Four Mums in a Boat

by Janette Benaddi, Helen Butters, Niki Doeg

  But frankly it was meeting people like Isabella and the spiritual woman during our days out fundraising that made it more bearable. Although some of us were better at meeting and greeting than others. Niki was perhaps the most gifted. ‘I was terrible at it,’ said Frances. ‘The worst fundraisers were the ones that went on all day, because by the end of it I was bored of people asking the same old questions and I wasn’t interested in the answers at all. Niki had endless enthusiasm. She never, ever ran out of enthusiasm for answering questions about the boat. Often, by the end of the day, Helen or Janette and I would be sitting round the corner having a coffee and Niki would still be going, chatting away. If we started at 10 a.m., I would have been completely through with it by four and just desperate to go home. But Niki would be going, “No, there’s at least another £50 out there.” It was admirable.’

  And Helen was always keen to turn a defeat into a victory. When we spent the day at Leeds Rhinos for an open day, we strategically placed Rose next to one of their top rugby players, and as the queue built up for him (we naturally had no one!) Helen took a whole load of photos of people “queuing to meet Rose” and put them on Facebook.’

  In the end, we realised that it was really going to be up to us and our immediate, fantastically supportive families. ‘We paid for ourselves,’ said Janette. ‘We had donations of equipment and some reduced prices, but we did put a lot of money into it personally. We had to pay for all our training, our courses, all our trips everywhere, the ferry for the North Sea, all that kind of stuff. From time to time we were able to pay for big kit purchases using sponsorship, but the majority of it, the day-to-day stuff, the smaller items, we paid for out of our own funding.’

  Of one thing we were absolutely sure: any money that was raised specifically for either of our charities was untouchable. It would, of course, go directly to them. Anything that was collected in our rattling buckets went to them, and anything that was pledged went straight to them. And the other thing we were all adamant about was that one day, eventually, hand on heart, we would all pay Janette back. It was just a matter of when.

  Time was ticking on and we had just over six months to get ourselves fit and ready for the ocean. For some of us it was a little easier than others. Janette is probably the least inclined towards any form of exercise. Given the choice between taking the lift or the stairs, she’s a lift woman if ever there was one.

  ‘I was lent one of those water rowing machines, so I’d sit in front of the telly, watching the news and rowing while Ben was cooking dinner,’ said Janette. ‘The only problem is that those machines are so noisy I could only row on my own, with the subtitles on. Ben used to tell me that he thought I needed to do more training. I used to say I was hard at it. I travel a lot and I’d always pack my swimming costume when I was on a conference, fully intending to do some lengths if there was a pool in the hotel that I was staying at, but honestly I’d never take it out of my suitcase. I also had one of those stretchy bands that you’re supposed to tie to a doorknob. I’d have a glass of wine and think, “I should really do 20 minutes on the band,” and then I’d end up doing emails and staring at the thing. I did have a go at a few Boxercise classes too. I didn’t like them, and I was rubbish. I did them with Helen and she was very hard on me. She kept shouting, “You’re not even sweating, Janette!” I didn’t last long there. In fact, if I’m honest, I did very little physical training at all, until the race got a little closer and I succumbed. I got myself a personal trainer. He came twice a week. God, I wish I hadn’t. I remember thinking, “Why the heck does anyone pay to have someone put them through 20 thousand bloody burpees and a million more bloody jumping jacks?” I did persevere with the trainer, but I have to admit on a few occasions he was cancelled due to some terrible migraine or a chronic cold, or any other pathetic excuse I could conjure up at short notice. I was the skipper and if the rest of the crew knew quite how unfit I was, they probably wouldn’t have got into the boat with me at all!’

  Fortunately, the rest of us were a lot more conscientious.

