Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Ben Fogle 2020

Ben Fogle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover image © Jack Watson

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008374037

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008374051

Version: 2020-09-19

Dedication

To you

I hope that this book will help you find confidence,

hope and happiness

Contents

1  Title Page

2  Copyright

3  Dedication

4  CONTENTS

5  PRELUDE

6 INTRODUCTION

7  CHAPTER ONE: THE SEA

8 CHAPTER TWO: THE ICE CAP

9  CHAPTER THREE: RIVERS

10  CHAPTER FOUR: ISLANDS

11  CHAPTER FIVE: THE JUNGLE

12  CHAPTER SIX: THE DESERT

13  CHAPTER SEVEN: WILD FOLK

14  CHAPTER EIGHT: WILDLIFE

15  CHAPTER NINE: THE MOUNTAINS

16  RE-WILDER

17  EPILOGUE

18  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

19  INDEX

20  Also by Ben Fogle

21  About the Author

22  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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PRELUDE

Spring 2020

A treehouse in Oxfordshire

Dear Reader,

I always had a plan.

In the event of a global crisis, I would retreat to the wilderness, an island in Scotland perhaps, where I would cultivate my own produce and home-school my children from our idyllic little croft far away from the crisis.

And now, the unimaginable has happened and I find myself in lockdown, isolated from the isolation of the Western Isles. Instead I am sitting in my new office, the children’s treehouse at home, which has been requisitioned for the duration.

Like so many people, I have fought my own mental and physical battles in isolation. Keeping the dark clouds away before they have a chance to form into a storm. And also taking this time to become more introspective. Away from the bombardment of ever-changing information, lockdown has given me the opportunity to reflect and scrutinise what I have done, what I am doing and where I’m going.

All my life I have been running from an inner voice of doubt, the loud voice of failure and disaster that goads me and taunts me with its negativity and hopelessness. I have spent a lifetime trying to silence the pessimism by taking myself out of my comfort zone and out into nature, where I get perspective and direction.

Sometimes it takes a jolt like a world crisis to shock us from the slumber of complacency and remind us what is really important in life.

Many of us spend our lives searching for something that is often right under our noses all along … a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging brings contentment, inclusion and happiness that eludes many for their entire lives. They say home is where the heart is. The wilderness and nature is all our ‘home’ – a place where we can all belong.

For me, one of the most powerful forms of escape has been to think about the people, the places and landscapes of my life. I find myself disappearing from the chaos of the kitchen table, back to the mountains and forests, the jungles and islands, the open seas and polar ice caps, to rediscover the wilderness within.

There is so much we can learn about ourselves in the wilderness.

The wilderness forces us to rise to the challenge. To take responsibility for ourselves and adapt. We become more creative, less wasteful and more empathetic. In short, it makes us less selfish and more selfless.

Lockdown has given us all a period of retrospective reflection. What have we been doing? Where have we come from and where are we going? Without the background noise it has given us all an opportunity for contemplation. And I have been contemplating all the lessons I have learned from the wilderness, and the way my experiences in nature have shaped me.

This book was born from of the experiences of re-wilding myself. Written on my lap in the children’s treehouse during the extraordinary period of lockdown isolation, here are lessons to inspire your own journey … and a sense of destination.

Ben

INTRODUCTION

‘The wilderness holds answers to questions we have not yet learned to ask.’

Nancy Newhall

This much I know.

It’s easier to break something than it is to repair it. A falling china vase will smash into a thousand pieces in milliseconds. Of course it can be repaired, but those repairs require patience, skill and perseverance. It might take months or even years to carefully piece it back together, and even then you are left with a damaged vase, forever marked by the scars of repair.

Beauty of course is in the eye of the beholder. While some see only the scarring, others see beauty. It was the Japanese who invented the art of kintsugi, whereby porcelain repaired with gold becomes an art form and the finished product becomes even more valuable and covetable, each vein, line and repair representing hours of dedication and artistic craft. By embracing its flaws and imperfections, the item, a vase, for example, has appreciated in worth because of the trials and tribulations in repairing it.

Life is full of ups and downs, light and shade, peaks and troughs. In essence, we are all damaged vases, and the repairs build character and strength and spirit. We all seek healing in different places. Nothing is truly ever broken.

Throughout my life, the wilderness has been my healer. She is my friend and my mentor. I am not a religious person but, if I was, nature would be my church. My place of worship.

Nature has taught me respect and compassion. The wild teaches you the importance of valuing and rationing your resources, of caring for your environment, and of respecting nature. She has reminded me to be thankful for what I have rather than sorrowful for what I don’t.

Throughout my life, through a series of adventures and misadventures, I have learned a great deal about myself through the theatre of nature. The wilderness has taught me how to deal with love and loss, with criticism and failure, with happiness and sorrow, with resilience and risk, aspiration and hope.

What goes up must come down. It’s the reality of life. Summiting Everest marked a high point in my life on many different levels, but the reality was that I eventually had to come back down. I couldn’t stay up there forever. Like a drug-induced high, there has to be a comedown.

In reality, my whole life has been a series of highs and lows. As a positive person I often skirt over the low points, but the year since climbing the highest mountain in the world has taught me a lesson about myself, about life and the importance of learning from our own failings and our weaknesses.

My childhood was dominated by failure: not always in obvious ways, but failings of one kind or another seemed to follow me like a bad smell. I failed my exams. I failed at friendships. I failed at sport. Deep down, this has scared me and it still scares me. I became failure and failure became me. It defined me as a person. I stopped trying because I knew I’d fail. There was no point. The last 45 years have been quite a rollercoaster. I don’t want to sound too clichéd, but if I’m honest, my life has been defined by the pain of failure. The inevitability of this failure stripped me of confidence and self-esteem and crushed my spirit. And so, as a child, I found myself retreating to the trees and to the river bank and seashore as a form of therapy to try to rebuild that shattered confidence. As I grew older, the scale and scope of my relationship with nature and the wilderness would continue to grow and develop.

Growing up in the 1970s, my childhood failings were largely restricted to my own head. But ‘failure’ today is very different. In this social media-obsessed world of sharing, gloating, commenting, swiping and liking, failings are highlighted on a daily basis. Never have our lives been under such scrutiny while on display, held on a pedestal for all to see.

