By September, the hulls had been built and the construction schedule was on catch-up—could the boat possibly be ready for mid-November, when it would have to be shipped to Morocco?
My own game of catch-up was every bit as frantic as Roy’s. While my official goading to be up to speed by the end of October came from headquarters, my real regimen came from Steve Roedde, who emailed me twice a day with endless encouragement and challenges—for this afternoon’s workout, for tomorrow’s simulated row, for the weekend’s marathon. What rattled me particularly as Week 1 slid past was my utter incapability merely to stay perched on the rowing machine. I would very shortly be expected to sit for two hours straight, six times a day, quite literally working my ass off, when for now I could barely go twenty minutes without having to get off and grimace and massage, as if I’d been flogged at the mast or thrown down the stairs. When I complained, Steve informed me that my problem was nothing more than the muscles being crushed by the pressure of the seat—“pulped,” I believe was his word. As for mental conditioning, I was led to think of it as something real ocean rowers, leather-butts, didn’t worry about because once you got out there it was pretty much a crapshoot of stresses and unpredictability and we were all more or less nuts anyway.
Gradually, I increased my “sit time” to half an hour, then forty minutes, but never really did get much beyond the latter. Even on the boat, I’d get up and stretch and adjust my cushion, or take a leak, or take off my T-shirt, or reapply my sunscreen—whatever little chore provided a modicum of cover for the fact that I simply could not sit there pulping my bony posterior for much more than half an hour at a time.
The second and third weeks of my training called for three- and four-hour rowing sessions at a level of strength and cardiovascular fitness that my second week told me I would not be achieving any time soon.
In response to these exaggerated demands, I was going through Gatorade by the gallon and eating whole chickens, whole lake trout, whole apple pies. At one point in October, I boiled up a five-pound bag of potatoes, tout complet, and ate them with a pound of butter and another of old cheddar within perhaps eight hours.
Meanwhile, I agonized over what I perceived to be my painfully sluggish progress, more fretful than ever that I would not be ready and would end up disgracing myself. My greatest fear was not that I would drown or be shipwrecked or die of a heart attack aboard; it was that I would simply not be equal to the task, would end up huddled and whimpering in a corner of the cabin while the others debated whether to euthanize me humanely or just throw me to the sharks.
At the same time, there was something crazily exhilarating for me in the fact that, at the ripening age of sixty-two (when, as Shakespeare put it, I might better be pulling up “the lean and slipper’d pantaloon”), I had committed myself to an adventure that I would not even have contemplated at times in my life when I would more likely have had the physical capabilities to survive what I planned to do.
In a magazine story on my training, I wrote with utmost sincerity that at twenty I would not have had the inner strength for such an endeavor, at thirty the imagination, at forty the time. At fifty I would have lacked the all-important awareness that I gained as I approached sixty: that mortality is just another setting on life’s cruise control, neither to be feared nor particularly avoided, and that the true gist of the ripening season is one’s compulsion just to go, to ask what would happen if rather than simply enduring risk and uncertainty as we add years, we decided instead to embrace risk, juice up on it, reclaim our bodies, re-establish ground—in short to reinvent ourselves, or at very least to discover what an adventure might turn up about the human comedy and how best we might play out our roles in it as we age.
WHEN WORD CAME from Roy Finlay in mid-October that the boat was not ready and that, given the shipping time to Morocco, we could not mobilize until February, I was surely the only crew member who felt even a remote sense of relief, in that I now had time to get properly into shape, as well as to sort my finances, get my will updated, and so on. Some of my fellow crew members were outraged. A few had taken specific time off work in order to participate, or had other obligations in February and couldn’t make the adjustment.
No one responded more adamantly than Steve. He and Janet have a maple syrup operation on the island, and he had to be there tapping trees and boiling sap during late February and March. I had access to some of Steve and Roy’s correspondence at the time. I am not free to quote from it, but will submit that Steve went at the captain with an all-but-animal rage over his perceived delinquency in not providing fair warning as to what was going on with the boat. It was Steve’s contention that Roy must have known weeks earlier not only what shape Big Blue was in but what sort of effort would be required to get her to Morocco.
By the time the ensuing quarrel derailed, Steve had pronounced Roy a liar and closet fraud, and Roy had declared Steve an insubordinate meddler (in words slightly more colorful) who could not accept authority and who would not now, ever, be part of the crew that would eventually row Big Blue to her rightful moorage in the record books.
When I spoke to Steve shortly after the announcement, he told me he was “devastated” that his eight months of training and anticipation—in effect the reshaping of his life to the exotic prospect that lay ahead—had come to nothing. Even if he could patch things up with Roy, there was the more concrete obstacle of the sugar bush.
We had barely absorbed this new and shattering reality, when an announcement came that it was now all off for a year. The proposed February departure could not be accomplished either, after which, for nine months, there would be too great a likelihood of tropical storms and hurricanes. For crew members such as Steve, this opened new possibilities—if and only if he could work things out with Roy. A new concern, however, was whether he could withstand another year of the sort of training that, at this point, had taken a toll not just on him but on his marriage.
For others who had stayed with the voyage, it was the last hatchet blow, and within days the crew was down to seven or eight committed rowers. One of them, fortunately, was Nigel Roedde, Steve’s son, who was determined to see the voyage through, thus significantly increasing the chances that Steve would find his way back aboard.
As rowers abandoned ship, my own sense of commitment deepened. By this time, I had borrowed a rowing machine and was often on it for three hours a day. At the height of Roy’s flare-up with Steve, I emailed them both, confirming my participation, hoping it would not be read as a betrayal of my friendship with Steve. Which clearly it was not. When I visited Steve and Janet at Christmas, Steve and I “raced” on a pair of machines in their rec room, after which he informed me that I was now functioning at “the fitness level of the average twenty-five-year-old” (he did not mention which species, although I assumed he was talking about human beings and on that basis permitted myself a moment or two of satisfaction over the progress I had at times doubted I was making).
If I had a training predicament it was this: that, while I was supposed to be putting on weight, the better to survive the physiological dunning of the Atlantic, I was actually losing it, couldn’t gain an ounce no matter how many gallons of oatmeal and pounds of spaghetti and handfuls of cashews I consumed. My intention was to get up to 180 pounds from my customary 160, but I knew from experience that I would have to put the weight on gradually—couldn’t hope to add that much muscle and lard during the last couple of months.
The other hitch in my training was my tendency to go too hard and thereby to risk injury, this against the advice of every knowledgeable athlete and trainer I encountered. My friend Peter White, a Thunder Bay lawyer and former competitive rower, would remind me every time I saw him that it was crucially preferable to under-train than to over-train, and that I should simply not allow myself to fall into the “harder, faster, longer” syndrome. Nevertheless, in February, while attempting to set a personal best for power