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Joining the Dots by Dave Cornthwaite

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This is a guest blog post by Dave Cornthwaite as part of the Adventure Blogging Chain:

Joining the Dots

I write from a concrete bench outside Honolulu airport, a building I’ve become quite familiar with over the past couple of days, without choice. Three extra days in Hawaii might seem like a blessing, but I should actually be one and a half days into another journey, a short one this time, 105 miles along the Wolf River which trickles through swamps and undergrowth before flowering and meandering towards Memphis, Tennessee.

Thankfully, my relationship with HNL airport only began as I attempted to leave the State. As with most new dots on a map I’m lucky enough to translate into real-life experiences, my first glimpse of Hawaii was from the surface. The fifth dimension of my Expedition1000 project fell into place little more than ten weeks ago, but in that time a crew of 11 was assembled to ensure safe passage of the scientific yacht Sea Dragon from Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, to the Pacific island of Oahu.

I had multiple motives for wanting to sail out into the middle of the ocean. Another 1000 miler was a nice bonus but this wasn’t about ticking off an item from a list, my base objective was to size up the middle of the ocean. How do I feel out there? Do I get seasick? Am I still the same ‘me’ 1000′s of miles from land and all the demands it brings. Can I climb to the top of the mast? And most importantly, can I row across this much water?

Dan is soon to experience the sheer inadequacy of being in the middle of the ocean. I felt it and I was in a perfectly safe capsule – like a sailing Truman Show. To swim across open seas for months on end is something I had no desire to do before this sailing voyage and nothing has changed. I love the feeling of human insignificance in a precise moment when stood up against nature. To be a dot floating on our planet takes every ounce of man-made pressure off. I know Dan feels this, after tens of thousands of kilometres on a bicycle he has what it takes to put his head down and keep going, but the decision to take the first step (or in this case, stroke) always comes from a gut instinct that there’s something more out there.

We are all habitual creatures, whether we think about it or not. To someone who lives the same life day in day out Dan’s idea to swim the Atlantic seems foolhardy, crazy, even worthless. To someone else who is accustomed to the challenges of adventure, Dan’s Global Triathlon is nothing more than a fine mixture of a continuing need for solid character-building and common sense.

What? Common sense?! Well, yes! Look around you. Unless you’re in the middle of a desert (or, indeed, the ocean) the things you’re looking at are man made. We’ve entirely fabricated the world in which we live: our lives, our systems, the way we spend our precious time here. Once upon a time the construction of a building from a non natural material would have seemed groundbreaking. Metal tubes with wings that fly people around the globe? Laughable. Light bulbs. Flares. Women doing the hunting. Reaching the peak of Everest. All concepts that once seemed ridiculous, impossible, nonsense. Now they’re commonplace.

Swimming the Atlantic is unlikely to become a popular pastime or even an annual race, but if Dan can make it across imagine the people it will affect. ‘A man swum across the Atlantic, therefore I can see myself doing that marathon. ‘We’re all dots floating around trying to make sense of the world around us and how we fit into it, but sometimes an enormous feat throws a whole bunch of dots together and completes a chunk of the puzzle. It’s human evolution, it’s what we’re here for. A small but resolute band of men and women have decided to make their life work from adventure, each journey and project and endeavour spreading the seed a little further.

I believe adventure – and by definition I mean the pushing of personal boundaries and the open acceptance of attempting new things – is a critical tool in our fight against the lazy world in which we live. Technology and comfy sofas have dulled the natural perception of our surroundings and therefore we have far less engagement with the environment and nature than our predecessors. We may be developing slates that we can interact with and spectacles that tell us where we should be going, but will we ever be able to artificially reproduce the pure peace that comes with sitting carefree beside a river, or the soul satisfaction of swimming underwater and staring up in amazement at the way a surface looks from below?

I’ve spread my limits around. At the same time that Dan is swimming the Atlantic I’ll also be swimming, but down a river with the current. Size up my 50 day expedition with Dan’s multi-month epic and there’s no comparison in endeavour at all, but the key is to find the challenge and the passion that makes us purr as individuals. Dan’s after the longest swim in history, I want to know how it feels to be in the water for a month and a half. Either way, we’ll both look like prunes when we’re done.

As long as I don’t get bumped off my twenty-third flight in a row, I should be flying out of Hawaii in a couple of hours. From there I’ll join up with the crew who have already begun to paddle the Wolf River and once we reach Memphis I’ll ready myself for another journey, 1001miles to Miami by Bikecar. Had you asked me eight years ago whether I’d be prepared to accept a 4-wheeled bicycle from a smiling Northern stranger and then ride off into the sunrise with the goal of picking up random Southerners along the way I would have laughed in your face and reclined into my sofa-sized beanbags. These days, it’s the type of opportunity I have for breakfast. I much prefer these habits, one minute a dot in the ocean, the next a dot on a long, straight road. Even though Dan is twice the size of me, I wish his dot’s journey well. Adventure on and be safe, my friend.