  Frances was already quite fit before she’d even had three glasses of wine and persuaded us to row an ocean. And she actually enjoys exercising. She used to go to British Military Fitness classes twice a week, mainly because they were just across the road from her office, but she did go for a whole year and didn’t miss a single class. Her favourite thing to do is clip an iPod shuffle to her bra strap and listen to Queen on a long run along the river, but as the prospect of the race drew closer she concentrated on rowing. ‘I stopped going for a run in the end, but I would do my weights – just my weights – probably five times a week, and I did try to do the rowing machine four or five times a week as well. I’d watch TV while I was rowing. I got very obsessed with Lewis, with the sound off, fervently reading the subtitles.’

  Helen worked out constantly. As she was working all the hours the NHS allowed, and the rest of the time she was looking after Henry and Lucy, it was almost impossible for her to find the time to go to a class or take time out of her day to run around the park. So she worked out, all the time: in her kitchen while cooking, while checking homework or doing the ironing – her motto was something along the lines of ‘there’s always time for a quick plank’. So while making the supper she would do sit-ups; while waiting for the kids’ pasta to boil, she’d knock out a few star jumps; at breakfast she’d squat while buttering the toast. And on Sundays she’d throw a quick plank while checking the chicken in the oven. ‘I was multitasking – something mums have done for centuries. If you don’t have time, you make time. It is extraordinary what you can actually fit into a day.’

  Meanwhile, Niki removed herself to the garage. Ever tactful, she wanted to make the training and the courses – such as the RYA Yachtmaster Ocean Theory – impact as little as possible on the family’s lives. So she would do all the admin for the boat if Gareth was out for the evening, and when she needed to train she’d take herself off to the small gym that she’d set up in the garage. ‘I would do it when he wasn’t around, just so that he didn’t think it was taking over my life.’ Although Niki was perhaps a little too successful.

  ‘He kept on saying that I wasn’t doing enough exercise! He was of the mind-set, like a lot of people are, that if you’re going to row the ocean you need to be some superhuman athlete, whereas actually that’s not as important. The key is getting to the start line in the first place, so having to do all the admin to get the money. And the mental side of things is way more important than the physical side. We’d never heard stories of anyone who hadn’t done it because of the physical side. You see loads of people giving up because it’s shit and because mentally it drives you mad, but nobody seems to give up from a physical point of view. Everyone who’d done it had said to us that you don’t have to be superhuman unless you want to go for a real speed record, which was never our aim. So most people ask you, “How’s your weight training?”, “How’s your stroke rate?” Well, you don’t need to do as much of that as you think.’

  With that in mind we stopped going to the rowing club. It was sad, but we had to be ruthless. We had so little time left to prepare for the race, and indeed so little time during the week, that anything that was not going to directly help us was kicked into touch. Any spare moment was better spent on Rose than it was on the river.

  And there was still so much to do.

  Niki organised a behavioural profiling session for us with a friend of hers and Frances’s, Catherine Baker, who runs a training and consultancy company and who had very kindly offered to help mentally prepare us for the challenge.

  The idea was to find out how each of us would react under pressure and how we could get the best out of one another in a moment of crisis. It was a fascinating process, using multiple-choice questions about our feelings in certain day-to-day situations, which would then help us to understand how we would react in more stressful times.

  The results were useful.

  Niki found out that she doesn�
��t like to antagonise people and doesn’t like conflict. She also hankers after freedom from control. She is apparently reliable under pressure, but under extreme pressure she is likely to stick the rules and rebel!

  Helen, on the other hand, had already been Myers-Briggsed to the max. ‘It was not as earth shattering for me as it might have been, as I have been profiled many times before. I know I think on my feet and I always look for a solution to a problem, although it was extremely useful to have a few indicators of how the others would perform under pressure.’

  Frances, somewhat unsurprisingly, doesn’t like being told what to do. If you bark orders at her, all that will happen is she will either refuse to do what you demand or she will retaliate. Her back will firmly go up, and the situation will deteriorate. The best way to deal with her, apparently, is to ask for her help. So don’t bark at Frances; plead with her instead and she’ll be only too delighted to assist! Janette, on the other hand, loves a crisis. Her test results indicated that she was bored, flat-lining and listless without the stress of running her company. She needs a challenge, pressure and lots of decisions to make. She likes to run at 500 miles an hour (metaphorically, obviously), which is why she is so successful. She doesn’t like a safety net and prefers to jump in with two feet rather than one. In short, she was perfect transatlantic material. Why hadn’t she done the thing before?

