Blog 3

The twinkling lights of the cities that line Lake Zurich shimmer in contrast to the darkness of the cold November night. The temperature threateningly hovers above freezing, and the sleet/rain mix that graced us for most of the week so far has paused. Our boat plots along the center of the flat lake and our surroundings are so dark that seeing the train lights pass on land gives the impression that we are tiny figurines in a Christmas set. I’m rowing in bow seat, waiting for the feeling in my fingers to return now that I’ve swapped my gloves for a heartier pair; Anima is in the seat ahead of me and positioning her phone for filming, and Sophia stands tall in the stern stoically looking out over the bow. Anima hits record, “Ok, DJ, if Anna was a dance move, what would she be?” Sophia shook her hips side to side to an imaginary disco track, and extended her arms in a giving motion, back and forth, animating Anna’s willingness to step up to any plate. Anima laughs in agreement. “If Libby was a dance move, what would she be?” We go around like this until each of us on deck has rotated through the dancing spot. One of us almost slipped in an attempt to perform the “sprinkler”. While this exercise might seem silly, it was a practical way to film honest content for our social media - enlivening, entertaining, true to our team spirit - as well as stay warm and awake so close to midnight during Switzerland’s first winter storm of the year. Anna pokes her head out of the bow cabin door, “Are you guys ready for me?” “Absolutely!” we exclaim. The real question is was she ready to bust a move. 

The two most common questions I have been asked in recent months are “Are you training?” and “Are you growing a mullet?” The answer is yes, to both, but not in the way one might think.

Last November (2025), our Seabirds team met for a week of training on Lake Zurich, where our boat, Iron Ore, is currently stored. We are an international team, with two rowers in the United States, and two rowers in Switzerland. Therefore, our training trips must be planned well in advance. Planning anything beyond what we must accomplish and what we hope to accomplish can feel like an exercise done in vain, because much like on the actual ocean, weather is the variable with the heaviest hand in determining what we can safely do and also the most changing. Unlike the ocean that we will be rowing later this year, where conditions will be warm from the start and get warmer as we make our way to Antigua, Lake Zurich was cold. After one row, Sophia picked up the guidelines to straighten out the rudder and found that they had frozen. The frozen lines and an icy deck were a reality check about what we could reasonably accomplish, again. No fully executed person-overboard drills this trip.  

Is it counterintuitive to plan a training trip in conditions that are opposite those that the actual adventure for which we are preparing will have? Yes. Is it counterproductive? Not in the slightest. Preparing for an ocean row is a grand combination of physical training, mental training, and emotional training, and wintery Lake Zurich was prime training grounds.

With a demanding, around the clock shift pattern of 2 hours on / 2 hours off ahead of us, the physical training includes the most obvious elements – workouts that build aerobic capacity, lifts that strengthen muscles, and movement patterns that enhance flexibility. Accordingly, we rowed for multiple hours any day that we got on the water, completing ten hours on the third day of the trip, and went to the local gym on days that were more admin focused. Physical training also includes lesser-known pieces. Part of how we feel physically is how much energy we have, and how we handle symptoms of illness. Our primary source of energy on our row will be freeze-dried meals, a.k.a. “hot mush”, which we will prepare via water heated by a Jet Boil. The nutrition of these meals is critical to our performance, therefore so is their palatability. Each meal period of our training trip, whether we were on land or on the boat, we made four meal bags for each of us to taste and subsequently recorded a ranking so we could remember which to order again. We found wide variation in each rower’s preferences, reinforcing the need to test and rank meals, knowing that if one person made a decision for the whole team, some athletes would certainly go hungry. Overall, we’re a team that likes beans, curry, and oatmeal. 

Hygiene, such as changing clothes when not on the oars, wiping off the salt and sunscreen between shifts, and keeping bums as clean as possible, is another matter that will make the difference between a relatively “comfortable” row (if such thing exists) and an excruciatingly uncomfortable row. Bum chafe, sunburn, and callouses are primary culprits of discomfort on the open ocean. Despite the cold temperatures on Lake Zurich, we prioritized changing clothes with each shift turnover to build the habit for doing so when we are fatigued from heat and exertion on the Atlantic.

The freezing rain granted us opportunity to practice our “wet clothes drill” in real time. On an ocean rowing boat, the cabin doors always remain closed, unless someone is entering or exiting the cabin. This principle ensures the best chance that the cabin stays as dry as possible because once moisture is inside, it is incredibly difficult to dispel. A wet, dark cabin is the perfect breeding ground for bacteria and molds – unideal roommates! Therefore, part of our physical training is practicing how to enter the cabin with wet clothes and consolidate said clothes in such a way that they are contained from spreading their moisture to other parts of the cabin. Rainstorms are common occurrences on the ocean, so the “wet clothes drill” is something that should be as customary as using the bathroom (amazingly, another thing that must be practiced!) by the time we cross the starting line.

A final, understated phenomenon about ocean rowing is boat navigation. While a crew is navigating the expansive waters of the ocean, we are also traversing our much less expansive 29x4 foot pod-shaped vessel. Safety rule #1 on the ocean is to be “clipped in”, which means that our harnesses are always attached to the boat’s grab lines or janestays* (a taught, secure rope that runs along the sides of the deck) when on deck. We wear our harnesses, which are simpler versions of rock-climbing harnesses, in the cabin as well, in case we need to quickly move to the deck. Part of our physical training is practicing maneuvering around the boat so that the cords that attach our harnesses to the boat are not crossed, unclipped, or positioned in a way that endangers our teammates’ ability to do their job. Each time we traveled across the deck, we practiced verbalizing our intended path, leaning on each other when needed, and clipping and re-clipping at nauseum. “I’m going to come up on the 1 side on the next stroke”, or in Heated Rivalry speak, “I’m coming to the cottage.” 

