Here's to the girl who rowed across the Atlantic! (How I loathe her)

This week Jelisa writes about Katie Spotz, the 23-year-old girl who rowed across the Atlantic Ocean. Jelisa is convinced Katie decided to do this just to make her look bad.
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By Jelisa Castrodale
My gym has one rowing machine, which is largely ignored unless you bang your shin against the rust-flecked flywheel on the way to the brighter, shinier ellipticals and Arc Trainers, the ones with the digital televisions, oversized displays and decreased risk of tetanus. That piece of outdated equipment is everyone’s last resort, a creaky throwback marooned in the middle of the carpet, like the cardio equivalent of Larry King.
I used it once in January, when all of the other machines were occupied by new members and their even newer resolutions. My choice was either to row or to impatiently shift my weight from foot to foot until those people disappeared into a heart-shaped Whitman’s sampler. Sighing, I wiped two decades worth of dust off the seat, slid my feet into the stirrups and tentatively grabbed the handle. After four minutes, I was exhausted, even though I’d only rowed the length of Food Lion’s Ten Items or Less lane. I haven’t done it since.

Contrast that with 23-year old Ohio native Katie Spotz, who spent one afternoon paddling in Lake Erie, covering forty miles on her first trip and deciding that she dug it, despite almost crashing her boat into a cliff. Spotz — an ultramarathoner and triathlete — decided that rather than just spend several weekends splashing around the lake, she’d commit herself to rowing across the Atlantic Ocean. Read that sentence again, specifically the words “rowing” and “across the Atlantic.” That’s like spending an afternoon at the planetarium, then deciding you’re going to ski to Mercury.
After spending two years raising money and signing sponsors, Spotz strapped herself into “Liv”, a 19-foot, 400-pound boat, and dipped her oars in the ocean for the first time. She left Dakar, Senegal on January 3 and landed in Georgetown, Guyana on March 14, bookending her 2,800-mile adventure with two places you rarely hear about outside of a tough category in Double Jeopardy.
Yeah. She did it, completing the trip in 70 days, 5 hours, and 22 minutes. As soon as “Liv” hit land, she became the youngest person to row solo across an ocean and the first American to row “from mainland to mainland,” which I’m pretty sure is also a Jack Johnson album. Spotz averaged between eight and ten hours of rowing every day, listening to audiobooks on one of the four iPods she packed and sticking to a 5,000 calorie Snickers-heavy meal plan that Kirstie Alley likes to call “breakfast.”
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! Spotz didn’t make the trip just for two months’ worth of “Still rowing” Twitter updates. Because of the ten brazillion times her oars broke the water — a highly scientific estimate — she raised $70,000 for the Blue Planet Run Foundation, an organization that provides pure drinking water to undernourished countries. Not to brag, but in that same period of time, I dropped at least twelve cents in the “Leave a Penny” bowl at the Shell station.
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! The exhaustively-ambitious Spotz seems to have a problem sitting still, and not in that fidgety “tap-tap-tap the pen on the counter while you wait at the pharmacy” kind of way. She’s already crammed an REI catalog’s worth of adventure into her first two decades. In 2008, she swam the 325-mile length of the Allegheny River. Before that, she biked 3,300 miles across the country and then, just for kicks, ran 150 miles across the Mohave Desert. Despite her accomplishments, I’m pretty sure I can still take her in Vanilla Wafer consumption, peeing for distance, and continuous sobbing.
BUT WAIT…yeah…you get it. In interviews conducted after her return to dry land, Spotz hinted that she’s already planning her next adventure. It’ll no doubt be another challenge both physically and mentally, like a Tuesday afternoon Everest climb or shoveling to the earth’s core or watching a Jennifer Lopez movie.
I can’t wait to see what she’ll do next. Until then, I’ll be on that rowing machine.
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Jelisa Castrodale is a writer and comedian who has learned a lot about life by making a mess of her own. She chronicles her failures at The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, covers music for London’s BitchBuzz and twitters while she waits at stoplights. Castrodale was featured in the book Twitter Wit and was named one of Mashable’s 10 Funniest Twitterers.
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