In the summer of 2022, four women, Sophia Denison-Johnston, Brooke Downes, Libby Costello and Adrienne Smith, set a new record for the fastest all female team to row from San Francisco to Hawaii. They completed the journey in 34 days, 14 hours and 20 minutes.
In the summer of 2022, four women, Sophia Denison-Johnston, Brooke Downes, Libby Costello and Adrienne Smith, set a new record for the fastest all female team to row from San Francisco to Hawaii. They completed the journey in 34 days, 14 hours and 20 minutes.
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Adrienne Smith:
My name is Adrienne Smith.
Sophia Denison-Johnston:
My name is Sophia Denison-Johnston.
Libby Costello:
My name is Libby Costello.
Brooke Downes:
My name is Brooke Downes.
Adrienne Smith:
I was part of the four women team.
Sophia Denison-Johnston:
The Lat 35 team that...
Libby Costello:
... rowed from California to Hawaii this past summer.
Brooke Downes:
And we broke a world record as the fastest women's team to do the crossing.
Shelby Stanger:
In the summer of 2022, four women set a new record for the fastest all female team to row from San Francisco to Hawaii. Sophia Denison-Johnston, Brooke Downes, Libby Costello and Adrienne Smith completed the journey in 34 days, 14 hours and 11 minutes. Their boat was four feet wide and 28 feet long. For over a month, they slept in 90 minute increments, ate rehydrated meals out of a bag and even went to the bathroom in a plastic bucket.
Libby Costello:
We would just talk about it for hours how we had this luxurious two bedroom, one and a half bath seaside view. When it was really crazy at night, we would pee in the dagger board hole because at that point we were rowing in the most bow section, and we didn't want to go all the way up to the stern to go to the bathroom. It was just too much, too much. So then we would just pee behind each other, and it was very close quarters, and then we'd just rinse it out in the morning.
Shelby Stanger:
The reality was these women were not living in a luxury apartment. The boat looked like a big inflatable raft combined with a rocket ship. The front and back of the boat each had a small cabin, more like a crawl space where one person would sleep at a time. When they weren't in the cabins, the women were in the open air, completely exposed to the elements. They had some solar power, a satellite phone, and enough food for a couple of months, but for the most part it was just them and their oars rowing to Hawaii as fast as possible. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI's Co-op Studio's Production.
Rowing from San Francisco to Hawaii is a wild adventure, and to be honest, it's one that had never even crossed these women's minds. The idea came from rower and author Jason Caldwell. Jason owns a leadership development and adventure racing company called Lat 35, and he wanted to help assemble a team to break the women's record for a Pacific Ocean crossing. He asked Sophia Denison-Johnston, who just returned from Olympic trials, if she was interested in being the first member of the team. She said yes and immediately started looking for other rowers to join her. Here's Sophia.
Sophia Denison-Johnston:
The first person that came to mind was Libby. Libby and I rowed together in college, and if you know Libby, you know that she's just one of the most genuine and kind people there is. She's probably more comfortable running 50 miles than she is going throughout her normal day. She's a total workhorse. She is very strong. She's very determined, and she's mentally very tough. I knew that she would be a fiercely loyal teammate, but also that her body would be up to the challenge. So I just showed her what ocean rowing was, a video of it, and she just turned to me and she was like, "When do we start training?" I was like, great. Okay, Libby's on. So we've got one. Really, Brooke and Adrienne found us more than we found them. Brooke and Libby had been in high school together and rowed together, and they were just catching up one weekend and Libby told Brooke about the project that we were doing. And at the time, Brooke was not interested, but over time she just couldn't put it out of her mind.
The story that she tells is, "I asked myself the question, a year from now, I could be sitting at home watching Libby finish or I could be on the boat finishing with her, and I'd rather do the second one." And then it was a long process. I was basically scouring the internet, walking into the sailing club here in Santa Barbara and being like, "Are any women here interested in doing this crazy thing?" And most of the people that found our team at some point came to the realization that they were not prepared to make the sacrifices necessary.
Shelby Stanger:
Brooke, Sophia and Libby had all rowed in college, and Brooke and Sophia had also competed at an international level. Even though they were used to intense training, preparing for the crossing and continuing to hunt for their fourth teammate was like taking on another full-time job. There were tons of certifications, safety protocols and details about the boat that they had to learn. If something went wrong in the middle of the ocean, they needed to know how to fix it. A few months into their training, Sophia, Brooke and Libby started working with another Jason, a coach named Jason Smith, who specialized in endurance sports training. Smith realized that he actually knew the perfect person to complete their team: his wife Adrienne. Adrienne is a natural athlete. She's a yoga instructor and an Ironman champion. The only caveat was that she had never rowed before. Here's Sophia again.