  Having tested that we were mentally capable, we also underwent a full medical, courtesy of a friend of Niki’s called Maurice. Actually, he was quite insistent that we had one, peppering his sentences with charming phrases such as ‘at your age’ and ‘dropped-down dead’. A heart specialist at Leeds and York hospital, he had us in for the day, putting us through stress tests, ECGs and cardiograms. He kept helpfully citing examples of footballers who’d keeled over on the pitch with undetected health problems. He said that it was better we know now if we had anything wrong with us, rather than 1,500 miles away from Antigua. Helen was worried. She had been diagnosed with a heart murmur when pregnant with Henry and was terrified that she would be prevented from rowing. It would be so disappointing to have got this far, only to be told she wasn’t fit for the challenge. Thankfully, we all passed and went sent letters informing us: ‘Nothing abnormal found. Except their heads need seeing to.’ We’re not sure what the life insurance people made of our letters when they received them.

  But the medical profession are renowned for their warped sense of humour, as the wonderful Dr Caroline so artfully demonstrated when she held a birthday party for Janette at the end of October, only to produce a plate of raw pork chops.

  ‘It was my birthday and Ben was away, so she invited us all over, although only Frances and I could come,’ said Janette. ‘When we arrived the table was laid with a pink pork chop in each place, with a whole load of surgical instruments. All the dressing packs with the gauze swabs were there, and all the material you’d use for suturing. She’d also baked an enormous, amazing chocolate cake and she’d got a bottle of sparkly.’

  Caroline thought we needed to know how to stitch ourselves back up again in the event of an accident. So she taught the two of us how to suture, while we ate cake and drank champagne. She taught us to put the gloves on, which Janette vividly remembered from her nursing days. Frances was a little less enamoured with the task, seeing as it was something else she had to learn to do, and kept on saying that come the time and the injury, she’d leave the stitching down to Janette, as she was a trained nurse and Frances didn’t have the patience.

  As well as learning to put a pork chop back together, Caroline taught us how to administer sub cutaneous fluids. ‘I remember phoning up Helen as I was going home,’ said Janette. ‘I said, “Helen, it’s fine. I’ve got a saline drip and all the stuff from Caroline, so if you’re dehydrated we can just hydrate you back again. All I need to do is put a needle in your stomach!” I don’t think she felt very confident!’

  But Caroline’s generosity did not stop at a chocolate cake worthy of The Great British Bake Off and a packet of pork chops. She also trawled through the medical kits that we were supposed to take with us, deeming them not good enough or fit for purpose, so she proceeded to scrawl off a whole pad of prescriptions, providing detailed instructions on how to use them.

  ‘She looked at the medical kits that the race had put together and said they were “woefully inadequate”,’ remembered Frances. ‘She warned us: “You’re on your own out there, girls.” So we ended up with an enormous shopping list at Boots, which I stuck on our credit card. Our medical kit cost £800. What the guy behind the counter must have thought as he was putting all these drugs together, I don’t know. But Caroline was a hero. She did little index cards, all in wonderful order: this is your pain relief, this is your seasickness, this is your infection stuff, these are your antibiotics. She did little notes for us for everything. She spent hours of her time researching, preparing these notes for us, numbering our painkillers from one to four – from paracetamol to tramadol – depending on how bad the pain was.’

  Her help and patience were invaluable, although how dextrous and adept any of us would be at stitching each other up while being battered by a force-12 hurricane was another point altogether.

  Another vital member of our support team was Paul Cheung, who was our team chiropractor for almost two years, and helped us more than most physically in our preparations. As well as crick-cracking us into shape every two to three weeks, and offering advice, he came to see us off before our North Sea crossing and at La Gomera (where he also treated half the other teams, on the harbour walls next to the boats).

  But we were not leaving everything to science.

