Maintaining motivation at sea

Yeah look I mentioned before commitment and passion and how you stay motivated. It was funny at sea, because what we did when we were at sea, we did two hour shifts, where one person would row and the other would rest, and you would swap over, turn and turn about, so there would be two hours on, two hours off, two hours on two hours off, round the clock non-stop. And we felt that if we could maintain that we would be hard to beat.

One of the problems of course was the motivation. I tell you getting up at two o’clock in the morning when you’ve only had an hour and three quarters sleep at the most, and getting up to then go and swing on the oars for another two hours, was absolutely diabolically horrible, I can’t explain to you how unpleasant that was. I could have thought of much more pleasant things to be doing than getting up at that hour in the pitch black and rowing in the middle of the ocean in this tiny little boat.

But the big motivation factor for us was multiple, well it was two or three fold actually. We had committed to try and win the race. We had committed to our sponsors back home, saying look, we are going there to try and win this race. And thirdly we had said to a number of people….well we said to everyone back home, we can win this race. And it’s like that Mohammed Ali effect, remember….you may not remember Ali perse, but Ali was wonderful and psychological in his ploys. He would tell everyone that he would beat that chump in round five or whatever, and it got to the point that he kind of had to back up his talk, he couldn’t just….for pride or ego reasons, he just had to do it, and he committed to do it. And that’s a huge motivation, to then go out and when round five comes he wants to knock this guy out. Well it was the same for us, we committed back home, we are going to try and win this race, and if I had stayed in my cabin, there was no way we were going to win that race if I didn’t get up. Bear in my mind too, Phil had just done a two hour shift, so I couldn’t very well….and the same for him, I had just done mine and he had to get up and of course do his. So I guess the message is you know, support each other, get people around you, make commitments to them, and that’s part of your motivation as well.