Danny Quigly, known locally for his astounding completion of ten iron-man challenges over ten days, has announced his plans to swim the Foyle River. His aim is to swim one mile for every name of suicide victims put forward to raise money for suicide awareness charities.

Danny has been involved in suicide awareness since his father died by suicide in March 2011. The decade anniversary of his father’s death inspired him to take on the gruelling challenge of ten iron man challenges, which raised over 100,000.  This challenge amounted to 24 miles swimming, 1,120 miles cycling and 260 miles of running over the ten days.

“I would have grabbed a leaf and I said, ‘This is my pain and im going to throw it away’.”

Speaking about his training for the Iron Man challenge, Danny said “The training was a mix of four different aspects, swim training, bike training and running. Those were the main three, but you had gym work to do as well. I was doing deadlifts and squats to withstand the impact being put through the body – the physio said that 12 million kilos of impact would go through my body every marathon, so that by ten.”

“There was times I was thinking I could fall asleep at any stage. Mentally it was exhausting – physically it wasn’t that bad, during the iron man I felt that I had more to give and could go faster but I felt sluggish and drowsy. After I finished, I felt really bad for 10 days, I was feeling pains you don’t even want to imagine, mentally I was proud and relived that it was finished,” he continued.

Danny is also in the middle of writing a book along with his brother, Oisin Quigly. The book is about Danny’s life, including the ten-to-ten, mental health, raising funds and suicide awareness. “There’s a bit of everything in there, it’s a bit of a Dolly mixture,” Danny said.

“There’s a bit of everything in there, there’s a bit of poetry, factual stuff with statistics. I just started writing down stuff and then next thing I had a few poems. It’s a mechanism for me to keep my own mental health on par because its like talking, writing it down has the same kinda impact as talking to people does,” he concluded.