  Cue God. Previously, at an event in Leeds, we’d had the celestial good fortune to be placed on the same table as the Reverend Kate Bottley, the delightful, entertaining vicar who wears comedy slippers while sharing her views with the nation on Gogglebox.

  During the event in Leeds she’d asked us quite possibly the rudest question we’d ever been asked: how were we going to pleasure ourselves in such a teeny tiny boat in the middle of Atlantic? We naturally responded by suggesting she might like to come and bless the good ship Rose before our voyage. She was delighted and on a crisp October morning, just after Janette’s birthday, we all turned up in white T-shirts and trainers, accompanied by more friends, family and supporters than you can shake holy water at, for the baptism of Rose.

  The Reverend Bottley arrived, bringing along her pal and fellow vicar Alicia, who did the actual religious honours, splashing a few drops here and there. We gave them both a Yorkshire Rows mug and Alicia named Rose and gave us another St Christopher to add to our burgeoning collection. And Anne, Helen’s mum, cried.

  One of the upsides of gracing the BBC Breakfast sofa was that Talisker invited us up to their distillery on the Isle of Skye to film part of the promotional video for the Atlantic Race Challenge. It was an extraordinary offer. They had chosen us out of all the handsome, youthful, photogenic crews to film on the loch just next to where they made their whisky. We’d seen their films before and were genuinely shocked that they’d asked us. It was two months before the start of the race and it was another great excuse for a weekend of practice rowing on Rose and, of course, an all-girls road trip.

  However, it was after about eight hours on the road up to Skye that we realised just what a long road trip it was. The bends were tight and we were running out of petrol – seriously running out of petrol. We’d tried freewheeling down the hills in order to save fuel and were now really only running on vapour.

  ‘There has to be a petrol station somewhere,’ declared Janette for the eighteenth time, staring out of the window.

  ‘Did you say petrol?’ asked Helen, suddenly waking up. ‘I saw one about five minutes ago, just off the road.’

  ‘That’s so you!’ said Niki, clinging onto the steering wheel fiercely, peering into the darkness. ‘Why don’t you ever speak up?’

  Fortunately, we managed to make it to our destination, a
nd when we arrived at the small B&B where we were staying for the two days of filming, our team bonding improved. Well, it had to – there was only one bathroom for the four of us. And at 6 p.m., Helen took to the pink bath, computer in hand, attempting to do some Yorkshire Rows emails. The first to come and use the loo was Niki, rapidly followed by Janette.

  ‘I think you should all come in!’ announced Helen from the small pink bath. ‘I think you should all come and see me starkers and you all need to be able to go to the toilet in front of me.’

  ‘I have no desire to see your ropy old fanny!’ declared Janette from the loo.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Helen, moving her computer to one side and flashing her boobs. ‘We’ve got to get used to it. When we’re on the boat, we’ll mostly be naked.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ muttered Janette, standing up.

  ‘She’s right,’ agreed Frances, joining the bathroom gang. ‘I think it’s a good thing to do. I think we should go to the toilet in front of each other as much as possible.’

  ‘I’ve just been,’ announced Niki from the next-door bedroom.

  So as well as filming for the Talisker promo, our tacit stated aim for the two-day stay on Skye was sufficient public urination to render us immune to all bodily functions. The result was a lot of laughing and a lot of seeing Helen naked as she monopolised the bath.

  ‘I can’t live without baths!’ she’d declare, leaping in.

  ‘You’re going to have to on the Atlantic,’ Janette would reply.

  Filming the video was hard work. Firstly, we were shown around the Talisker factory and given a history of distilling, along with an extensive tasting session! Secondly, we had to perform out on the loch in the freezing-cold, icy wind for hours. Back and forth they sent us, up and down in the choppy waves. Simon and Ollie, the director and producer, ordered us about while the drone handlers, Stef and Pete, tried to get footage of us rowing through the water from above. The sky was blue and the sun was out but it was still biting cold out there and the temptation to so much as glance up at the drone as it slowly crept past was extremely hard to resist. All we could mumble to ourselves was: ‘Don’t look at the drone, don’t look at the drone,’ as it hovered right in front of our faces.