One unique aspect of rowing an ocean, compared to other sports where athletes can train in the places they compete (i.e. track, swimming, trail races), is that we can’t do the thing until we do the thing. Therefore, two of the most vital mental skills to practice are capability and adaptability. In regards to capability, part of our training is drilling certain scenarios over and over again until they are muscle memory or close to it. Luckily, many of the motions of ocean rowing are procedural, meaning there is a best practice available and everyone is capable of learning it. This goes for everyday mechanics, such as autohelm arm replacement, radio use, and chart plotting, and extreme response scenarios, such as hull repair (from marlin strikes), anchor deployment, and person-overboard. Every evening, we sat around the living room table like campers around a firepit and either verbalized or acted out different versions of every scenario.  “The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario, but a mindset that can handle uncertainty” (James Clear, Atomic Habits).

Everything on the ocean is a raw experience, and we will need to be able to field heightened, possibly overwhelming emotions within arm’s length of three teammates and nowhere to run (or hide). The intimidating amount of boxes we sought to check off during this training trip, one of the rare opportunities where the four of us are all together in person, in hand with the volatile winter weather and close quarters proved ideal for fostering environments where we could apply words to feeling and open the windows of our individual experiences to our teammates. One example of this came after our first multi-hour row. After tying up our boat, Sophia, Anna, Anima, and I huddled around the heater in the bathroom of the shipping yard, to decide how to proceed. We had left the dock with one plan in mind – to bank as many hours as possible on the water before the weather turned – yet found that after our first daylit interval, we needed a reset. Some of us were eager to hold tight to the original plan, while others were inclined to go home and get back out the following day. We went around the huddle and performed our team check in. I held my breath before the check in came to me, keeping my words close to my chest at first. I was cold, yes, but eager to continue and unsure how to toe the line of perseverance and reasonability and even more unsure how to articulate that conundrum to my teammates. Part of building trust with a team is taking chances saying what feels hard. While there is laundry list of excuses as to why one shouldn’t share - the idea is not fully developed, you want to avoid conflict, your hardship may burden others, you want to avoid stepping on toes - the best assumption one can make when building trust is that your teammates will give you the benefit of the doubt. From there, you can move towards resolution together. The important thing with emotion is to accept them all, embrace them all, and then choose to do with them what you want. The factors at stake had two understandable vantage points. There was a fear of missing out on opportunities, some ego around persevering through the cold, maybe even the desire to prove we could. On the other hand, we were on day three of ten, and it was imperative to maintain the quality of our work in the coming week. Sleep and rest are non-negotiables for learning, and we could afford to lose sleep and warmth later on in the trip, when it would not cost us so much. Ultimately, we decided to go home, regroup, work on some powerpoint materials, and prepare for the following day with a clear idea of what the conditions demanded of us. Navigating that tension wasn’t enjoyable, but it was a big step in bolstering our confidence in the team as a whole. Voicing differing opinions and strong feelings while in a physically vulnerable position, we were able to chart a path that the whole team could get behind. 

Over the course of the week, we asked a lot of ourselves and each other. We grappled with questions like, “How much do I want to communicate with loved ones during our row?” We juggled those with lighter ones like, “Who wants to do the bit about the calories in the Robert Irwin voiceover?” Much like in everyday life, it’s possible to have four people in the same room all with different emotional states, and part of our training is learning how to allow each person to be present and feel supported amongst the group. 

The wild ocean is full of juxtapositions - days with choppy waves and dark clouds interspersed with favorable winds, wildlife visits and shining sun - and our week in Zurich was no different. After our final row of the week, an outing punctuated by rowing, layers, photos, and a final douse of freezing rain, we readied our boat for the trailer and hurried home to prepare dinner. It was the Wednesday of Thanksgiving week, and we had a lot of thanks to give. Our training trip culminated in a Swiss-American Thanksgiving meal with our Swiss family members and friends gathering around the living room table sharing tales of the week and gratitudes for each other. With our bellies full, for once not with “hot mush”, we did what any team on a mission does and outlined responsibilities for the coming weeks and months as well as necessary tasks for our May training trip. This cold chapter was over, and it was time to keep looking ahead. As Beryl Markham once said, “hope and work, but never hope more than you work.”

As for the latter question, the mullet is a hairstyle that dates back to the ancient traditions of Romans, Indigenous Americans, and Vikings. It was practical, functional, and rugged. The look became re-popularized in the 1980’s and 1990’s when iconic musicians began wearing it as a symbol of rebellion and individualism. I stumbled into it rather accidentally. As autumn came to close, I went a few weeks longer than I usually do without a haircut and found that if the back has a chance to grow, it curls much like the top and sides. When I eventually found time to get my usual trim, I was on the phone with Sophia and explaining this newfound style, short on the sides and a little longer on the top and back. “So like a mullet?” she asked, always curious, never judgmental. “Eh, I don’t think it’s technically a mullet.” I pushed back. We exchanged some photos to exemplify what we were each trying to describe in words, and evidently, it was the same thing, a mullet. Or at least some version of one. So for now, it’s business in the front, party in the back, or as we say on Iron Ore, business in the bow, party in the stern.  

*Traditionally this is called a “jackstay” but is the latest piece of equipment to fall victim to our habit of re-naming boy-name sounding tools to girl-name sounding titles. “Jerrycans”, for example, will be called “Jennycans” from here on out.