What’s the Story With . . . Amazing Journeys?

By MARK SMITH and GREGOR CUBIE

IT WAS the day the comedian who dresses as a lady got serious. He put on his rubber suit and goggles, scanned the horizon for any sign of circling sharks or oncoming ocean liners, and then began his remarkable journey: swimming 12 miles across the Strait of Gibraltar in just over four-and-a-half hours.

Swimming with him was the Olympic rower, James Cracknell, who even before stepping into the water yesterday had good reason to boast. The 35-year-old had already swum the Channel and cycled 1395 miles to the starting point of the Gibraltar swim in Tarifa, southern Spain.

Both David Walliams and Cracknell know what it’s like to push yourself to the limit and then add a wee bit more. Two years ago, Walliams swam the Channel in 10 hours and 34 minutes, while, in 2006, Cracknell and the television presenter Ben Fogle rowed 2931 miles from the Canary Isles to the West Indies in 51 days.

Walliams’s achievements as a swimmer are remarkable – he has never done sport seriously and his swim across the Channel is something fewer than 10per cent of the people who attempt it achieve. It’s a stretch of water that has always attracted the adventurous, the brave and the fame-hungry. The record for the fastest crossing is held by the American, Chad Hundeby, who did it in seven hours and 17 minutes in 1994. But perhaps the record for the most unusual crossing of the Channel should go to Simon Paterson, who did the whole thing in under 15 hours. Under water. An air hose attached to a pilot boat helped him complete the 22 miles and his record for the fastest underwater crossing has stood since 1962.

Back on land, every conceivable type and combination of transport has been used by men and women keen to experience an adventurous journey. Last month, Scot Mark Beaumont became the fastest man to cycle the planet, completing 18,297 miles in 194 days and 17 hours. The 25-yearold pedalled about 100 miles a day, breaking the previous record by more than 82 days and his own target by eight hours. And on completing the trip, he put it all down not to training or fitness or planning, but that traditional source of inspiration: mum.

German Walter Stolle might consider Mark Beaumont’s 18,297 miles nothing but a warmup, though. The teacher covered an astonishing 402,000 miles on his bike in a 17-year journey that began in 1976. Hans-Peter Beck was another who didn’t like to do things the easy way. Between June 30 and August 20, 1985, he unicyled across Australia, travelling 3876 miles from Port Hedland, Western Australia, to Melbourne, Victoria, in just under 52 days.

Rick Hansen is in the record books, too, for completing an epic trip of 24,000 miles across four continents . . . but this time in a wheelchair. The Canadian, who was paralysed from the waist down in a car crash, set out on March 21, 1985, from his home in Vancouver and returned on May 22, 1987.

Perhaps the most praise should go to those who simply start walking. And don’t really stop. Such as the British man David Parker. He went to Australia on his holidays but instead of shopping in the malls or sprawling on the beaches, he walked. And walked. And walked. Starting in Cottesloe Beach, Perth, on July 1, 1998, he walked all the way to Sydney in 69 days.

Another Brit, George Meegan, proved we enjoy walking almost as much as we love queuing. He walked from the southernmost tip of South America, in Ushuaia, Argentina, to the northern tip of Alaska, Prudhoe Bay. The journey took 2426 days between January 26, 1977, and September 18, 1983.

But perhaps it took a Frenchman to do the most show-offy walk of all time, for he didn’t walk across a country or even a continent; he walked across an ocean. Using specially adapted floats and a double-edged paddle, he crossed the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to Trinidad. It took 59 days, between April 2 and May 31, 1988, making him not the first to walk on water, but perhaps the most inventive.

Originally published by Newsquest Media Group.

(c) 2008 Herald, The; Glasgow (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.