We are living in polarised times in which it is easier to find fault than to celebrate success. We are living the age of ‘more’, not just in terms of material consumption but in achievement, and even then we will pick holes and highlight the shortcomings. I don’t know why we do it. Perhaps it is our unshakeable instinct towards jealousy? Maybe it’s tall poppy syndrome. As the saying goes, ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.’

So many people spend their lives worrying about what others are up to rather than enjoying their own lives; worrying more about comparing, contrasting and criticising than enjoying, fulfilling and respecting. But comparison kills happiness. It has always been the case, but rarely has it been so easy as it is in the age of the internet. Compare and contrast. Often we don’t even realise that we are showing off. The human instinct seems to be to criticise and find failure.

And it is very easy to find fault. Throughout my life, however hard I’ve tried, people have always picked holes. When I was first chosen as a volunteer for the BBC social experiment Castaway 2000, in which I was marooned for a year on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides, ‘it was only because I had a famous mother’; when I published my first book, ‘it was only because I was a celebrity’; when I started presenting television, ‘it was only because I was public school and posh’; when I presented the rural affairs programme Countryfile, I was dismissed as a townie who knew nothing of the countryside; when I presented the dog show Crufts, I was dismissed as knowing nothing about dogs; when I successfully rowed the Atlantic, ‘it was only because we had the ocean currents to help us’; when I walked to the South Pole, ‘it was only because we were supported’; when I climbed Everest it was dismissed by some because ‘it was no longer a challenge’; and when I raise concerns about the environment, I am accused of gross hypocrisy because I fly.

I could go on and on … It seems black and white, and yet it isn’t because you can make anything fit your own narrative with clever editing of the truth. Sometimes called ‘fake news’, it is more about using creative licence with the facts, or, as we used to call it, ‘poetic licence’.

Never have our lives been more on show for all the world to see and criticise, presented not just to our family and friends but, depending on your use of social media, to millions of people, all with a voice and opinion of their own. The impact can be overwhelming and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t affect me. Thin-skinned, I have always been stung by criticism. As much as I try to toughen my resolve to take it on the chin, I find myself recoiling from critique.

Throughout my life, through the criticism and the failure, I have had one consistent companion: the wilderness. Of course my family, my parents, my sisters, my wife, my children and my friends have always been there supporting me too, but the wilderness has always been my safe place.

It may seem a strange term to use, ‘safe place’, when the wilderness can be unpredictable and often hostile, but for me it has, in all of its many forms, from ocean to desert, jungle to forest, savannah to mountain, been a place of great comfort. It still surprises me how it is so often seen as a battle between man and wild, but for me, there has never really been a battle; it has always been a symbiotic relationship.

I love how the Swedes and the Norwegians refer to it as ‘the nature’, not just ‘nature’. It’s as if they are adding a reverence to the word to indicate its importance. For me, the wild, the nature, the wilderness, call it what you will, has been my medicine, a place to retreat from the pressures of daily life and a place to rebuild my confidence.

For the last eight years I have travelled the world meeting people who have dropped off the grid for my TV series New Lives in the Wild. Individuals who have suffered their own existential crisis and have decided to begin again with a simpler life in the wild. Each time I return from my ten-day immersion, I suffer my own mini crisis and ask questions about my own life. It’s the old clichés, ‘What’s it all about?’ and ‘Why are we here?’ They really are big questions with an infinite number of answers that wax and wane throughout life.

For many years I tried to confront my fear of failure. Rowing the Atlantic and climbing Mount Everest were just two examples in which I risked failure to overcome my own fear of it. If someone asks you to describe your life, chances are you will list your achievements and accomplishments and edit out the failings and shortcomings, but aren’t they part of who we are? After all, failure is a part of everyday life. Without failure you can’t really have success. It’s all relative. In the same way that the millionaire wants to become a billionaire or the mayor wants to become the president, we will always aspire to more, and in doing so, we will have to face the inevitability of failures along the way. The problem is that most of us try to forget the failings. It’s like we have amnesia.

Society treats failure like a taboo. But surely we are all a sum of our parts. Those experiences mould and shape us. If we learn from our mistakes then we become better people, don’t we? If we only ever succeed without a struggle, then is it really success?

When you combine the self-doubt with the criticism levelled at any achievement by the pessimists and the naysayers, you get the perfect storm of doubt. I call them my ‘downs’. I have always had them but they seemed to gather more often after my Everest trip. The small dark cloud that follows you even in sunny weather. I would be overcome with an often baseless anxiety, I began to worry more and overanalysed things.

In this picture-perfect Instagram world of Hollywood perfection, it is easy to edit our frailties and our fallibilities, but the reality is that we all have them, it’s just that we don’t often choose to share them. We all want to project the image of perfection, but the mask will eventually slip. I have always struggled with self-doubt. I think it might even be clinically described as having imposter syndrome. I lack self-worth. I feel like I have somehow cheated the system – after all, as a failure, I should have been destined to a life of failure. Success is not a part of who I am.

I wonder whether it is a symptom of the highly interconnected world in which we now live, where some people will be contrary for the sake of being contrary. Whatever the root cause, the result is that we have rarely lived under such intense scrutiny.

It is perhaps the reason that the wilderness has become increasingly precious as an antidote to the hate, pessimism and negativity that pervades modern life. Because in contrast the wilderness and nature offer a simple and honest world. The wilderness is free of complications. The term ‘wild’ may imply that it is dangerous and hostile, but it is arguably far safer than the urban world in which most of us choose to live.

Where the civilisation of humanity is often full of complication, nuance and confusion, the wilderness is an organic, simple place where black is black and green is green. There is no hate, or jealousy. There is no anger. Of course it can be dangerous and sometimes brutal. It can also be unpredictable, but we can learn a great deal from nature. I was certainly at my happiest in that environment.

Consider the happiness index. Is it really possible to be happy 100 per cent of the time? Think about it. We all aspire to it, but is it really possible? Surely happiness is created by fluctuating emotions? You need a small dip to recreate the emotion. I compare it to the weather. I don’t know about you, but I have a smile on my face and experience an elevated mood whenever I wake to the morning sun streaming through the window. It feels like a treat, a rarefied moment on our cloudy isle.

I call it the ‘California’ syndrome. If you have ever been to California then you might recognise the reference. Each time I visit the west coast of America, I am seduced by its perfect weather. Clear blue skies and a perfect temperature seemingly every day. Every day the weather is guaranteed to be sunny. Can you imagine? It’s the dream. The thing is, eventually it becomes boring. The sameness is repetitive and it loses its magic. We need the rainy days to really appreciate the sunny days.

