“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
The time is finally here that we are getting ready to leave the UK, and were just round the corner from race start begining at 7am on Sunday 20th.
Since signing up for the race in November 2014, it has been my main focus and driver. All my decisions and actions have been centred around it, even down to my eating habits (in theory… I like cake). Its an odd feeling knowing that in a few short months the whole experience will be over, but I know it will be something that stays with me.
I’m emotional about that as the race journey has been wrapped up a lot in my back surgery and recovery – after the surgery there were 5 or 6 months where I was utterly miserable, and couldn’t see how I could ever get better entirely. I was too sore, too achey, too heavily restricted in my movements, too stiff – walking up stairs and being comfortable in bed were difficult, how was I possibly going to get back to a position where I could be active and do something challenging again? I thought my life wouldn’t be able to be the way I wanted it to be, because my body was letting me down.
The Clipper Race set that goal for me. From seeing the poster on the tube, to searching online to find out a bit more, to going down to Portsmouth for the interview and to tour the boat, I started to imagine myself fitter and stronger, imagined myself on the boat sailing with a group of friends, imagined being in the middle of the sea. I wanted to do it, so I was ready to work for it. And once I’d committed, that was it; no going back. From that day in Portsmouth I was in. I’d never sailed before so I didn’t even know if I would like it, which seems a bit mad in hindsight, but I wonder if I was just desperate to focus on something and work towards recovering, almost like a bet with myself – can you do it? The Clipper team didn’t see it as something that would hold me back, so neither did I. It was more about an attitude. Maybe it could have been anything that sparked the drive for me and it was all just a case of timing, but I’m glad it was this.
I started putting money away whenever I could, got better at not spending money on rubbish. If it was a choice between buying X and the boat, the boat won. I’ve had an ‘aggressive’ savings plan for the last 3 years, becoming a little trickier when I decided to leave London and work 6 days a week over 3 jobs in Essex, but it all works out in the end if you want something enough.
And now here we are, just round the corner from race depart and it is suddenly very real. For so long, it has been something very far away in the distance, and in all honesty, something that for a period of time I wasn’t sure I’d be able to ever recover enough for. But then it got closer, I got stronger, my body started to feel like mine again. I’ve met amazing people, heard wonderful stories and shared brilliant experiences through the 4 levels of training. Its the whole journey not just the race that I will miss.
Its a weird thing to go through – committing such a lot of your life to something that at times can actually be quite torturous (!) – but as a friend said to me this week, it will be an extraordinary experience that I will never forget, and that no one can ever take away.
fransbigsail 