‘You change or you drown’: Lewis Pugh on surviving the world’s most brutal swims
Lewis Pugh has built a career by going where very few people would dare.
A record-holding endurance swimmer, UN Patron of the Oceans and founder of the Lewis Pugh Foundation, he is known for pushing the limits of human endurance in some of the world’s harshest waters.
Over more than three decades, Pugh has completed landmark swims that have tested both body and mind, including a swim across the North Pole in 2007 and the 528km length of the English Channel in 2018.
His work has consistently tied extreme adventure to a wider purpose, using sport and storytelling to draw attention to the climate crisis and ocean conservation.
That combination of endurance, adaptability and purpose is exactly why Lewis Pugh stands out as a peak performance speaker.
His experiences go far beyond physical challenge, offering lessons in resilience, leadership and keeping sight of a mission when conditions turn against you.
In this exclusive interview with the High Performance Speakers Agency, Lewis Pugh reflects on where his passion for swimming began, the toughest journeys of his career, and the mindset that has helped him keep going through fear, fatigue and uncertainty.
Q1: Looking back, where did your relationship with open-water swimming first begin?
Lewis Pugh: “My first big swim was when I was 17 years old. I went to school in Cape Town in South Africa, and from my classroom in the distance I could see Robin Island. A friend of mine had actually swum it, and I also wanted to have a go at it.
“I got some swimming lessons, and shortly afterwards, I got a boat out to Robin Island and started this swim.
“In those days, I was really thin, and the water is very cold. I was able to hold it together for about an hour. After the second hour, though, I was starting to get really cold.
“After two and a half hours, not only was I really cold, but I was absolutely exhausted. Just to be able to get to the end, I'm switching from crawl to breaststroke.
“I found out later that some of the members of the team in the boat next to me were actually taking bets to see whether I would get out of the water.
“Eventually, after three hours, I finally put my feet down on the sand in Cape Town, and I remember the joy of that feeling. The realisation at that moment was that I had fallen in love with swimming, and it is a love affair which has now lasted for nearly 40 years.”
Q2: Of all the places you have swum, which journey tested you the most and why?
Lewis Pugh: I'm probably best known for undertaking the first-ever swim across the North Pole, where the water is unimaginably cold. But if I were to choose one swim which was incredibly tough, it would be doing the first-ever swim along the length of the English Channel.
“Just to give a bit of background, about 2,000 people have swum across the English Channel.
“The width of the English Channel, that's 33 km. The length, though, is a lot longer. It is 528 kilometres, and it's a swim which took me 49 days to complete.”
Q3: When you are preparing for an extreme journey, how do you build the mindset needed to keep going?
Lewis Pugh: “On the first day of my swim along the length of the English Channel, I met my team on the beach, and I decided to make three promises to them.
“I said, ‘The first thing I'm going to promise you is that I'm going to leave all my doubt here on the beach.’ It is very natural, if you're going to swim for 528 km, that you have doubts. I said if we're going to make this, all of us have to leave our doubts here at the beginning.
“The second promise I made them was that I'm going to swim 10 km every day. And the third promise, if we go into a storm and we can't swim on a specific day, I said the following day I'll swim 20 kilometres.
“Then I shook all their hands, dove into the sea and started swimming, and we went through a fair couple of storms on that swim.
“But 49 days later, I finally arrived in Dova. And when you arrive in Dover, there's a little statue in Dova to Captain Matthew Webb, who was the first person to swim across the English Channel.
“Underneath the statue is a quote by him where he says, ‘Nothing great is easy.’ There can never be something which is so true as that quote, ‘Nothing great is easy.’”
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Travel news: Coming home a stranger
Q4: Travel and adventure rarely go exactly to plan. What has one experience taught you about adapting when conditions turn against you?
Lewis Pugh: “It's so important that you build a culture of adaptability in your team. Let me give you a practical example of that.
“A few years ago, I went up onto Mount Everest, onto the highest mountain on this earth, to do a swim in a glacial lake there and talk about how important these glaciers are.
“I dived into the water, I started the swim, and I just couldn't breathe. I was gasping for air. So the leader of the expedition ran into the water, grabbed me, pulled me out and said, ‘Lewis, if I allow you to carry on with this swim, you’re just going to be another person who dies here on Mount Everest. I'm taking you off this mountain as quickly as I can.’
“A few days later, he said, ‘We have to change everything.’ And he said, ‘What I recommend is three things. Number one, instead of swimming as quickly as you can...’ - which is the way I have been swimming for my whole career. When I get into cold water, I try to swim as quickly as I can to generate heat.
“He said, "Instead of swimming as quickly as you can, I actually need you to swim as slowly as you can because I need you to preserve oxygen."
He said, ‘The second thing I need you to do, instead of swimming crawl and you got your head in the water, I want you to swim breaststroke, and then you can breathe whenever you need to.’
“And lastly, he said to me, ‘Instead of swimming with all this aggression...’ - which is the way you generate the heat - ‘I need you to swim with real humility.’
“And he pointed up to Mount Everest and said, ‘You cannot bully Mount Everest. You change, or you drown.’”
This exclusive interview with Lewis Pugh was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.
READ NEXT: Astronaut reveals the hidden danger of space travel most people never see coming
