Swimming the Channel 34 times didn’t stop one athlete from having a heart attack

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Swimmer Kevin Murphy was in training for his 35th crossing of the English Channel when he felt a gripping pain in his chest.

However his record-breaking feats of endurance have taught him to battle through pain and over the years Kevin has overcome numbing cold, fatigue and jellyfish stings so he wasn’t going to succumb to what he mistook for a bad bout of indigestion.

Instead he finished the three-quarter mile swim, had dinner and went to bed. He woke in agony in the early hours of the next morning and instinctively knew that he was having a heart attack.

“I’ve never known pain like it,” recalls Kevin, who first swam the Channel when he was a teenager. “On the way to hospital I was biting the strap of my wife’s handbag. I really thought I was breathing my last.”