In June, four women set out to row from San Francisco to Honolulu in the Great Pacific Race. Libby Costello, Adrienne Smith, Sophia Denison-Johnston and Brooke Downes made the 2,400-nautical-mile trip in record time: 34 days, 14 hours and 11 minutes, smashing the previous record by 24 hours. Sophia Denison-Johnston spoke about the journey with “LA Times Today” host Lisa McRee.

All four women had experience with flat-water rowing but had a lot of training to do to traverse an ocean. Denison-Johnston spoke about their preparation.

“The rowing part we knew how to do. But living on a boat for a month we didn’t know how to do. Navigating the ocean, we didn’t know how to do. There’s a lot of learning. We actually had a coach from the UK come teach us about the boat so we could safely run training trips by ourselves out on the open ocean. And then there was the mental training and communication process that we had with each other,” she explained.

Every woman had a job. Denison-Johnston was the skipper and trained to be the medic. She said the direst thing to watch out for on the trip were skin injuries, sun exposure and dehydration. Each teammate ate 5,000 calories a day.

“We packed about a million calories onto the boat and most of it was freeze-dried food. So, we had four full meals a day and then we also had snack boxes. We just loaded up gallon size Ziplocs of pantry staples,” Denison-Johnston said.

The women traveled about 70 miles each day. They would row in pairs while the other two women rested. The crew did communication training and took personality quizzes to minimize conflict on the boat. Denison-Johnston said they became close throughout the journey, and it was hard to say goodbye.

“We all come from really different backgrounds, and we were going to return to different lives and different places. It was kind of a bittersweet moment of we’d been looking forward to getting on to land so much. Even now that we’re back, we’ll talk to each other and say that life was easier on the boat. We didn’t have to deal with all these other people; it was just us. And there was so much love, and we felt so safe,” she said.

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