Welcome - To the World Record Row blog

Current Location – Tegucigalpa, Honduras

20249 km rowed… 19826 km remaining

Courtesy of the lovely guys and girls at The Escape we’ve got a cool new banner up by the rower – I know I’m going to be mocked for saying this but it was a very exciting morning as a result… please remember that I don’t get out much and I stare at Primark for seven hours a day!

So, without further ado….

Graham and I do a little adjusting – still wonky methinks… so totally Graham’s fault and not mine.

With Craig and Jacqui from The Escape – both lovely and much less hairy to cuddle than Martin the Gorilla.

And back again to the rowing plod…just got to remember to pull the handle next time!

If you get the chance, there should be an interview on BBC South Today on Saturday 25th on the row – I’ll pop a link up as soon as it’s available. Once again thank you to everyone for all your continued and wonderful support – it keeps me going more than you know x

Current Location – Guatemala City, Guatemala

20,062 km rowed… 20,013 km remaining

At last… we’re halfway through the challenge! After 10 weeks of virtual rowing through Mexico, I’ve just arrived in Guatemala… the difficulty being the closer we get to sunny South America, the more winter sets in in Basingstoke! It’s a great feeling knowing it’s downhill from here on in. Met the lovely Molly Forbes from Heart FM today for the second time during the row - many thanks to Harvey, Dan, Ben and Carl for staying by me to be interviewed. You can listen to the first interview with Molly here – the next interview should hopefully go live on The Breakfast Show this Wednesday.

Just a few days ago I met up with a lovely chap called Martin in town – next Saturday he’ll run 7km in London in The Great Gorilla Run  but stopped by the rower on a training run for a quick cuddle. You can follow his progress on twitter.  

And here Martin is again in his full glory…

I’ve had a bit of a funny rowing month because of work but I’m clinging on to the world leader board in terms of kilometres rowed in a season by the skin of my teeth. If I can keep the average over 16,540 km for the season, we should have a another world record by the end of April next year.

My third record attempt will start next Monday as I attempt to row 1000km in ten days and set a fastest million metre row for my age and weight category. I’ve not rowed further than 87km in a day (and then had two weeks off through sore buttocks!) so I’m a bit twitchy but hope it will be good training for the longest continual rowing record that James and I will attempt together in early November.

A huge thank you to Kevin, Paula, Steven, Bex, Sal, James and Cogz for all sponsoring the challenge through the justgiving page  (we’re now  up to a fantastic £10,200 for Breakthrough) and as always to Sam and Faye for wonderful donations of chocolate and fig rolls x

Finally, and I know he’s going to give me such a thrashing for putting this up, but I found a picture of Graham (the security supervisor who’s become a bit of a celeb with the young chaps and ladies who follow the row in town) and had to show it to the world. I can’t even describe how hard it is to get him to be in a picture, let alone wearing an elf hat, but here he is in all his magnificence… the big softie.

Current location – Palerique, Mexico

19331 km rowed… 20744 km remaining

Brilliant donations in the last few days have seen the money raised for Breakthrough just tip over the £10,000 which is marvellous. Had a mini panic at one point as we stuck on £9,999 – however I managed to scrabble together another 14 five penny pieces from around the house to complete a £5 bag and we were in business!

I was very lucky to meet the lovely people of the Basingstoke Writer’s Circle last Tuesday - Bruce, a good friend of mine, is working on a documentary for the rowing challenge and got in contact with Joan and the guys to see if they would write some poetry for the project. It was a fantasic evening and the poems they had been working on were superb, even giving the impression that I knew what I was doing, which I found hysterical but loved them for it. Here’s a photo of them just below and I’m hoping I can put their poems on the blog very soon.

I’m now hopefully just over two weeks away from the half way point of the challenge. The support from everyone is, as always, just brilliant but my limbs have just felt a bit heavy over the last few weeks and I think psycologically it will make such a huge difference to get to that half way marker – downhill all the way to the finish at the end of next year!

Huge thank you to John for making me a brilliant new seat pad for the rower – nicknamed by John as the ‘Crevice Cushion Deluxe’. Unfortunately he had some last minute testing issues and on discovering that there were no vent holes into the gortex cover when the seat took John’s weight, the escaping air had no-where to go and opened one of the seams down the side. With 20km remaining last Saturday, I did exactly the same – my hefty buttocks slapped down so heavily that the whoopy cushion effect and resulting release of air  nearly blew out half of Primark. I also had nearly two hours of very paranoid rowing after John convinced me that I’d spent a year and three months with my seat the wrong way round! Bless him for sparing my blushes by checking it out when he got back home to assure me it was okay .

A huge thank you too to Susan and Joost for donating via the justgiving page and Sam and Faye for their continued chocolate and fig roll support x