Dan Martin will soon be in a world of pain.
And wonders why you don’t want the same.
The British teacher and extreme-athlete plans to step into the Nova Scotia surf in mid-May, to attempt the preposterous.
He vows to swim, bike and run around the world.
Mount Everest is so badly beaten; it’s a tourist trap — often catering to those with enough money to be pulled up.
The darkest jungles now have Internet access.
And there’s less and less ice to become stranded on.
With the world getting smaller, so do the number of feats left to master.
But Martin believes the globe is still big enough to awe — if someone were to conquer it all.
He plans to swim more than 5,000 km from Nova Scotia to the shores of France — working his way across at eight-hour shifts, while using GPS on a support boat to plant him back in the water at the spot he left off.
From France, the 28-year-old adventurer — dubbed “Daring Dan’ by those in his community near East England’s city of Peterborough — will cycle across Europe before making his way to Siberia and the Bering Straits at the worst possible time of year.
Then, it’s just a quick sprint across Canada, and he can — after 18 months on his ‘Global Triathlon’ (www.danmartinextreme.com) — relax.
“There are deadly hazards from the first minute of the swim to the last minute of the run,” he tells QMI Agency. “Everything on the trip has the ability to go wrong.”
Among his sponsors is an online bookie, but Martin has yet to check what odds they’re giving him.
Even the Atlantic crossing, which has never been done before without wetsuits and fins, would take four months.
Like an English Channel marathoner, he will only wear a swimsuit, goggles, cap and loads of sloppy petroleum jelly, to cut down on chafing.
He’ll also be wearing an electrical pulse device he hopes will stop him from becoming seafood for a passing shark.
Every third hour, he plans to have a companion swimmer jump in with him.
“He’s also a smaller, weaker swimmer than me, so when the sharks are about, hopefully they’ll pick him off first,” Martin reasons.
If Martin manages to swim for his life, he still has the wolves and bears of Russian Siberia to bike past.
“(If) you focus on the day to day, focus on each hour, each minute, each stroke, then suddenly it becomes merely about keeping going,” he guesses.
Martin, who has a few marathon bike rides to his claim, says it hasn’t been the endless hours of training that’s been the toughest to endure.
Instead, he fumes, it’s been: “Weathering the torrents of abuse, negative messages and ridicule that comes with chasing my dreams into reality.”
Perhaps the easiest part has been packing on pounds as he loses himself in his mission.
Now around 133 kg — he’s a tall man — he’s shooting for 152 kg to make the swim.
Even now, he’s thinking of all the food he’ll miss along his journey. It includes British chocolate, Marmite and ale.
“The sea isn’t going to be much warmer than 10C when I start and getting as much insulation between my internal organs — the stuff that keeps me alive — and the sea that’s trying to kill me is critical,” he explains.
Much of his diet — the part that isn’t padding his hull — is being burned up during hours each day he spends in the water training.
As he tries to collect up the funds he and his team will need — he has about half — Martin is also busy using the ultra-triathlon to raise funds for orphanages.
Though he’s all but abandoned his plan to impress girls.
“Up until now, it’s not really worked out,” he admits.
“Apparently, girls don’t like adventurous, absentee boyfriends.”
But he knows his friends and family are behind him.
“Of course we’re worried as parents,” his dad George Martin told their local newspaper. “But this is what he wants to do and we have to support him as best we can.”
Tired of the limited world of adventures being high-jacked by reality stars and weeping celebrities, Martin believes it’s time to prove an every-man can still do the preposterous.
“I think everyone has a book and a marathon inside them,” he’s come to realize.
“It’s just a shame that most people let out the book and keep in the marathon.”
Oceans eleven — And the three dogs who also conquered the Atlantic
The Atlantic Ocean has bested some of history’s toughest men.
But it’s also allowed a few to test their human limits.
Here are others who have taken the plunge before the British extreme athlete attempts to own the ocean:
French adventurer Alain Bombard managed to cross the Atlantic solo, in a rubber dingy, in 1952.
In 1969, Brit athlete John Fairfax managed to row the 5,794 km across.
Few compared to the wackiness of Frenchman Remy Bricka, who, in 1988, took 64 days to ski the Atlantic using floating polyester floats.
Doing it with far less effort, British windsurfer Jason Gilbert managed to windsurf the ocean — as part of a three-member team — ten years after Bricka’s wacky voyage.
That same year, in 1998, extreme French swimmer Benoit Lecomte went from Cape Cod to France. Unlike Martin’s upcoming attempt, Lecomte used eight wetsuits, snorkels and even swim fins.
A boat, made out of junk, was taken across last year by three U.S. artists and a trio of old sea dogs — actual canines.