Adventure Blogging Chain: Sarah Outen by Dave Cornthwaite

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This post by Dave Cornthwaite and is part of an Adventure Blogging Chain I’m in with Tim Moss, Mark Kalch and Sarah Outen.

This post is particularly special as it’s written by one of us about one of us! This is Dave quite rightly singing the praises of Sarah Outen:

I write from Vancouver, Canada, where I’m preparing for a two week, 1400 mile pedal to Las Vegas on a tandem bike, alongside my good friend Sebastian Terry. I say ‘preparing’ but that’s popping too fine a word on it. We leave tomorrow morning, and I arrived a couple of hours ago. Why cut it so fine? You might ask. And I have an answer, a good one, there was something going on in London that I just wasn’t going to miss. It happened yesterday.

April Fools Day, London, 1pm. Sarah Outen paddles her kayak downstream, passes underneath Tower Bridge, waves at the crowd on the overpass above her, pauses for a minute to take a photo with her support kayaker Justine Curgenven, and then she continues. To her left, on the gangways of HMS President, more than 200 people wave banners and cheer. It’s a deserving send off for a young woman who has been planning her new endeavour for one year. In 2009 she broke three world records at the age of 24 by rowing solo across the Indian Ocean. She was the first woman to row that ocean alone, the youngest woman at the time to row any ocean, and the youngest person to row the Indian. It could easily have rested as the challenge of a lifetime, but Sarah decided to extend her adventuring career in the only way she knows how, by taking on the planet.

At heart it’s a simple, natural idea; to circumnavigate the globe under human power, but to consider doing so by multiple means and in such a way that makes you shake your head at the audacity of it all, well, it takes someone special to pull it off. Sarah Outen has never just been a talker. From the moment she conceived the idea of kayaking, rowing, and cycling around the world her poor Mum was resigned to the fact that not only would her daughter leave when she promised, but she’d never waiver from a commitment to taking on a continuous journey that is likely to keep her away from home for two and a half years.

Adventurers are a dime a dozen these days, who isn’t a bloody adventurer? I am! Look at me! Of course I am! I did something new once! Some dine on past glories, some are physically above the average grade, but the stand out Adventurers are undeniably impressive. Find me one thing that isn’t impressive about Sarah, dare you! I was on the phone to her last week, three days before this global extravaganza of hers, and she’s chatting away like she’s on holiday. The conversation went something like this:

‘Ootsy, how are you feeling, can I help with anything?’

‘All under control D-Man, we’re tying up loose ends with the website, finalising the tracking system, got some cool tech guys working on syncing up blogs and tweets and pictures with the online maps. Three busloads of schoolchildren heading to Tower Bridge on Friday, kit’s being reprinted because of the new sponsor. I’m so excited, it’s happening!’

‘Are you sleeping enough?’

‘I’m getting a bit.’

She’s about to go on a two and a half year journey under her own steam and within seconds we were talking about everyday stuff, like sleep. If anyone reading this hasn’t heard of Sarah Outen then for goodness sake go to www.sarahouten.com. She’s a role model for kids, for adults, for anyone who has no qualms about making Mars Bars their favourite topic of conversation. We Stand Up Paddleboarded 150 miles from Bath to London last year and at one point we happened to pass two elderly ladies on a Canal Boat. One of them fell in at that moment, the quay was too high, she would have drowned. I was just scrabbling around, trying to grab this woman’s limbs. Sarah saved her life. Instantly she came up with a plan and talked her through the steps that would eventually see her out of the water, gasping for breath, soaked and freezing. Special to witness.

The scale of Sarah’s current mission, London to London Via the World, is such that by the time I join her for a swift cycle across North America it will be late 2012. Between now and then she’ll have kayaked a chunk of the Thames and across the Channel, cycled the breadth of Europe and Asia, kayaked to Japan and rowed across the Pacific. Yesterday this sentence was thrown about with such wild abandon by experienced adventurers that it became cliched, ‘if anyone can do it, Sarah can.’ Cliches are there for a reason, they’re based on fact, and Sarah Outen is capable of it because she walks the walk however big the talk is. And in this case, it’s pretty big.

