um we we do have quite a problem with litter in Malta and the use of plastic is is excessive and then when everyone’s by the sea they leave them their cups of ice cream or or packets of sweets or whatever it is lying around and when it’s windy it all gets blown into the sea and this is kind of deteriorating our our wildlife and we see it as it is today and our grandparents will say oh when we were younger we could see all these things and now we can’t see those things and then our next generation are going to see even less if we’re not going to start taking action and there’s not going to be anything for our children to see yet I’m sure you know about the the Great Barrier Reef how it’s the it’s deteriorating and the the wildlife is is dying and there’s not going to be anything for for anyone to

to enjoy and to to see because this is something that everyone should be able to to enjoy in life but unfortunately soon it won’t be if we don’t start making changes and did that come about because of what you you experienced at home was it just something that there’s clearly obvious from living in in Malta or is it um was there a certain event or anything that sort of sparked this idea the kind of when I was training for around Malta I had it was a 24 hour swim plan so 22 hours so there was going to be swimming at night and I had never really swam at night and on my first night swim I basically was I jumped in the sea with friends at night just kind of jumped in and out but never goggles cap you know a bag full of food ready to go for a long swim and I was really impressed by how amazing it really is just putting one hand in front of the other so quiet nobody around and it was really special and then that moment I swam

into a plastic bag I didn’t know that what it what it was at that point but kind of engulfed my head and I think I lost about five years of my life I got really really really big fright there and it was kind of like a sign for the ocean putting that bag there for me to be the voice of the of the sea to give it a voice to let them they’re there suffocating in plastic and they don’t have a voice we need to be their voice yeah that’s um that’s a big one isn’t it and I think I mean recently so in February I moved down to the coast and it’s um I think when you when you’re closer to nature and for me being a swimmer especially close to the sea I think you become a lot more aware of those things and you kind of want to protect them you want to make sure it’s there for a very long time your connection with the ocean grows the more you spend time in it the more your love and understanding of it grows and then when you’re

swimming you’ve got goggles on in your swimming you could see what’s underneath there you know um there are some places in Malta where we even find fridges and cookers and and all sorts of things that people dump into sea you know because it’s the easier way out yeah yeah that’s why and um and I’m guessing it’s probably even um you know more so because it’s such a it’s such a small island is it like there’s you know I know here in Australia it’s a massive country lots of free space and sometimes if you go out to the to the country or to the bush you’ll see mattresses you’ll see refrigerators dumped like you know by just next to the next to the trees and stuff so I imagine it’s um that’s the sea for if you guys in Malta yeah pretty much they they dumped them wherever really they try and kind of avoid the cost of spending the money to do it illegally so they kind of just drive with a truck and chuck it wherever it is the easiest

and um and so since the swim have you been able to return to the pool and get back into it or is there was there a bit of time out where just like I don’t want to look at the water or yeah I don’t want to spin the answer at all not really don’t want to look at the water but I haven’t swam yet in the sea um I went for like leisure swims with friends or whatever by the day by the beach but I don’t actually do any training for up to eight to nine weeks because I want my body to fully recover my mind mentally and my body needs to fully 100% recover before I start training for the next one because if you don’t let that happen then you are not being sustainable for this to be your thing for a long time I have a few swims that I really want to want to accomplish over the next few years and if I don’t and I jump back into it I feel like I’m recovered but am I really recovered I need to be every nook and crank and every muscle

has to be fully fully fully recovered before you start your next cycle of training yeah that’s it’s so important and I was listening to the Australian coach Dean Boxle who I don’t know if you saw him at the Olympics when Ariane Titmus won the 400 free but so he became pretty well known but he was talking about when he got back from the Olympics so here in Australia there’s a two week quarantine period where they basically go into isolation for two weeks and then they can go back into you know the normal world and he was saying that like with his swimmers there was no set date for them to return to the pool and for him to return to coaching they were just going to kind of play it by ear and just like they just needed time to relax and to just like yeah and just kind of let normal life happen and then when he started to sort of feel alright it’s time to get back into it they’re ready to go but because the Olympics is such a huge preparation and so much effort and that’s

four years or five years now of practice goes into it you need that down time you need to balance it out and for you for those upcoming swims are they things that you’ve mentioned to others or are these ones just in the back of your mind you know what you’re working towards they’re in the back of my mind I don’t think it will be me trying to break this world record again for the next two years but then after that I’ll definitely try to swim over 150 maybe 160 kilometers that’s what my next goal will be but in the meantime I have some cool swims that I want to do but I can’t really mention just yet but yeah something really different what people aren’t doing since I’ve never been done before so it’s really exciting what the future holds I wish you all the best for those swims and fingers crossed the ratification goes through for the world record and I don’t see why it wouldn’t so it’s been great having you on the podcast

and where can people find you on Instagram and some other places yeah they can check out my Facebook page on Facebook which is nilajuice or it’s nil.adjuice on Instagram maybe I’ll send you my links to the pages so you can upload it with the video yeah excellent we’ll put that on the on our website and make sure to take when this episode goes out so Neil thanks very much for being on the podcast and congratulations once again it’s a massive feat and I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve got in store I’d like to pry further into what you’ve got in mind but I know you’re not going to share that but you can invite me back when it’s announced yeah I definitely will yeah looking forward to it so yeah thanks so much Neil and all the best yeah thanks Brent thanks for having me all the way from Australia and a real pleasure talking to you and it’s a pleasure to help you become a faster more efficient swimmer go to

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