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That’s not a pleasant thought while you are trying to sleep, but I managed to put it to the back of my mind. At any point, we ran the risk of being spiked by a blue marlin, as four boats had been in the previous year. Survival instinct takes over, and you adapt. We normalised life on the boat, playing music, singing along to Peter Andre, and having endless stupid conversations about mundane things.Įvery night-time brought with it an element of danger because in the darkness you can’t see the threats around you. Before our December 12 departure, I assiduously prepared for disaster, making everyone practise man overboard drills.īut what I discovered once we were out there is: if you always imagine the worst, you have less fear in a dangerous situation. Despite that, I never considered dropping out, although I was the crew pessimist. I worried I might leave my two children, Inès, 15, and Vincent, 13, motherless, and had to confront my mortality by writing a will with my husband Fred, 46. I don’t think you can do a challenge like this without accepting you may die.Īt night, I could not help catastrophising, replaying a scene in which the boat flips and I’m trapped in the cabin. It’s so hard to imagine what being out on the ocean would feel like, that saying yes felt overwhelming – and I needed a weekend on the boat to convince me. When my friend Jo Blackshaw, who I’d rowed with at uni, called in June 2021 to offer me a place in the Mothership, after someone dropped out through injury, I was ready to accept.īut that’s not to say I didn’t have doubts. The message was clear: adventure is for middle-aged women after all. I interviewed Kelda Wood, 47, the first disabled woman to row the Atlantic alone, and Pip Hare, 48, who completed the Vendée Globe, a round the world yacht race, in 95 days on snippets of 20 minutes’ sleep. But I discovered being back in a boat was joyous. Her description of the race, and its gruelling two hours on, two hours off regime intrigued me. I wondered if I’d be able to withstand such a challenge – and our conversations planted a seed in my head. Inspired, I started rowing again for the first time since 1995, after a decade of walking marathons. I’d rowed at university, competing in the Women’s Boat Race for Oxford, but had hung up my oars a year after graduating. In the aftermath, as I rebuilt my career as a freelance journalist, even a thoughtlessly worded email could send me into a pit of paranoia. I’d presume I’d done something wrong and would re-read emails constantly, looking for hidden meanings or slights.īut in 2019, I was invited to write about a paddle-boarding contest at Lake Annecy in France, and competed in one of the crews. I met Debra Searle, who’d rowed the Atlantic solo when her husband was rescued from their boat suffering from uncontrollable fear of the water after 13 days at sea. I worried I might leave my two children, Inès, 15, and Vincent, 13, motherless, and had to confront my mortality by writing a will with my husband Fred I felt constantly as if I was in fight or flight mode, but facing the brutal reality that I didn’t have any decisions to make any more, and no one cared what I thought. I hit rock bottom, with no ounce of resilience left. It was like someone had switched off an adrenalin tap overnight, but without it I couldn’t function. Then four years ago, I was made redundant from my job as a magazine editor.
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I still can’t bear that feeling of hemmed-in claustrophobia.Īs a teen in the 80s, I had such a fear of germs, my friends gave me an early self-help book on OCD: The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing. My chronic health anxiety made being pregnant terrifying, and I became convinced I’d accidentally pick up toxoplasmosis. I’ve suffered from anxiety ever since I was a small child – my worries usually triggered by things I read about, from nuclear war to heart disease. For years, I couldn’t get on a plane without hyperventilating, so scared was I that it would crash on take-off. That night, I thought, ‘How on earth did I end up here?’ It was the only time we put them on during our 40-day row from La Gomera in the Canaries to Antigua in the Caribbean, as part of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge. ‘I think we should,’ she replied, equally terrified by the elements. In a small voice, I said to Pippa, the skipper of our four-woman crew (The Mothership), ‘Shall we put our life jackets on now?’ But, miraculously, Mrs Nelson, our boat, withstood the force. We were drenched as the wave engulfed us.