A 23-year-old has become the first woman in the world to swim from Land’s End to John o’Groats. Jasmine Harrison, from Thirsk in North Yorkshire, completed the gruelling 900-mile swim on Tuesday after about three-and-a-half months of swimming.
The distance is the equivalent of swimming about 58,000 lengths of a 25-metre pool. The swimming teacher and motivational speaker already holds a world record for being the youngest woman to row solo across the Atlantic in February last year.
Battling thousands of jellyfish, being followed by a shark and swimming into a live military exercise, Harrison swam between four and 12 hours a day after first entering the water at Land’s End in western Cornwall on 1 July.
Her swims were often split into two shifts, broken up by eating and sleeping in her support boat. Her longest swim was 12 hours, and the maximum distance swum in any one shift was 14 nautical miles – about 16 miles – with 27 nautical miles (31 miles) being the most she covered in one day.