Watch: River Severn challenge swimmer sets off from Ironbridge
A man who is attempting to become the first person to swim the length of the River Severn said he is "wrecked" at the end of every day's swim.
Kevin Brady, 32, from Gloucestershire, set off from Ironbridge today on the latest leg of his 220 mile journey.
Although he had expected it to be an intense challenge, he said it had turned out to be much harder than he had imagined.
He said: "The water is much colder than I thought it would be, and when I first started this swim the most I could do was an hour at a time – but now I can do two hours.
"I tend to break the day down into one or two hour swimming sessions, doing three or four of those sessions per day and covering about eight miles in total.
"I am not making progress as fast as I expected because the current is not as strong as I hoped – I have been told that the Severn currently has its lowest flow rate in the last thirty years.
"It means that at the end of each day's swim I feel completely wrecked, and it isn't helped that I have had an ear infection for the past few days."
The swim will raise money for the Superhero Foundation, a charity which Mr Brady co-founded with his cousin and fellow endurance athlete Jamie McDonald.
The charity helps families that need funds to access otherwise inaccessible treatments for mental or physical illness.
Mr Brady said: "I first got into swimming five years ago, after I broke my collarbone in a moped crash in Thailand.
"I took up swimming to aid my recovery and it helped rebuild the strength in my shoulder – that led to me swimming Lake Windermere for a charity.
"But since then I haven't done much swimming at all until I had the idea to do the Severn swim about 14 weeks ago – then I got into training."
Mr Brady will finish his swim on Severn Beach in Bristol and said that for the first time he can now imagine reaching Bristol.
He said: "Up until a week ago I couldn't visualise the end of this swim, but now I can.
"I am eating loads, nothing special just normal food – one newspaper said I was eating a roast dinner every day and I can categorically say I am not doing that."