Sophia Denison-Johnston:
A lot of people were concerned that Adrienne didn't know how to row before joining this team, but I think the mechanics of the rowing stroke are not supremely complicated, and beyond that - almost the hardest part about this journey was not the rowing, it was like everything that you're doing when you're not rowing. It's knowing how to navigate, managing the seasickness, taking care of yourself when you're alone at sea. And so I think we had plenty of time and training for Adrienne to learn how to row, but she's an athlete. She's a professional Ironman triathlete. We were not concerned about her learning that one skill because there's also 30 other skills that we all had to learn, we were all new to, so it was like a drop in the bucket. It's really interesting because you go through this process of thinking what are the mental skills that are necessary to be successful here?
And when you start, you think that, okay, the mental skills for someone doing something this crazy is a high fear tolerance or the ability to be in pain and just suck it up and keep going. But the more we trained, I think the more we realized that maybe the biggest skills mentally that we were going to need to practice and learn was the communication with each other and just the perspective positivity because when you're out there, whether or not you keep going isn't really the question. The only way is through. So it's not so much I'm going to be pulling so hard and my muscles are burning, but I'm going to keep going, it's like we're all athletes. That's something that we've been training for our whole lives. But what about living on a 29-foot boat for a month with only three other people? And so I think a lot of the mental preparation was actually about building trust and love between us.
Shelby Stanger:
Imagine eating, sleeping and rowing in close quarters for over a month. The team hardly had any time to be alone or talk to loved ones, and obviously there were no mental health walks in the middle of the ocean. No matter what they were going through, the team just had to keep rowing. Before the women left for their trip, they strategized about how to stay resilient during the row. They thought about what they would do when things went awry and came up with a mission statement. Mission statements can often seem like empty words that companies tuck away on websites or in employee handbooks, but the team came up with a statement that would play a bigger role than any of them realized. Here's Brooke.
Brooke Downes:
Our mission statement was to elevate each other's greatness and get to Hawaii as fast as possible. It's really useful because when you're making any decision big or small, sometimes you'll all be in agreement on what should be done, but sometimes you might be pretty split on it, and it kind of just took the emotions out of the decisions. Especially because when you're in the middle of the ocean, no matter how bad you want a world record or how bad you want to get to Hawaii, when you're that tired and exhausted and frustrated, it's a lot easier to fall into picking the easier route. And so it was just a really good reminder to have out there. And it was also something that all of us drafted together, and we all agreed on it. So one of the first times that we all met in person, we had each individually drafted a list of our personal values and our goals for the row, both personally and as a team.
And then we came together and shared them all. And then from there we drafted our mission statement, and we looked back on it, not just during the crossing, but also in decisions we had to make in our preparation as well. The "elevate each other's greatness" was almost more important to us than getting to Hawaii as fast as possible. We understood that this crossing is very challenging physically, emotionally, mentally, and that supporting each other was going to be the thing that was going to get us to Hawaii. Just from the stories we've heard from other teams out there, you can really want to just crawl into your own shell and just really protect yourself, but you need the other women on the boat just as much as you need yourself out there. Nobody is getting to Hawaii without your teammates.
And so we really wanted to make sure that we were doing everything that we could for each other. We understood that people were going to have bad days and bad moments. We really wanted to create an environment that was really accepting and open so that we had the opportunity to be really transparent and honest about how we were feeling so that our teammates could help us, which was another big thing for us out there.
Shelby Stanger:
The team used this mission statement a lot before they left as they scheduled training trips around work and family or divvied up preparations. Once the women got out on the ocean in June of 2022, their mission statement became even more important. On their second night, the team had lost sight of land. They were seasick and horribly sleep deprived. On top of all of that, they were hit with their first storm.
Brooke Downes:
The conditions started to get really big, which is common for the first couple hundred miles of the row. And we were looking at the little screen that was telling us our speed and our course, and it was just dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping to the point where we were going 0.1 knots, which is very slow. And we looked back at our mission statement and knew that every decision we made had to align with that mission.
Libby Costello:
We were far enough out from the coast where we were in the most open ocean that we had been in yet, and there was this storm that was coming kind of as the sun was setting, and we could definitely feel that it was harder to keep the course. We have a screen on the stern that tells us our degrees basically as if there was a circle and where we're going. And so our weather lady called us and she was like, "Listen, you need to keep your degrees above 180 because if you go too far south, then you get pushed into some other currents that will kind of take you more towards Mexico as opposed to Hawaii." And so we were finding it really tough to stay above 180 degrees, and it was getting dark and we left on a new moon. It's the darkest we have ever seen, and our land team calls us and they're like, "Hey, we think you guys should throw out the para anchor and just wait out this storm."
