Ross Edgley is the ultimate athlete. He's run a marathon pulling a car, done a triathlon carrying a 100-pound tree, climbed a 65-foot rope repeatedly until he climbed the height of Mt. Everest, but he's most known for completing the world's longest assisted stage sea swim at 1,780 miles.
During that swim, a shark encounter changed Edgley's life forever.
"This basking shark was like looking at me going 'What are you doing out here?'" Edgley described to On The Red Carpet. The shark swam next to him for almost two days around the coast of Scotland.
"That encounter was just unbelievable. I started speaking to NatGeo about it, and we just had this idea that was just, 'Could we fuse sports science with shark science?'"
Now, he's putting his body to the test in four shark versus human challenges; to swim faster than a mako, to jump higher than a great white, eat more than a tiger shark and turn faster than a hammerhead!
Edgley described the process it took to train for his great white jump. "We met with the British synchronized swimming team. They were incredible. They taught me so much. We realized I needed a mono-fin. Olympians, everybody is training for Paris, and I'm there doing leg raises with a mono-fin in the gym, like 'What is that guy doing?'" he joked.
With his newfound appreciation for sharks, he hopes that the documentary sheds a new, positive light on the creatures.
"People watch the show, the documentary and realize that it's not just 'shark' you know, bad, negative connotations. Like, no they're so much more intricate and interesting than that," he explained.
"Shark vs. Ross Edgley" premieres Sunday, June 30 on National Geographic and will be available July 1 on Disney+ and Hulu.
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