A little like the weather, we need texture within our lives. We need to experience lows to really appreciate the highs. In short, without our failings we can never really taste the sweet smell of success. Our senses would become dulled and immune to it.

That is not to say that we need misery in order to attain happiness, but we need mixed emotions to feel real elation. Happiness must be the ultimate goal in life; no amount of money or success can ever really compete with happiness. So what is it that makes us unhappy? Most young children are happy. As I write this book, my children are laughing and squealing and giggling and smiling. It’s infectious, it makes me so happy to hear their happiness, I absorb it by osmosis.

If most young children are happy, then what is it that happens to us in life that makes us unhappy? If happiness is the default, then what happens to us to make us sad? There are plenty of people who have everything but feel like they have nothing. I am what I’d call an empath. I absorb the emotions around me. I feel other people’s pain and happiness. It can be exhausting.

I would like to think of myself as a happy person. That’s not to say I am always happy but I’d call myself a glass-half-full kind of guy. Physical things like sunshine, trees, water, mountains, grass, moss, flowers, rivers, lakes, ocean and boats all make me happy. And social things like family, walking, hiking, running, laughing, eating and chatting make me happy too. Combining the physical and the social would be my idyll.

When I was 13, my father took me and my best friend Toby on a summer camping trip to Algonquin Park in southeastern Ontario, Canada. We strapped the old cedar canoe that had been renovated by my grandfather to the roof of the Buick, packed our rucksacks with food and set off on our adventure.

The three of us slipped into the most remote wilderness I had ever encountered. During the daytime we paddled past elegantly grazing moose and wood-chipping beavers. At night, on pitching our tent we would hoist our bag of food high into the trees to keep it out of the reach of wild bears. I was terrified of bears. (Before we left the UK, Dad had taken Toby and me to Hyde Park in central London for a bear-attack class. This consisted of Dad pretending to be a bear, battering us with his imaginary paws, while we rolled up in the foetal position to protect ourselves!) We used our fishing rods to catch freshwater fish for our dinner which we would supplement with freshwater clams that we dived for and wild blueberries collected from the forest. I can still remember our first campsite; the tent was only large enough for Toby and me, so Dad had to sleep outside.

I loved home but London never made me happy like Canada. In fact, Canada has always been my ‘happy’ place. The son of a Canadian, I spent my long summer holidays in Canada on the shores of Lake Chemong, a freshwater lake, in the wooden cabin hand-built by my grandfather. Those summers were a highlight of my childhood but also a catalyst for my love and appreciation of nature. For eight long weeks every year, my sisters, cousins and I swam, fished, paddled and camped around our little lake. I never remember feeling bored, and despite the frequent rain and plentiful mosquitoes, I never remember feeling uncomfortable. I loved the simplicity of lake life. We never wore shoes and rarely wore a shirt. My memories are of perpetual movement. We were always busy.

My late grandfather, Morris, was a bear of a man. He was a doer. A grafter. One of those people who can do, fix, mend or make anything. He had a number of different workshops around the cabin filled with tools and equipment.

As a child I never really appreciated the fact that he had built that cabin himself. Now I marvel at the fact that he did it. He hauled the timber and made the doors and he fitted the piping and wired the electrics. It was a bit wonky but everything worked and we loved it.

Have you ever been hit by a smell that takes you back in time? Well, for me, it is a slightly musky, damp smell that sends me reeling back to those heady summers on Lake Chemong. Uninsulated and without heating, the cabin would be boarded up by my grandfather each winter when the lake froze solid, before opening it once again in the spring, lifting its sagging corners with a car jack. The winter ice would have moved the docks and the boathouse, which he would single-handedly haul back into place.

While the lake wasn’t exactly wilderness, it was our wild place where I could get lost in the flora and fauna. It was the antithesis of my London life. I spent hours in the canoe, paddling around the small islands that dotted the lake, watching the beavers. I wonder whether it is the reason I still feel such happiness and contentment when I am near water or in a forest; perhaps it is the subliminal memory of my childhood.

While I appreciate not everyone has a ‘happy’ childhood, over the years some of the happiest people I have met are those who have been able to recreate their childhood in later life; those carefree days without responsibility or the burden that comes with ‘growing up’.

What is that burden? Is it responsibility? I have often wondered why, on a day-to-day basis, most childhoods have a higher return of happiness. Does age and responsibility hinder happiness? We all end up taking responsibility of one kind or another in later life, whether it is responsibility through work, family responsibilities or financial responsibilities. All of them come with a commitment and a pressure to provide. For many that ‘pressure’ can be overwhelming.

For me, the wild has always been an escape from the pressures of life. That is not to say there are no pressures in the wilderness, it’s just that once they become familiar, they are less intimidating than the artificial pressures of urban life. When we talk about ‘escapism’ in the Western sense of the world, most people think of ‘escaping’ to the wilderness from the city, although there are of course still plenty of places in the world where people strive and dream of escaping rural life for the opportunity of the city.

It has always seemed strange to me that so many people dream of that escapism and yet so few actually do it. Escape? To escape implies that you are stuck somewhere that doesn’t make you happy. Why then do so many of us choose to live a life without contentment, in the hope that we will somehow, somewhere along the line, find the elusive happiness? The interpretation is that we can only ever be happy at the beginning and end of our lives, the two periods when we are free of financial burden. Is it money then that makes us happy or unhappy? The fact that so many aspire to a simpler life in the wild suggests that most of us long for a life free from those money pressures.

When you live in a city, among people, materialism and money are king. Caught in the system, we need to accumulate money to keep up with the masses. Consumerism ties us into the financial grid and we become inextricably stuck.

The wilderness requires a very different kind of finance, that of respect, knowledge and patience. Life in the wild comes with great responsibility but it is a very different kind to that of consumerism.

The wilderness in all her forms, from the jungle to the ice caps and from the mighty rivers to the vast oceans, still makes up 23 per cent of the planet. But that means 77 per cent has been tamed and touched by man. There isn’t much true wilderness left and our relationship with that sliver of real untouched nature remains complicated.

We like to take control of the flora and fauna all around us. We like to believe that we are the primary apex predator and that we have the power to tame, control and harness the landscape around us. Yet we also see the value of nature, and being out in the wild makes us happy.

I am happier outdoors than indoors. I am never more content than when I am walking or climbing, or hiking or running, or swimming. The wilderness lifts my spirits and boosts my confidence.