And I was like, I actually think that we can get through this storm. We just have to row really hard and trust ourselves. And so we called another guy on our land team and he's like, "Well, from a safety perspective, I can't tell you not to throw out your anchor if you think that's the best thing for you to do." So I was like, okay, cool. Two for two say throw out the anchor. So we call our weather router, Dawn, and she was like, "You guys want to get to Hawaii as fast as possible, right?" And we were like, "Yeah." And she was like, "Okay, well, you're going to row two up as hard as you can for as long as you can, and if you can't stay above 180 degrees, then you're going to put the third seat in and you're going to row three up."
And she's like, "And you're going to do that for as long as you can for as hard as you can. And if that doesn't work, then you can consider throwing out the anchor." And I was like, "Okay, I love you, Dawn. Thank you so much. We're going to go with that one." So we hung up the phone and we call it the night of manic rowing. It was so extreme, and the only way that I can describe it is if you're riding a mechanical bull on the top of a high dive blindfolded with buckets of water being thrown at you all night long. And I remember, I don't know, I knew that we had just launched, and I felt like it was going to be a really tone-setting decision. And I was like, if these are the conditions that merit it throwing out an anchor, then we're going to be throwing out the anchor at least once a week. And I just don't think that we need to do that.
We each emerged for our respective morning shifts the next day. Then the weather had calmed down and the storm had passed, and it was just like, whoa, we can do this. It was just a huge confidence boost, and it was this incredible feeling of we are more ready than we believed that we were or knew that we were. And I think it was also just reinforcing the lesson of don't let other people set your ceiling for you. You have to decide what you're capable of. Nobody else can do it. We made the best decision for us on that day, and it really proved to be beneficial for just our mindset and our confidence. And then after that we were like, that was actually kind of fun. We hope that we get to have more waves like that. And it was pretty incredible.
Shelby Stanger:
Pushing through the storm so early on in the trip was harrowing, but it also helped the team find their footing. That second night set the standard for how they would deal with the challenges for the rest of their journey. When we come back, Libby tells us more about what it was like to be out on the ocean for over a month and Adrienne shares her experience reaching the finish line and breaking the world record.
In summer of 2022, Sophia Denison-Johnston, Brooke Downes, Libby Costello and Adrienne Smith became the fastest all-female team to row from San Francisco to Hawaii. While they were out on the ocean, the team was pushed to their limits physically and mentally. They wore a lot of sunscreen and got very used to being pelted by wind and rain. They managed sea sickness and sleep deprivation and dealt with feelings of isolation and boredom. On the other side of those obstacles though, each member of the team found beautiful moments of introspection and revelation. Here's Libby.
Libby Costello:
Day 26 was a pretty interesting one because for most of the row, we would row between 70 and 75 miles a day. Our weather router would call us at 6:00 AM every morning, I think, and she'd be like, "Okay, here's how many miles you rode in the last 24 hours from 6:00 AM to 6:00 AM, and here's the progress towards Hawaii and here's your weather outlook, what to expect in the next day, and how to direct our course in the most efficient way." And so in my head I was like, I think we can do an 80 mile day because we were inching closer to it. We were like did 76 miles, 77 miles. And based on just mental math, I was like, okay, if we want to row 80 miles in this 24 hours, we have to keep about, I think it was 3.4, 3.5 miles an hour, our average speed.
And for the whole day, all of my shifts, I'm seeing 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, it was 3.5. Everything was kind of pointing to the direction that, yes, we're going to hit this 80 mile day, which felt somehow arbitrarily significant because I was like, it's just the next set of 10. So we get our weather report on day 26, and we did 78 miles, and I was bummed all day. I had been like, we're going to hit it. We're on track for 80 miles. But it was because it was so windy, the actual net miles that we rowed was 78, and that was the furthest that we had rowed in one day. But I was disappointed because it wasn't 80. And so we started to have this really interesting chat about being goal oriented versus being process oriented. And so I went back into the cabin, and I was stewing a little bit because historically I'm a pretty goal-oriented person.
I find it, not easier isn't the right word, but it makes a lot of sense in my mind to have a goal because it informs the process. And the last 10, 15 years of my life, I've definitely put a lot of weight in the process itself. But I like to have a direction. It feels more manageable for me, and it makes a lot of sense in my mind. And I'm sitting in the cabin, and I'm just kind of thinking about the 80 miles and the feeling upset even though it was the furthest that we had rowed and sort of conflicted. And I was like, man, maybe I should be a more process oriented person.
