Three
weeks ago it was the eve of the start my friends took me for one last
ice cream and I couldn’t figure out if I was nervous or not nervous. I
felt calm, and it felt like I shouldn’t be calm—I felt like I should be
really nervous, that my butterflies should be massive but the reality
was I didn’t even have them. I
asked my boss if I should be nervous. “No, you are prepared. Tomorrow
you should have little butterflies, but that’s it.” And she was right—I
was packed and prepared , there was nothing left to do but go.
BIG
nerves, the kind you lose sleep over, stem from lack of
preparedness—boxes left unchecked and lists unfinished. But as a team
we had checked all the boxes, weighed all the bags, and looked at
everything twice. We were ready we just had to go. We reached the
point of needing to go because there had been so much build up, so much
hype, so much talk about leaving, that we just needed to go race. We
didn’t need that figurative “one more day.” We just needed October 11.
Twenty
days ago, the idea of being at sea for twenty days was a bit daunting.
Twenty days without a shower, twenty days without a run, twenty days
with only a few changes of clothes. Twenty days without ice cream,
steak, nor spinach.
“Here
we are twenty days into it. On day 3 it was really like holy cow, we
still have a long way to go, but now it’s 20 days. It helps really being
in the moment, one day at a time,” Sally said.
Sally
is right. Out here, it really is one day at a time. It’s one “sked”
(aka position report) at a time. It’s sailing with the conditions you
have, and doing the ultimate best with them. It’s not thinking about day
26 and preparing the sails and boat for day 26 because then you’ll be
slow. Our here, you have to deal with today.
In
the next few days, the race could become anyone’s race again. We could
get handed some luck (finally) with the wind Gods. The boats in front
could not catch on to the Low pressure in the Southern Ocean they are
hoping for. The ice gates race control has put into place could change
the whole race in the last five days. We are not kidding when we say:
it still is anyone’s race.
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