Over the years, through a series of expeditions, journeys, adventures and encounters, I have experienced a range of challenges that have tested my fortitude and resilience. They have inspired hope and happiness while other times eliciting despair and outrage. I have experienced courage and fear, blissful solitude and crippling loneliness. Success and failure in equal measure.

This is what I have learned along the way …

CHAPTER ONE
THE SEA

‘The sea heals all ailments of man.’

Plato

Rowing across the Atlantic Ocean was the hardest thing I have ever done. The end.

This could have been a very short chapter, but I’ll elaborate.

Rowing across the Atlantic was the hardest thing I have ever done. Really. I mean it. It tested me more than anything I have ever done before or will ever do again. Nothing will ever be as daunting, or boring, or as overwhelming, or mind-bendingly tedious.

It wasn’t the scariest thing I have ever done, it wasn’t the most dangerous thing I have ever done and it wasn’t the toughest thing I have ever done, but it broke me. It also taught me about boredom, fear, pain, frustration, perseverance, planning and preparation. In fact, it would be one of my early lessons in the six ‘P’s: Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss-Poor Performance. The ocean is almost unimaginably vast, a huge expanse of wilderness where we humans are particularly out of place. But in measuring myself against the Atlantic, I learned the value of endurance.

It had all started when an email popped into my Inbox inviting me to take part in the BBC’s Sport Relief 2004 charity boxing match. I would be paired with Aled Jones, the young Welsh chorister who found fame as a teenager with a chart-topping cover of 'Walking in the Air' from The Snowman.

In an unusual and out-of-character move, I agreed. I should probably explain here that I am not a pugilist. I have always hated contact sport, and boxing had always seemed particularly unappealing. But sometimes you just go with your instincts. That split-second decision was like a tipping point for me, and the beginning of a great personal journey.

As it transpired, Aled Jones dropped out, and instead I was paired with the actor Sid Owen. For the first time in my life, I found myself well and truly out of my comfort zone, boxing on live national television in front of an audience of millions against a hugely popular EastEnders actor, who also happened to be a former amateur boxer.

The odds were stacked against me. At the weigh-in, Sid had chest-butted me, sending me flying backwards. ‘IS THIS THE GREATEST SPORTING MISMATCH EVER?!’ screamed the newspaper headlines the next day. I was the underdog. Not prepared to be humiliated, I threw myself into two months of hard training. I rose to the challenge and won the fight. In the end my greatest asset was my endurance. Committing 100 per cent to my training earned me the winner’s belt.

After that, I was energised by survivor syndrome. I felt invincible. I felt that I could conquer the world. From there it was a sort of domino effect – the boxing bout was a catalyst for my increasing confidence in my own ability, and I soon found myself looking for another challenge that would really test my resilience and take me out of my comfort zone.

It was in that boxing ring, as my arm was lifted aloft and I was declared the winner, that the confidence to take on the Atlantic was kindled. Up to that point I was still a slave to the stereotyping of reality television, where my ‘fame’ had been created on BBC One’s Castaway 2000. The thing about reality-show fame is that it is very shallow – it has neither substance nor roots. You are famous because you were on a television show, not because you have any depth, ability or knowledge. This was 2004 and I was still stuck in the Heat magazine celebrity circus and I wanted to escape from that. I craved for a challenge that would help me alter the course of my life and reclaim my own narrative.

I was still seen as just a posh and pretty public school boy. But I didn’t forever want to be known as ‘Ben, that guy from the reality TV show’. I wanted people to respect me for more than that. I wanted to surprise the critics who wrote me off and prove to them that beneath my puppy-like exterior was more grit and determination than they gave me credit for. If I could prove myself by suffering and enduring, then maybe I could take control of my public persona as well as build my own self-esteem and confidence.

Deep down I wanted success, not fame. To achieve that, I needed something big, while still within the realm of achievability. Something that would test me to my absolute limits. Rowing the Atlantic looked like the answer.

The first time I heard of anyone attempting to row across the Atlantic was when the husband-and-wife team of Andrew and Debra Veal announced their intention in 2001. There was a huge amount of media interest – a married couple, with the husband an amateur rower and the wife a complete novice, was bound to cause a stir. This only intensified when Andrew was forced to retire after suffering uncontrollable anxiety just eight days into the journey.

Debra took the decision to carry on alone. Like the rest of the nation, I was captivated by the unfolding drama. Debra had never rowed before she signed up for the race. I admired her resolve to carry on when her husband was rescued, and yet despite the temptation to abandon the row, she persevered and 108 days later reached land. I was enthralled by her story, and when it came to finding a challenge of my own, rowing the Atlantic seemed like a reasonable choice.

‘Reasonable’, of course, is different for each of us. As a child, I always loved boats. I spent a great deal of time in canoes and rowing boats at my grandparents’ lakeside cabin, and while the ocean was a very different proposition to a small lake in Ontario, I knew that I felt comfortable on the water. If I’m honest, I’m not sure how I had the confidence to compare a 3,000-mile row across the stormy Atlantic Ocean with a half-mile canoe across a calm freshwater lake – I suspect the boxing match had more of a psychological effect on me than I had given it credit for.

I don’t think I really appreciated the enormity of the challenge. Debra had taken one-third of a year to row the Atlantic but even that didn’t feel daunting to me. After all, hadn’t I already endured a whole year living on an island in Castaway? Longevity was not really an issue. And as for the 3,000 miles, that also seemed abstract. I didn’t really have a reference point for the distance, the conditions, or the speed of rowing an ocean.

It was, of course, a risk. A huge one. Failure would have been mentally crushing, and potentially career suicide, as I was trying to reinvent myself as a successful adventurer. Everyone thought I was crazy. No one could believe I would really go through with it. But what I lack in confidence and self-esteem, I make up for in resilience and determination. And I have always been drawn to water.

Oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, waterfalls … I find myself mesmerised by water. I’m not sure if it’s the fluidity of the movement, or just the expanse, but I have always found myself calmed and soothed by the water. On it, under it, or in it, it doesn’t really matter. I find a spiritual draw towards water and towards oceans in particular. And there is something deeply spiritual and primitive about the ocean. Remember, humans are made up of nearly 70 per cent water. The ocean is part of us. It’s no surprise to me that the phases of the Moon can affect our moods. Once you see what it does to the tides, you can imagine the impact on the water within us.