As I sit here in Canada I’ve just realised that destiny has dictated that I shall never leave Vancouver by anything but a form of bicycle. Seb and I are yet to decide who gets the back seat on the tandem, but we’ve set ourselves a very fun and silly task. It hit me last week that I’ve been so excited about jumping on this bike and experiencing America in all its guises that I’d forgotten this will be the third of my twenty-five 1000-mile journeys. Sure, 100 miles a day for two weeks will produce some aching limbs and some chafing that will surely make Seb whimper (I’m stoical, in these situations), but we’re already visualising pedalling those desert roads into Vegas and just thinking about it is enough to confirm that whatever it takes, we’re going to make it in time to open a business conference on the 17th April.

I daresay, in the briefest moments, Sarah will have allowed herself brief consideration on how it might feel to row or kayak back under Tower Bridge in 2013. A lot happens in two and a half years. She’ll be 27 when she finishes. She’ll have become the first woman to row non-stop, solo and unsupported across the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans. She’ll be a good cyclist by then. And I know, without a doubt, that she’ll have run out of Mars Bars at least three weeks before the end. Thankfully, the initial consignment of her favourite foodstuff arrived 45 minutes before her thank you speech yesterday morning. Even the best of us have to allow for the odd glitch.

Good luck Sarah, you won’t need it at all.

The Adventure Blogging Chain: Yesterday Was Easy by Mark Kalch

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This post by Mark Kalch and is part of an Adventure Blogging Chain I’m in with Tim Moss, Dave Cornthwaite and Sarah Outen.

This is from Mark Kalch, if you can imagine him saying it in his Aussie accent it works better! I’m not sure I could get away with saying things like ‘nada’ and ‘oughta’.

Yesterday Was Easy

High-end expeditions can be tough, damn tough. So how fit do you really need to be? How tough do you really need to be? One of the most common questions I am asked when I speak about my work is what sort of training I put in to prepare myself for such hardship. The disappointment (or perhaps bewilderment) on so many faces when I explain what I get up to as prep for an expedition is interesting.

Why don’t I clock my running times (besides the fact that I am rubbish)? Why don’t I spend my days in the gym throwing weights around? What’s my best time run or heaviest weight lifted? No idea! What I do know is that I train hard and it works (for me at least). A common week (when I am injury free, which these days is getting a little rare for my liking) might look like this:

Monday: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (2 hours of conditioning, technique, sparring and stretching)
Tuesday: Sandbag training and yoga
Wednesday: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
Thursday: Sandbag training and yoga
Friday: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
Saturday: Rest day (kayaking, trekking)
Sunday: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu sparring only

*Add into here a surf on any day if the forecast on magicseaweed.com looks good!
** Week to week this can change dramatically. More kayaking, less BJJ or more time spent in the hills if I am headed to Kili for example.

Besides having arthritis in my left shoulder, a recently reconstructed right shoulder and a fractured clavicle (!), I have never been fitter, stronger or indeed tougher. I am pretty sure that having a 120kg monster looking to choke me out or rip my arm off may induce my body to try a little harder than if I were max-repping on single-arm biceps curls at Fitness First. Throw in some hard work on a mountain occasionally and voila! Good to go! The rest is kept in my head inside that thing we humans don’t really use as much as we probably oughta.

I could be wrong and you are free to disagree, but physical conditioning for proper adventure is not rocket science. It’s just not! Train hard, have fun and your done. Sure, if you need to find a 1/100th of a second to beat an opponent on the track then of course it starts to become a little more finite. But, on the side of a mountain or in the desert it counts for nada. There are no definites. How far today? How hard today? On expedition you just never know.

I reckon Navy Seal, Dave Goggins, in the video above may know a thing or two about toughness and being an ultra-marathon runner he might just clock his times. However, as a Navy Seal it just don’t matter how many seconds he took off his PB. He trains hard and he stays alive. Easy (sorta).

Previous Adventure Blogging Chain Posts:

Mark Kalch on Adventurers and The X-Factor
Sarah Outen on Teamwork
Dave Cornthwaite on What’s Next?
Tim Moss on Community
Dan Martin on Swimming: The Next Step in Adventure
Sarah Outen on Survival Stories
Dave Cornthwaite on ‘Adios Comfort Zone’

The Adventurers Blogging Chain Post: Sarah Outen-Teamwork

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Teamwork

I am a solo expeditionist. Therefore you might think that to write a blog on the concept of team work is a bit ironic. Out there on the Indian Ocean last year it was just me and the fishes, right? Right. But I had a team of folks right around the globe, working to ensure I made it safely to the other side. It had certainly taken more than just me to make it to my start in Australia too. You see, no man is really an island – not even a rower on their own, thousands of miles from anyone. I think that in the most literal sense, none of us can truly function without anyone else at all – we need people. As social creatures we are generally interdependent to some or other degree. In the expedition world, this is absolutely the case. Behind every solo adventurer there will almost certainly be a team in the wings – helping manage logistics, pulling strings, paying bills, managing media activity and easing the burden of the one they are supporting. Even ‘unsupported’ expeditions have remote support teams.

