Brentwood man survives rowing 3,000 miles across Atlantic

For 45 days, nine hours and 21 minutes, Phil Theodore lived on a 23-foot-long and 6-foot-wide boat in the Atlantic Ocean.

He wasn’t just living, though, he was rowing 12 hours a day — fighting for survival.

“It’s a mind-bending experience,” Theodore said. “You question and you think, ‘My god what have I put myself into?’”

On Dec. 20, Theodore and his rowing teammate, 29-year-old Daley Ervin, set off from La Gomera, Spain, to take part in the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge. Known as "The World's Toughest Row," more people have climbed Mount Everest and been into space than have rowed across the Atlantic Ocean.

More than a month later, not only did Theodore and Ervin finish the race, but the team, known as Team Beyond, crushed the U.S. record by a full week.

But those 45 days were hell on earth.

Theodore lost nearly 35 pounds during the row.

“We were dropping weight fast early on,” he said.

Both men rowed together for 12 hours a day and separately for six hours, burning about 10,000 calories a day in the process. Considering the body can only digest about 6,000 calories a day, they were running on a caloric deficit.

Complicating the challenge, storms battered the team during the first week of the row.

One storm system morphed into a hurricane. Rough seas slapped around the 23-foot-long boat like a tattered flag on a pole.

The sea water became a thick sludge.

“It was like putting your oars into cement and trying to row,” Theodore said.

Along with vacuum-sealed meals, the boat's small cabin held first aid kits and a water maker to convert sea water into drinking water.

While the boat was equipped with an emergency distress signal and satellite phone, which were powered by solar panels above the boat’s small cabin, the men rowed for about 75 percent of the journey without power or a radar.

“We lost all power and electronics, and we were operating on a simple, basic raw compass,” Theodore said. “It was like the Stone Age.”

And then there was darkness.

At night, nothingness would eclipse the vision of Theodore and Ervin. The horizon line, the endless waves of sea, the blue water and the blue sky all vanished.

What the men were used to seeing, they now only heard.

“There were periods of time where we had eight hours of complete darkness and waves coming from every direction,” Theodore said. “You couldn’t see them, but you could hear them.”

But 48-year-old Theodore knew it was crucial to break through the psychological barrier of the first seven days at sea.

“Relatively speaking, we knew we had a job to do so our bodies adjusted, which took about a week,” he said. “We were pretty seasick though. It beats you down physically, and it starts to impact your mental state. But everything else comes into picture once you stabilize your thoughts. All I kept saying was we just got to get through the first seven days.”

And just as the men started to adjust, the ocean once again showed no mercy.

“Ten days in we got rogue waves due to weather changes," he said. "We got hit. It’s like getting T-boned in the middle of an intersection; we never saw it coming. It just flipped us over. It was just, boom, it hits you.”

Theodore was rowing when the wave hit and he was thrown off the boat. Ervin was in the cabin at the time and remained in the boat.

“I just grabbed anything I could,” Theodore said. “You’re so amped up and you’re just in survival mode.”

The boat was righted, but the team had lost water bottles and small pieces of equipment. Despite the losses, the team pushed forward with the essentials.

“You just get that raw determination,” he said. “You can throw anything at me, but we’re going to get across. We were able to figure out all is not lost; we have basic fundamentals. You just think we are determined.”

The final push came on the last leg of the 3,000-mile journey to Antigua.

“To avoid getting pushed back, the last 30-36 hours we didn’t get off the oars.”

For Theodore seeing the coast, the finish line and his family was like an “out-of-body experience.”

“It was just sensory overload,” he said “We were completely removed from what was (going) on in the world. We were isolated. It’s a very primitive experience.”

After living off vacuum-sealed meals and fish the men caught off the boat, one of the first things Theodore did after putting his feet on dry land was sink his teeth into a fat, greasy cheeseburger and sip an ice-cold beer.

“Boy, I’ll tell you that cheeseburger was like a biblical experience,” he laughed. “It was a good, good cheeseburger.”

Theodore is back home in Brentwood, still adjusting to life on land and life in general.

“I’m still not 100 percent. I still have to try to get my legs back underneath me,” he said. “I don’t look at my phone every two minutes. You get incredible clarity on what is truly important when you’re out in the ocean. You realize what’s important: faith, family and friends. It’s good to be back on land; you feel very vulnerable out on the ocean, it’s so powerful, you’re captive to it. It’s a very, very humbling experience.”

Theodore and Ervin have started a foundation to raise awareness about nutritional and hunger issues effecting the United States.

Beyond Hunger Foundation is planning to raise $1 million to supply local food banks with enough resources to feed more than 5 million families.

“Everybody needs hope, and there are a lot of people out there that don’t have it. We trying to inspire people to go above and beyond every day,” he said.

“You’re capable of doing much more than you think you are. Everyone is.”

For more information, visit www.teambeyond.org

Reach Collin Czarnecki at 615-852-1130 or on Twitter @CollinReports.