I can still recall every childhood holiday by the sea in St Ives, in Brighton, and on the Isle of Rum in the Hebrides. The ocean was like a friend. Even in stormy weather the ocean never looked threatening; on the contrary, it almost appeared more exciting.

During my year living as a castaway on Taransay, the ocean was both a prison and an opportunity. Each evening I would sit on the top of one of the little hills and look west as the sun set over the vast, seemingly endless Atlantic Ocean. I was conflicted: I hated the artifice of our isolation and imprisonment but I also loved being a castaway. I would stare at that ocean and dream about the opportunity that lay on the horizon once we were set free from the ‘experiment’. And the ocean for me has always signified ultimate freedom.

Like a castle without a drawbridge, the island without a boat had become a prison, but with a boat you could go anywhere. I would stare at that ocean and marvel at the idea I could get all the way to Grandma and Grandpa’s little cabin on the lake in Canada, or even into Central London by boat. All from the very waters lapping the shoreline of Taransay. If you think about it, the seas are like a metaphor for life. Imagine all of humanity on a single beach; opportunity is ahead of us and it’s up to us to choose the journey. We have the option to remain on the beach, or we can set off across the ocean. We can choose our mode of transport – be it a plane, a cruise ship, or a sailing boat, we can make life as easy or as hard as we wish it to be. We can go with or against the ocean currents, with or against the prevailing winds; we can go with a motor or a sail, or we can go on a rudderless raft and allow the currents to take us where they choose. We can even swim it. You see, life can be as tough as you make it.

Maybe it was that unstoppable draw of the ocean, or perhaps it was the desire to test my resilience, but whatever the reason, the idea of rowing across the ocean never seemed too daunting or scary. It sounded more like opportunity and adventure. But while I have always been connected to the ocean, the rowing part was largely a mystery to me.

The first time I ever went sailing was awful. I was 14 and my friends, twin brothers Bruce and Russell Price, invited me to sail to France aboard their father’s sailing boat. It wasn’t flash and it certainly wasn’t ‘crewed’; in fact we did all the hard work in between vomiting and sipping cups of Bovril.

My memories were of seasickness, of being cold and wet, and yet I went back for more. Like a moth to a flame, I found myself drawn to the discomfort. There was something rather exciting about the mix of hardship and satisfaction. I had long admired the heroics of the early sailors. One of the first stories I heard as a child was that of Sir Robin Knox-Johnston who, during the late 1960s, won the Golden Globe trophy in the race to be the first person to sail single-handed, unassisted and non-stop, round the world. His achievement was made all the more memorable by the fact that he was the only one of nine entrants to complete the race, as he crossed the finish line after a mammoth 312 days at sea.

The draw of the water eventually landed me at the University of Portsmouth where my student flat overlooked the ocean. But just looking at it wasn’t enough and I soon found myself enlisting with the Royal Navy as a midshipman in the University Royal Naval Unit. We had our own ship, HMS Blazer, which we crewed each weekend for small deployments around the Solent. If there was a single series of experiences that helped build my resolve, it was those stormy, cold weekends at sea.

My time aboard HMS Blazer gave me my first real test of sleep deprivation and discomfort. We worked in shifts through the night, and we cooked in the tiny sea-sickness-inducing galley. What’s more, the permanent crew of Royal Naval sailors who joined us ensured it was no holiday. I owe my toilet-cleaning expertise and my polishing skills to those four years of scrubbing and buffing (and vomiting) aboard that little ship.

During the holidays we would leave UK waters and head down to Spain and Gibraltar, or up as far as Norway and Sweden. I loved and hated every single minute on that little ship, and when I wasn’t aboard HMS Blazer, I was sailing at the Joint Services Sailing Centre.

My time in the Royal Naval reserves was like an apprenticeship to the ocean. She had become familiar, like a friend, but rowing 3,000 miles in a small 24-foot boat made of plywood and glue was a very different proposition to sailing aboard a Naval Fast Patrol boat with an engine and a competent crew who knew what they were doing.

Back in 2001, when Debra Veal had been catapulted into the headlines, another young sailor had also become a household name: Ellen MacArthur. She had competed in the Vendée Globe, the race to sail single-handed, non-stop around the world, just like Knox-Johnston had done some thirty years earlier. Like millions of other Brits, I had been moved and uplifted by her fighting spirit in the face of adversity. There was something so beautiful about watching this young woman take on 28,000 miles of ocean. I found it empowering and inspiring and I wanted my own challenge. It wouldn’t be on a sailing yacht though. The problem with sailing is that the costs are prohibitive; you could spend millions of pounds to get a boat fit for a circumnavigation of the world. I needed something more attainable and achievable. A rowing boat is a fraction of the cost, though at the sacrifice of security and any semblance of leisure time …

I signed up for the Atlantic Rowing Race two years ahead of the December 2005 start date, and for the first year I buried my head in the sand and pretended it wasn’t really happening. Although the ocean held a comfortable familiarity for me, spending many months at sea in a tiny wooden boat was on an entirely different scale to anything I had done before. When the clock ticked round to a year to go, I still didn’t have either a boat or, more importantly, a partner.

I was at a party in Central London when I spotted James Cracknell across the room. I recognised him because he had just won his second gold medal in the Olympic Games.

‘Now there’s a bloke who can row,’ I thought.

If you don’t ask you won’t get, my grandmother always said. Be brave.

I bounded over with Tigger-like enthusiasm and asked James if he’d like to row across the Atlantic Ocean with me.

‘Have you rowed before?’ he asked, looking at my physique suspiciously.

‘Nope. Never,’ I smiled. I should have lied.

He told me to get lost, but I persevered and a few weeks later we discussed the possibility of teaming up.

Have you ever met an Olympian? If not, then let me paint a picture. They really are a unique type of person. Stubborn, determined, focused people who have decided to sacrifice their life to the goal of winning medals. It takes a different kind of competitive confidence to embrace a life of professional sport. Imagine dedicating your life to one discipline: jumping, running, throwing, cycling, rowing. Imagine the dedication and the commitment needed to turn up at the gym 360 days of the year. Those freezing cold mornings. The sacrifice of abstaining from alcohol and parties and socialising. I may be over-egging it slightly, but you can’t overestimate an Olympian’s commitment to their sport.

