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

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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.