And it's interesting because in this day and age, you're always advertised to improve yourself in some way, to change yourself in some way, to be more of this, more of that, less of that, do this instead. And after having done so much work personally as an individual and then collectively as a team, I was hesitant to want to change another thing about myself. So in the next shift, I come out and Adrienne's making lunch, Brooke's rowing. I started rowing my shifts with Brooke, and I'm just being kind of quiet and I can hear them talking on the deck. And Brooke looks back and she was like, "Lib, you're more quiet than usual. Are you okay? What's going on?" And I just started crying.
And I was just like I like that I'm a goal-oriented person. I like it so much. I actually like a lot about myself, and I had never really been able to say that that I liked all of me and that a lot of my characteristics are the things that I hold really dear, and I'm tired of trying to change that or mold it in some way. It was just this big personal breakthrough. It was really amazing. And then for her to ask and then to be able to share that moment was really sweet. It was like this moment of just complete self-acceptance as if we had been working towards that the whole time.
Brooke Downes:
Hello everybody. Hi. It's day 28. Day 28, and we are about 480 miles from the finish line, and we will see you in Hawaii soon. Yay, can't wait to celebrate with you.
Shelby Stanger:
As the days of their trip wore on, the team's routine became monotonous. It was a cycle of two hours of rowing, two hours of sleep or cooking or laundry or water pumping. They would also use their time off the oars for a daily call with their land team who gave them weather and navigation updates. Mostly though, they rowed. Brooke and Sophia alternated in the stern seat, and Libby and Adrienne traded off in the bow. The women saw surprisingly little wildlife, no sharks, a handful of whales and many beautiful birds. For most of their journey, it was just them and the sea. Finally, on their 33rd day, the team spotted land for the first time. What at first looked like another cloud bank quickly became the Hawaiian Islands. This is Adrienne.
Adrienne Smith:
Seeing land was cool, but it also was... We still had a long way to go to get to O'ahu, and we showed on social media that we were very joyful. But when I reflect on a lot of moments on the boat, it was a lot of conversations in my own head and also out loud of how much longer is this going to take? How many hours, how many shifts I'm calculating? I miss my daughter. I would watch videos of her from when she was a little girl and just sit in my cabin and cry, why did I do this? Why did I leave a life that I love and I'm doing this? It's so stupid, it's so monotonous. And, yes, there's those moments of, oh, we're inspiring a whole group of people and we're doing something epic, but the monotony of the day was not lost on any of us.
And so very early on, I wanted that to be done, for those days to go quicker than they were going. And as we got closer, we knew, we're like, okay, this is about how much longer. And when those numbers got down to the forties and the thirties and we're going to be there today, it started to get so insanely real with the fact that we've been on this boat not having to care about anything else other than ourselves for this long. And then we're going to shift gears and go back into the throes of life, which I don't think anyone prepared us for. They didn't give us a window into how to handle that. But as we got closer to O'ahu, you get to this point at Diamond Head where it's still three miles from that point until we get to the dock, and we can tell that there's some boats that are for us, not just boats going on a little sailing trip. All of a sudden I hear a little voice in the distance, and it's my daughter.
And I just remember, I didn't know which direction was which as I'm turning around. The seats on the boat are low, so I can't see over the bow cabin if there's a boat back that way. But I heard her voice and she said, "Hi, mommy." And it was so loud, so clear, and my whole body filled with chills just knowing that all of that was... It was all worth it. She's okay. I'm okay. And then those next, whatever it was, three miles that we had to row to get to the dock, that was terrible because it was just like, oh, I get to see you. We get to see all of our people and we're waving and taking pictures, and then we still have to go those last three miles. But the adrenaline that was available because we were almost done, was... People talk about superpower strength that you get, but it's interesting to witness how strong -
We were rowing. We were listening to Kelly Clarkson and Justin Bieber those last couple miles in and just so pumped. And as we were coming in through the finish, we followed one boat that was pretty far away from us, but he was just showing us where to go. It was beautiful. It was sunset. There was a break wall with people holding signs just cheering for us. And then as we turned the corner to get into our actual row where our slip was, there was a rainbow that's end is right behind where we're docking our boat, and there's what seemed like hundreds of people that were there waiting for us.
And it was interesting because I have this video where we're coming in, and it was interesting because in the video it was really quiet, and my memory of it was that it was just like "aaahh" - all this energy inside and loudness, but that's not actually what it was. It was like people were waiting in sort of that moment of when do they start cheering? And in the video I kind of go off to the side of the boat and I say something like, "Hello." And then everyone cheers.