And the financial rewards are slim. At best you might win a gold medal and fleeting sporting fame, until the next generation come up through the ranks. The likes of Chris Hoy, Steve Redgrave and Helen Grainger are the exceptions to the rule. They are sportsmen and women who have broken the third wall and entered the world of celebrity.

James Cracknell, even among sporting legends, had a fearsome reputation. He was famed for pushing himself and those around him harder and farther than anyone else. He was ferocious. He wanted to be the best. For James it was gold or nothing. There was no point in turning up if he was only going to come second. For 18 years of his life, James had sacrificed a normal life for rowing.

And then there was me. Mr Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none. For me, variety has always been the spice of life. Oh, and I hate competition and I can’t row.

We teamed up.

James and I wrote a book about that journey (called The Crossing) but I want to talk about the experience in the context of what I learned from the sea in those seven weeks.

I’ll begin with our preparation, or lack of. On paper, we ticked all the boxes. We passed the necessary exams and became Ocean Yachtmasters. If we compare it to a driving test, we did all the theory but failed to do any of the practical. A rowing machine was as close to a rowing boat as I ever got during our preparation. In the few months leading up to the race, I was filming in the deserts of Namibia.

The morning of the race was only the third time James and I had ever been in a rowing boat together and the previous times had all been photo opportunities. Before we were allowed to start the race, we had to pass ‘scrutineering’ and here was where our shortcomings really showed. James was asked to demonstrate how to use the handheld pump to bail water out of our boat. He held it the wrong way round and ended up filling the boat with seawater instead. Lynn, the chief scrutineer, went red with rage. We had shown an early red flag and she was about to uncover the full scale of our lack of preparedness.

I have never been good with preparation. I have always been one of those individuals who goes in with hope and a prayer. I cross my fingers and hope I’ll get through it. My frequent exam failures were proof that it rarely worked. At that stage in my life, preparation felt like extending the misery. I already knew that rowing the Atlantic wasn’t going to be easy or even much fun, so what was the point in another year of ‘suffering’ in the preparation? How wrong I was.

What followed was a baptism of fire, exaggerated because we hadn’t prepared or trained ourselves mentally or physically. Don’t get me wrong, I was in good physical shape. I had rowed for an hour or two every day for six long months, but always within the safety of my rowing machine. On my terms.

Now we were stuck on a 24-foot rowing boat, Spirit of EDF Energy, facing the pressure of expectation. We rowed a routine of two hours on, two hours off, two hours on, two hours off, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for seven weeks. We never slept for more than 40 minutes at a time and never more than three hours in any 24-hour block. Sleep deprivation became our nemesis. Our enemy. Irritability descended into madness. I have never experienced such delirium. We became irrational, emotional and vulnerable at the very time we needed to be clinical, focused and strong.

Rowing 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean was one thing, but doing it as part of a race with a competitive edge was another. Competition adds pressure, which changes the dynamic. Ever since I was a young boy, I have hated competition. Part of the attraction of the Atlantic Rowing Race was to confront my fears, and the competitive element was an important aspect to that. But it didn’t make life easy, particularly as I was with a fiercely competitive Olympian.

For an Olympian like James Cracknell, the race element was bigger than the challenge. Rowing the Atlantic was incidental. For me, the race was a by-product of the task itself, to row the Atlantic. What you must remember is that James wasn’t the only sportsman or woman in the race. There were semi-professional athletes from all around the world alongside everyday folk like myself. It was this heady mix of ambition and ability that made the Atlantic Rowing Race such an exciting proposition.

The first week on the ocean was the hardest as we adapted to our new routine. We were still strangers. In the year’s preparation we had never really got to know one another. It soon transpired we had two very different objectives. I was there to complete, while James was in it to win it. I didn’t care if it took us a whole year to row across that ocean as long as we did so in the spirit of the race, in good health and we arrived alive. James, on the other hand, didn’t mind if we died halfway across as long as we had put in 110 per cent effort.

We fought and we wept. That first week was misery. Utter misery, possibly the most depressed I have ever been. The satnav registered 2,995 miles to go and a speed of half a mile an hour. This was perhaps one of the single biggest learning experiences of my life. Those numbers on that machine looked impossible. It wasn’t the ocean around us nor the weather or storms that felt overwhelming and suffocating, but the scale in my head.

For the first time in my life, my brain couldn’t cope. The enormity of the task was out of my comfort zone and something I had never experienced before. It was abstract. Invisible. Unimaginable.

It was overwhelming. ‘Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five miles,’ I kept repeating over and over. It was just a number. But the figure was like a gremlin. It kept multiplying. I couldn’t break down the size of the whole thing.

What kept us both from turning about and heading back into harbour with our tails between our legs? Pride. We were both haunted by the fear of humiliation on turning around. Neither of us could stomach that prospect. Despite the misery, carrying on felt like the lesser of two evils.

I don’t remember much from those first few days. It was like waking up to a version of Groundhog Day every two hours. There was no escape. When we weren’t enduring the oars in the open water, we were worried about the ticking clock to the next session. And on top of that, there were the eyes. James was watching. I don’t know for sure that he was always staring and he probably wasn’t, but I so wanted to please him. I wanted to prove I was up to the task. I wanted to impress the Olympian. Through the tinted window of the cabin door, James was invisible from the outside, but I knew that from inside the cabin, he could watch my progress as if from a ship’s wheelhouse. I always felt those eyes boring into me as I took my turn to row.

I had gone into my charity boxing bout as the underdog. The only way to go was up. In some ways, I couldn’t really lose, because as far as the press was concerned, I’d lost before I’d started. But now, here, with an Olympic rower, we were the boat to beat. By teaming up with an Olympic legend, I had put extra pressure on ourselves to perform and to win.

If we failed or lost, I wasn’t just letting myself down but James Cracknell too. The shame would be too much. And I found myself obsessing about pleasing James more than anything.

Rowing across the Atlantic was like the ultimate apprenticeship in stoicism. There was not a single moment or break from the relentlessness. We were always tired, or nervous, or sick, or hungry, or irritable, or sleep deprived, or sad, or anxious, or thirsty. Or all of the above. If I’m honest, I can barely think of a single moment of contentment in those seven weeks because I was always worried about what might happen next.

We had to poo into a bucket, and we tried to fill the food vacuum created by 12 hours of rowing each day, which equated to about 10,000 calories. It was monotonous and overwhelming.

