19-25 Sep

There seems to be one aspect of this race that many people get a little fixated with - the fact that we’ll be rowing naked. I’ve generally taken the approach that people just don’t want to know and hence kept quiet about it, but with James Cracknell admitting to it in the national press, suddenly it’s a hot topic of conversation.

So, for the record, yes - I will be rowing naked. This isn’t just because I want an all over tan, but for practical reasons. Any clothes you wear get wet and salty, and then they get crusty, and then they chafe. And there are bits of me I don’t want to chafe! So naturism and lots of suncream is the way forward - I tried it out whilst I was in the Mediterranean (being careful not to get too close to passing pleasure yachts) and it worked just fine. Our seats are very wide and cushioned, so there’s no chance of an accident with the slide mechanism, and it’s generally perfectly comfortable once you get over the awkwardness with the other guy in the boat. I’m afraid I don’t have any appropriate photos to accompany this paragraph (and I wouldn’t publish them if I did!) so you’ll have to make do with the photo that we had in City A.M. this Friday.

I will take a few clothes though. Conditions in the tropics, even in winter, mean that getting cold is unlikely to be a problem during the day, but at night I may wear a thin shirt to keep any wind chill off. If it’s really sunny I might wear it during part of the day as well to avoid sunburn. And I’ll be wearing a hat with a wide brim during the day as well - with my colouring I can easily get heatstroke in an English summer, let alone in tropical heat with no shelter! Plus we’ll have waterproofs for stormy conditions, and immersion suits just in case the worst happens and we need to abandon ship to the liferaft.

Another frequent question is about what we’re going to eat. The race rules require you to be entirely self-sufficient, so we have to take all our food with us. Obviously this means we can take nothing fresh, and freeze dried meals will be the order of the day. These are basically just glorified Pot Noodle - you boil water (on a small gas stove fitted in the boat) and add it to a sachet of food, leave it for 10 minutes to rehydrate and you’ve got a meal. The quality of these foods varies immensely by brand, but the US product we’re taking is actually amazingly nice and perfectly edible.

On top of 2 or 3 of those per day, we’ll be drinking sports drink and eating lots of snacks. We’re aiming at 6000 calories per day, which is an awful lot to get through, and so we’ll pretty much be eating the whole time. I had a session with Ellen MacArthur’s nutritionist on Saturday, formulating a plan for how we’re actually going to consume that much, and the types of foods we should be eating. We now have the bare bones of a strategy, and hopefully by thinking of all aspects of the race like this, this will be another way that we can get a competitive advantage. The nutritionist was certainly very useful, and we have another session planned for a couple of weeks time to pick her brains some more! One thing she did say was that I had to get used to eating more food - so apologies to everybody on my team at work, but I’m going to be upping my food intake again!