Therefore to make these teams productive and to achieve the goals, effective team work is essential. There is no point in having a team which can’t work together or who are pulling in different directions, particularly when the team is geographically distinct. When this happens or something goes wrong, it is likely that things get tricky and the chance of success might plummet. At the very least it might make things uncomfortable and more hassle – both of which you don’t want in an expedition setting. Yet with quality team work, I think the potential is mind-blowingly exciting. It can put people on the moon. It can defeat armies. It can take people right round the planet.

I hope that my team will achieve the latter. For I am currently working with my team to put together a bid to loop the planet under my own power. I will row two major oceans, cycle three continents and paddle all the bits in between. Logistically, physically, financially, temporally – it is mind-bogglingly huge. So huge in fact that I try not to think of the whole in its detail too often, but I think of it in different sections. To get anywhere near the start line I need a team to help me across the board and to take charge of those little sections. That way none of us gets freaked out, and all of us can manage the project in piecemeal fashion, joining up the dots only when we need to.

I have sourced the best people I can find to be on my team. In fact, some of them found me. Between them they are a formidable and highly skilled bunch, equipped to do all the bits that I can’t do. But I need more than skills. I need to trust them and they need to trust me and each other. We need to click and gel. We must all be singing from the same song sheet and marching in the same direction. For the world it isn’t just my goal, it is their goal and their journey too, now

The most important things about the folks in my team are energy and belief. This has to be inherent – I need folks who believe that this is possible and who can commit to a multi-year project. They need to buzz too, excited by the project and the journeys. There will be setbacks on the way, mountains to climb and oceans to cross. To an extent, my dreams and my life are in their hands. So they need to believe in me and I in them. It is a tangible multiway web of energy and belief, a really special thing to be a part of. In tough moments, it is this which will buoy us and move us forward.

Another key ingredient to my team is effective communication. It will keep everyone informed and tie everyone together. It will shape progress and direct action, it will help me avoid storms on the ocean and keep me safe. It is critical that we get this right. Without transparent, effective, honest communication teams can and do go bust. Projects flounder and fail. This will be particularly important on my voyage for we will all be on opposite sides of the planet. HQ is in Britain; my Logistics Manager loves to travel; my weather router is in the States and I might be thousands of miles out to see, alone in a small boat. In the best of times, it will make everyone’s lives easier if we are communicating properly as a team and in the worst of times it might save me my life.

My solo row across the Indian Ocean taught me a lot about communication. As with the next project, my team were on the other side of the world and my opportunities to talk to them limited by technology and my budget. It was essential that we said what we meant and we meant what we said. More than once we got in a bit of a pickle due to a breakdown in communication. During the voyage that was just frustrating, but right at the very end it nearly cost me my life.

A Mauritian chap had agreed to help me and arrange the details of my final run to the island. All manner of things were promised and agreed – most importantly an escort boat to guide me in the final few miles and through the treacherous reef.

On the morning of my landing, I had a phone call. There was no support boat as it wasn’t allowed outside of the reef. I had to head in by myself.

As a result, I crash landed on to the coral reef, missing the safe entrance by a matter of yards. Had I been unlucky, I would have been pulped to a bloody mess on the reef or drowned in the surf, gone with the waves. Had I had an escort boat as planned, it wouldn’t have happened at all. And why did it happen? Because I failed to communicate properly. Believing that the other person had sorted out the escort boat was, it seems, not enough. I now realise that I should have been on the phone to the captain checking details, discussing the plan. Then when it wasn’t sufficient, I would have known and sourced another boat. As it happens, I trusted and assumed that all was in hand, taking his word for it. My team did too. As the leader of that team, it is therefore my fault.

Still, you live and you learn. And thankfully I have learned that it’s all about communication and that this all lies with the receiver. It doesn’t matter what you’ve said; if the receiver has misunderstood you then it might well be curtains. And when we’re talking expeditions and risky situations, then miscommunication may cost someone their life. So remember, it’s all about clarity, clarity, clarity. Then you will know that you and your team are all headed in the right direction, whatever weird and wonderful place that may be (the moon, the world or otherwise).

Other posts on the Adventurerers Blogging Chain:

Mark Kalch on Adventurers and the X-Factor
Tim Moss on Community
Dave Cornthwaite on What’s Next?
Me on swimming being the next step in Adventure!
James Bowthorpe on having an adventure from your front door.