I have never really suffered from boredom. I’m pretty good in my own company, but for the first time in my life I had been psychologically outmanoeuvred by the ocean. I didn’t know what to do with my mind. I wasn’t sure where to take it. The loud inner voice kept screaming ‘3,000 miles at half a mile an hour!’ It was deafening. I had to calm myself down, for I could feel panic and anxiety rising within. I have never battled my own inner voice of doubt as much as I did during those first seven days.

I know it probably sounds glib to say this, but I reckon it would be a breeze if I were ever to do it again (which I won’t). It was awful, but the awfulness was largely down to my lack of mental strength. I don’t want to destroy the myth, but rowing the Atlantic isn’t particularly physical. It is so much more a mental battle of mind over matter, of mind over muscle.

Although I had tested my mental fortitude before, the Atlantic Ocean was on a whole new scale. There was not a single easy day. Life was perpetual uncertainty. Whenever things seemed to be going well, something happened to bring us back to reality.

First the electrics failed, then the water desalinator, which converts saltwater into freshwater, died on us, and then the rollers on our seats broke. The disasters continued. The water-maker broke, the rowing seat broke, our hands broke (with blisters), we ran out of food, the satellite phone wouldn’t work. Anything that could go wrong did go wrong. It felt like we were constantly fighting fires. Our emotions peaked and troughed more than the ocean waves.

It was like a never-ending nightmare. Every time we made progress and fixed something, another problem came our way. The breakages and the boat failures began to inhabit my subconscious. I would daydream about things breaking, the loud inner voice of doubt forever looming large.

The result was that almost every action filled me with dread and fear. I can still recall the sinking feeling every time I started the stove, to heat water for our rehydrated meals. If the stove failed or broke, which statistically was very likely in the damp salty air, then we would be stuck. There was no replacement and we couldn’t call in a mechanic.

That fear of things breaking made me feel sick. Physically sick. We are so used to calling in other people to help when things go wrong, from the plumber and the electrician to the police officer or the ambulance. On land, we become used to a life of deferring to others, but out there on the ocean we were alone. Really, truly, alone. We stood or fell by our own mistakes. There could be no one to blame but ourselves.

For both James and myself, this was a departure from our normal lives. James had spent his career surrounded by experts, from dietitians to sport scientists. All he had to do was train the muscle and do his thing. (That makes it sound easy, which it unequivocally isn’t, but I hope you’ll get my point.) I am often surrounded during filming assignments by teams of people who make sure there is food, fuel and water, but here, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean thousands of miles from land, we were on our own.

The thing about the ocean is that it begins to wear and tear both man and material. Both we and our boat began to fall apart. As well as the blisters on our hands, boils were forming on our bottoms. I never knew how painful boils could be until I had to row 12 hours a day on them. I would fixate about them. But it turned out that the physical and mechanical problems were the least of our worries.

A near-death experience changed the whole narrative. We were less than 1,000 miles from the finish line when we were capsized by an enormous wave. I was rowing at the time and James was in the cabin. All I remember was my head breaking the surface of the water and the sight of our upturned boat and mountainous seas all around. Strangely, I didn’t feel fear. Just resignation. I couldn’t see how we were going to get out of this one. So I resolved to meet my maker.

What does it feel like to stare death in the face? Honestly? It feels a bit shit. I was embarrassed at my failing. Typical, I thought. Trust me to fail at life and die too young. There were no angels in the sky like in the 1980s film Cocoon. I didn’t start to chat to God or a dog. There was no tunnel of light. It was just me and the ocean and a feeling of impending doom.

My past didn’t flash before my eyes and I didn’t scream out that I wasn’t yet done with life. Funnily, I remember looking at the hull of the boat and wondering why there were so many barnacles clinging to her.

James was obsessed about barnacles slowing us down and had insisted that one of us jump into the water each day to scrape the shells from the bottom of the boat. It was unpleasant and uncomfortable. We had argued about it and now I could see that it hadn’t even made a difference – the hull of the boat was covered in barnacles, not that it mattered now. We had bigger things to worry about. Like survival.

I am not scared of death. I don’t want that to sound blasé, but it’s true. I am fearful for my loved ones who would endure the loss, but I’m not fearful of death myself. We have a strange relationship with death. We rarely talk about it even though it is an inevitability for us all. Mortality just isn’t very sexy. Death is still the stuff of hushed tones. Setting aside any specifics of spirituality, religion, beliefs or non-beliefs, it is merely the place we will end our lives.

I think we should talk about it more.

In the wilderness, death is a part of life. The line between life and death is much more visceral and tenuous. Nature is red in tooth and claw and the circle of life incorporates death on a daily basis.

In much of modern life, death is an inconvenience. It obstructs the anti-ageing, immortal promise of consumerism. Death doesn’t really sell. Immortality, and the market for pills, potions, vitamins, supplements and serums, sells.

Death isn’t part of our life script. Until you stare it in the face in the middle of the Atlantic.

I wasn’t ready to die. I had too much to live for and I wasn’t ready to fail at life itself. Survival instinct is an extraordinary thing. In times of trauma, it really does take over.

So I banished death and opted for life.

I don’t recall swimming to the upturned hull of our boat. I can remember hauling myself out of the water and the boat somehow righting itself. I recall the crushing relief of hearing James’s voice from the cabin. He was alive. I was alive. But we were drifting in our little rowing boat, alone in the Atlantic Ocean.

We had lost almost everything. Our water desalinator, our solar panels, the batteries and all electrics. We had no GPS for guidance. No satellite phone. No VHF radio for communication. We were lost at sea with little hope of being found.

I was ready to activate our EPIRB, the emergency beacon used to summon rescue, but James had other thoughts. He threw a wet towel at me and told me I had five minutes to pull myself together and get back on the oars before we lost a place in the race.

Despite our near-death experience, James was still focused on the race.

We still had the basics to carry on, including two oars, some paper charts for navigation, a magnetic compass and emergency bottled water in the ballast of the boat, packed for such an eventuality and emergency.

In that moment, my inner voice of doubt disappeared, replaced by certainty and hope. If we could overcome the ultimate ocean test of a capsize, then it felt like nothing was going to stop us.

Interestingly, my surge of confidence coincided with a steep decline in James’s physical and mental well-being. He had been plagued by ill-health and, in the absence of a doctor onboard, he had overprescribed himself Tramadol, a highly addictive and hallucinogenic painkiller. With weeping ulcers on his bottom, he was finding it difficult to concentrate, let alone row. James’s decline and my strengthened resolve – which came first? I’m not sure if my strength came from his weakness or whether I was just rising to the challenge.

