Living a Life of Adventure: Roz Savage

In 2002, Roz Savage–who was then 34–appeared to have it all:

• A law degree from Oxford;
• A six-bedroom Edwardian house in the fashionable London suburb of Kew;
• Designer clothes;
• A career as a management consultant;
• Fabulous vacations to exotic destinations; and
• She was married to a good man.

Even though she owned everything she thought she wanted, and on the surface it looked like she should be very happy, she wasn’t.  She felt that something was missing.  Roz even had an affair, thinking that maybe the problem was that she wasn’t with the right person, and that another man might be the answer.  It wasn’t: she wasn’t unhappy with her husband, she was unhappy with herself.

At this point she sat down and she wrote two obituaries: a true account of her life to date, and a fantasy one in which she wrote down all of the things she wished she had done with her life.  After looking over the second obituary, she realized that what she wanted was a challenge and an adventure.  If she continued as she was, she was simply not going to end up where she wanted to be in 5 or 10 years, or at the end of her life.

Roz left her job and began to plan what to do next.  Her marriage–which had survived the affair–didn’t survive the changes that Roz was making to her life.  She decided to rent a houseboat in Portsmouth, and then she took on an extreme rowing challenge.  With the money she received from selling her husband her share of their house, Roz bought a racing rowing boat.  Then she signed up for the 2005 Atlantic Rowing Race.

Roz Savage Rows Across the Atlantic

The race, from the Canary Islands to Antigua in the West Indies, was extremely dangerous and grueling. Roz was the only solo competitor, having to row for 12 hours a day in three-hour shifts, grabbing what little sleep she could in the tiny cabin. She rowed through the tail end of a hurricane and faced 30ft waves.

In addition, she broke all four of her oars and had to patch them up as best she could.  Roz explains that she was never the type of person who fixes things, but when you’re alone in the middle of the ocean and you have no other choice but to find a way to patch up your oars, you become extraordinarily resourceful.  Those oars became a symbol of all the ways in which she went beyond what she thought were her limits during her trip.

There were several times along this journey when Roz felt that she had hit the limit of what she was capable of, but she had no choice but to carry on.   The race took her 103 days and she finished last, but she was extremely proud of herself when she finally reached Antigua.  She explains that the bigger the challenge, the bigger the sense of achievement when you get to the end of it.  Her book on her Atlantic voyage is titled Rowing the Atlantic – Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean.

Roz Savage Rows Across the Pacific

Shortly after her successful Atlantic crossing, Roz announced that she would attempt to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean–from the United States to Australia.  She would do this in 3 stages (the Pacific Ocean is huge; it pretty much covers half the planet):

• Stage 1: In the Summer of 2008 she started off from California and rowed to Hawaii.
• Stage 2: She began the second stage of her Pacific journey on May 24, 2009.  Although her intention was to arrive at the island nation of Tuvalu, she had to change course and head for Tarawa. She arrived in Tarawa after 104 days at sea.
• Stage 3: In April of this year, Roz set out from Tarawa on the last leg of her journey.  She’s headed for Australia.

Cumulatively, she will have rowed over 8,000 miles, taken over 3 million oar strokes, and spent over 312 days alone at sea on a 23 ft. rowboat.

Lessons Learned

Here are some of the lessons Roz has learned from her adventure:

1.  It’s all about the stories we tell ourselves. Roz explains in a talk she gave at TED, that for a long time she didn’t believe she could have a grand adventure.  The story she told herself was that adventurers were people who looked very different from her: namely, large, muscular, bearded men.  She simply didn’t look the part.

So she conformed, and she did what people from her type of background were supposed to do, working in an office in London as a management consultant.  Roz explains that she felt from day one that she wasn’t in the right place, but society’s conditioning kept here there for 11 years.

And then she changed the story that she was telling herself, and she began to live the type of life that she wanted.

2.  The accumulation of tiny actions lead to great results.  Start moving toward the life that you want, even if it’s by taking tiny actions.  Little by little those actions begin to add up, until you find yourself moving in the direction of where you truly want to go. With 3 million oar strokes, Roz will have crossed both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.

3.  It’s never too late to begin living a life of adventure. Roz is doing her adventuring in her 40s.  She says she’s glad she’s doing it now, instead of in her 20s, because today she has access to lots of tools that weren’t available then, namely, blogging, twitter, and other social media.

4. Happiness is in the mind. The 17th century English author Roger L’Estrange once said, “It is not the place, nor the condition, but the mind alone that can make anyone happy or miserable.” Roz echoes this same sentiment in the following quote:

“One of the challenges to myself is if I can learn to be happy on a 23-foot rowboat on my own in the middle of an ocean, I think I can learn to be happy pretty much anywhere.” (Source.)

5.  You have to take responsibility and create your own future. When Roz did her obituary exercise and realized that she wasn’t happy with her life, she took action to change things.  No one’s coming to save you or to change things for you: you have to get up and do it yourself.

6. Focus on something bigger than yourself. Roz is using the attention that she’s getting from her rowing to bring awareness to the harm we’re doing to our oceans. In particular, she’s bringing attention to the North Pacific Garbage Patch, a patch in the Central North Pacific Ocean thought to be about the size of the state of Texas, filled with an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash.

(Photo from Wikipedia).

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