Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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And so I rowed. And my heart pounded. And my lungs wheezed. And my heart pounded harder.

When it was over, I am relieved to report, I had not only survived but had put up numbers that moved Steve to enthuse that I was “probably going to be okay” and that he would hasten to let the others know that I would at least be able to lift my own oar onto the boat.

Later, in Steve’s absence, Janet told me how utterly relieved she had been to see me row, surely feeling that had I wobbled or begun to complain after a few minutes, the voyage, not to mention the lives of her son and husband, would have been that much further compromised and at risk.

And so began my training—the run-up to an adventure for which I still believed I had just three months to prepare. Throughout September I spent four or five hours a day at the Canada Games Complex in Thunder Bay, jogging on the track, lifting weights, pumping the rowing machines... and further pumping them... and pumping them some more. Part of my challenge was that the rest of the crew, already far stronger than I, had been training for nearly half a year. The previous February, a kind of cattle call had gone out over an array of rowing and sporting websites. The message was that Captain Roy Finlay, boat designer extraordinaire, was looking for hard-nosed rowers with an epic sense of adventure to take an experimental rowboat across the Atlantic during late 2009, and to take it across in world-record time. Steve and Nigel had been among the dozen hardy souls—from Canada, from the U.S., from Europe—who gathered at Shelter Island, showed Roy what they could do, and departed, dreams burnished, passports as good as stamped. The early instalments of their $10,000 participation fees would begin building the boat, which at that point was itself little more than a dream.