I have often experienced the same dynamic with teammates, almost like a tag team for good days and bad days. I think it is a subliminal survival instinct that keeps you from the double dip, which is when both teammates’ emotions dip at the same time and a feeling of despondency and helplessness takes over. That definitely kicked in when we were facing our harshest challenges in the Atlantic Rowing Race, and played a huge part in getting us through to the end.

After six weeks at sea, I began to look forward to those two-hour sessions on the oars. I could smell and taste the finish. Quite literally. You see, I worked out ways to trick my brain. I trained myself to break the whole journey up into tiny 20-minute goals that would each be rewarded with a piece of chocolate or a fragrant sweet.

I learned to relive experiences in my mind. Like turning on a projector, I would revisit my childhood. It brought light to the darkness and it lifted my morale.

The sleep deprivation was a monster. For the first time in my life I suffered from chronic insomnia. My tiredness began to spiral out of control. But what both James and I learned during that row across the Atlantic Ocean was that there is always more. However low you feel, however wretched the situation, however monotonous something is, the human spirit can always absorb more.

Rowing the Atlantic Ocean was a war of attrition. The sun, the saltwater, the storms, the isolation, the hunger and the sleep deprivation all ground me down. They smothered me, but my spirit, our spirit, was stronger.

If I have one regret, it is that I didn’t enjoy the experience more. It felt more like an endurance. I think if I had relaxed more and worried less, then not only would it have been more enjoyable but also a hell of a lot easier.

There were of course moments of great beauty, like the time we were joined by a whale, immense beneath our boat. But they were fleeting. I had a lot of time to think during those lonely seven weeks at sea. It was a frozen moment in my life when I could abstain from outside interference. It allowed for great introspection and moments of clarity.

It was during one of those long nights that I decided to propose to my then-girlfriend, Marina. We had only known one another for a year, but the time at sea made me realise she was the one. I proposed the day after reaching the finish line, with a ring made from a small piece of string from the boat. It was a fitting conclusion to the hardest adventure of my life.

Ten days after the capsize and 49 days after starting the race, we crossed the finish line. The Atlantic Ocean had tested our resolve and we had passed the examination. It was pretty overwhelming. I wish I could bottle that feeling of euphoria when we crossed that line. It makes me a little teary to think back to that extraordinary moment.

Imagine spending nearly two months on edge, surrounded by a deafening noise amid chaos and disruption, and then everything is silent? For the first time in months I could hear birdsong and the sound of waves lapping on the beach. There was no movement. No wind. No fear. No anguish.

It was the greatest achievement of my life. I had never done anything that had stretched me as much as rowing the Atlantic. Fourteen years later, I can still remember the night we arrived at English Harbour, Antigua, at the end of our mammoth journey. The stunned silence as we pulled into our safe haven. The small gathering of family and loved ones. The camera flashes. The tears. The hugs. The sweat and salt. The inability to walk properly on our painfully thin legs.

It is difficult to explain the feeling, but I shall try. Imagine a combination of relief and exhaustion, happiness and elation, numbness and disbelief. It is a pretty heady mix and one that I don’t think I will ever experience again.

I really don’t think I could ever recreate that feeling of sheer happiness in those few minutes of reunion on the shores of that Caribbean harbour. Boredom and misery and the fear of death were all banished and replaced by safety and security, family and love, satisfaction and familiarity and certainty. The monotonous hum that had been a constant companion over the past seven weeks had been subsumed in a calming stillness.

In actual fact there were quite a few people there to greet us in the middle of the night, but for some reason I remember so clearly the quietness and the whispered tones.

We had finished the race in third place – we were first in the pairs class but third overall behind two crews of four, out of a total of twenty-six starting boats – but the bare statistics didn’t really register with me, compared to what I had discovered about myself.

The Atlantic really was a game changer for me. It provided enduring life lessons. I learned to respect nature and to believe in myself. So many of us take our sanitised, clinical environment for granted, but out there on the water we were forced to work with the ocean and not against her. Most importantly, I came to realise that nothing is impossible as long as you believe in yourself.

Lose control of that belief and you’ve already failed. The Atlantic can be surprisingly forgiving but it doesn’t suffer fools. Those seven weeks at sea taught me a huge amount about myself but also a great deal about the ocean herself.

I can’t say with hand on my heart that it was an ‘enjoyable’ experience. There was little obvious happiness or laughter during those challenging days at sea, but I think that was more self-imposed than something the ocean imposed on us.

Above all, I learned the art of self-preservation. Half the battle was self-guarding my own mental and physical well-being. I didn’t always succeed, and I battled more demons than on almost any other expedition, but I fought for my spirit and, ultimately, I won.

What is it like living in your own mind for seven weeks without distraction? Once you surrender to the boredom and the notion that you are in it for the long term, it becomes almost cathartic.

That adventure taught me how to cope under duress and how to carry on when all around you in your world seems to be crumbling. I learned to shield myself from the dark cloud of doubt that followed me and James all the way across the ocean.

The ocean can be a cruel mistress. She has claimed many lives over the years. Those 49 days at sea had taught me so much about the nuances of life, the slow wear and tear of mind and body. Like a beautiful dance we had learned to move together with the sea. The ocean had given me the strength to be brave in my moment of fear. We had been lucky. We scraped through despite our early lack of preparation, because the extended nature of the race had given us a chance to catch up as we rowed.

As we adapted to the ocean, as we moved and worked together and with it, I replaced my fear and withered self-confidence with hope, respect and durability. Pitting myself against the ocean gave me the opportunity to blossom into a fully paid-up apprentice who had earned his first stripes in the school of wilderness. I discovered that we are all capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. In society we are often held back by presumptions and assumptions. We fail to push ourselves to the limit of our abilities for fear of failure, public ridicule or humiliation. But in the face of the immensity of nature, these concerns begin to pale in significance.

Out in the Atlantic, thousands of miles from society, we were free to succeed or fail on our own terms. The difference being that failure on the ocean could result in more than just a battered ego. Rowing the Atlantic strengthened my self-confidence and taught me to believe in myself. It instilled in me the perseverance to carry on against all the odds. It showed me that I can achieve my goals, even when the going isn’t easy. And it demonstrated that if we believe in what we are doing, we can endure whatever comes our way. The ocean had taught me to take control of my own narrative and believe in myself.

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