It was sort of like they were waiting for us to say something in a way like we've made it, and we had to adhere to some of the world record policies when we docked so we couldn't touch land yet. They had to check their watch, take a couple pictures of us, make sure that they got all this stuff correct for the Guinness Book of World Records. And then we take a couple pictures, group hug and emotional tears with the girls, and we step off the boat. All of us kind of rock a little bit because we're standing on solid ground for the first time in a long time, and people don't remember that. Yes, we were moving our bodies rowing, but we were sitting. And so the impact on our bones that our structure is able to hold us wasn't something that we were doing for the last 35 days.
Shelby Stanger:
Ironically, it took a minute for these powerhouse athletes to regain their endurance in standing and walking. After their record breaking arrival in Hawaii some of the team stayed on the island for a few weeks and some went home. Brooke, Sophia, Libby and Adrienne have stayed close touch with each other, but for each of them, the transition back into everyday life was an adjustment. Completing a big adventure or a wild idea can lead to some high highs, but also some pretty low lows.
Brooke Downes:
I really miss being out in the middle of the ocean. It's been like an emotional rollercoaster. When I first got back to the mainland, I really did feel the post adventure blues. I also dropped everything to do this row. I moved out of my apartment, moved across the country, I left the training center, left training for the Olympics to do this, and so I came back to a place that I only knew ocean rowing. The only people I knew here were my teammates and my coach. I think that definitely played a pretty big role into the transition process being a little bit bumpier for me. But I did actually get hired to work for the Great Pacific Race, and then I also got hired to work for Lat 35, and now I've been getting back into training full time, and that's been much better. So now I'm doing great.
Adrienne Smith:
I had taken off of work formally until August 14th, so that was a full two solid months off. And I got back and I was like, I'm not ready. And I noticed that I didn't want to go back to my studio. There was this feeling of this whole time for so long planning for this adventure. My whole focus was on it. All the conversations were about it, and now we did it. And I was a couple days from getting back to land, and I realized that I was really scared to go back to life and scared that my life was going to be the same.
But what I did do was I started to look at what I wanted to be spending my time on, and based on our team, we started out at the beginning creating a mission statement and values. And so I did that for myself and I did it for my business, and I started sharing it with my staff and making that be the cornerstone of what we were creating. And then it's funny, I did my own personal core values and then I pulled them up yesterday and I was like, that doesn't seem right anymore. I've got to redo those.
Sophia Denison-Johnston:
I actually had a really, really big crash after Olympic trials. So right around when I decided to sign up for this was when I kind of had my biggest post-event depression. And it wasn't until I actually listened to a podcast about addiction that I realized, oh, this is withdrawal. Because addiction works with dopamine, and my version of that was training, being competitive. So I knew that going into this experience with the ocean row, I was fixing myself up for a very similar crash. So a big part of my preparation was creating a life that was going to receive me after this row. For me, coming back, it was mostly just like I was exhausted and my nervous system was totally shot, but in terms of the emotional low, I didn't get nearly as low as I had before, so I was really proud of that.
Libby Costello:
It's easy to think back to the great parts of the row and kind of long for it, but I'm trying to not so much long for the past anymore. I've done that in a number of different transitional periods so far. The row was never going to be an everlasting thing or a lifestyle, but there were a lot of elements of it that were exactly what I needed at the time. I put a lot of energy and passion into this project, which was the row and in other areas of my life. If I were to put it there, then what could some of the outcomes be? I came back and I threw a lot of darts at the board, and I'm just sort of now seeing what sticks and which of those I want to keep pursuing.
Shelby Stanger:
Libby, Sophia, Brooke, and Adrienne achieved something incredible. Spending over a month at sea rowing 2,400 nautical miles to break a world record. Since they've been back, the team has been applying what they learned out on the water to their lives back on land: examining and living by their core values, creating a life that they're excited to come back to and applying the same dedication to new adventures.
Thank you so much to Libby, Sophia, Brooke, and Adrienne for sharing your stories with the Wild Ideas Worth Living Team. There is nothing more inspiring to me than badass women doing incredible things. If you want to find out more about the team's row, watch videos and see pictures, you can head to their Instagram @Lat35racing. That's Lat 35 Racing. We'd also like to thank the Great Pacific Race and Lat 35 for letting us use their audio for this episode.
This is the first episode our team fully recorded without me, and I thought it was awesome. Thank you to my team, Sylvia Thomas, Annie Fassler, for doing the interviews to get this amazing piece. I want to know what you all think. Please write a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to this show.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. And our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. Before I sign off, don't forget, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.