Dame Ellen MacArthur, 32, knows what it is to survive alone for months in the wild on the world's oceans. In 2005 she broke the world record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe in just over 71 days, having earlier broken the record for a woman when she finished second in the 2000-2001 Vendée Globe race, racing solo for 94 days.
MacArthur is not surprised Ed expressed nerves in his tweet before he arrived in the Yukon. 'The most fear you have is before the start because you have time to think. At the start line of the round the world record attempt on the French coast, I was really, really scared. I knew that what I was going to do was dangerous, and that I’d be going to places I had never been before, both physically and within myself, that what I doing was at or beyond my limits.
You just concentrate on the task in hand, I concentrated on the boat, checked everything was OK, looked at the weather, immersed myself in what I was doing and used that to help me deal with it. If you just sat and worried you'd fry yourself. And with Ed it will be finding food, building a camp, doing X, Y and Z and actually he'll find there's not much time to think.'
MacArthur doesn’t always keep her mind in the moment but instead, has the end in sight in order to pace herself, 'It’s slightly different. What I was doing was not just survival but pushing myself really really hard to break the record. Maybe it's the same for Ed, you go off there and you have to get some food in the bank, you have to get some time in the bank, for me it was getting miles in the bank, you need those or you won’t succeed in what you set out to do. For me the first week was really stressful. You are heading down the Atlantic and you have to get down into the Southern ocean fast or you won't break the record… It's the same for Ed in that he needs to set up a camp and create shelter and get things set up so he can do what he set out to do.
'Ed will have to be constantly vigilant and prepared for when things go wrong. You are always psyched up. You are living on adrenaline. Your normal bodily needs and wants are somewhat put aside. Sleep you have as and when you can.'
As fatigue and hunger may affect Ed's judgement, how will Ed deal with the physical discomfort? 'You just have to. There's no one there. There's nobody else who is going to come. I don't know what it is like for Ed if he needs to get out in an emergency, but for me it was five days to get me off the boat. It would have taken five days for a ship to come down and get me. So you just deal with it.'
On her record-breaking round-the-world race being able to phone out on a satellite phone was a mixed blessing, 'If everyone knows you can phone out and then you don’t, that's a worry. On Christmas Day in the around the world race, it was absolutely horrendous, it was a huge storm and I couldn't phone home until the end of the day because I was so stressed. When I did finally call I said 'I’m Ok, I can’t talk to anyone, but I'm Ok, Happy Christmas everyone’ and that was it. And they were clearly very worried.
With the Vendee Globe’s fatality rate of 4.5%, it’s hardly surprising that Macarthur admits to having worried that she might buckle under the pressure and 'lose it', 'I know people who have hallucinated and woken up standing at the edge of the boat. All sorts of things can happen. I have never hallucinated but I have got absolutely totally and utterly exhausted... Some of my friends haven't come home from the race. Gerry Roufs who sailed in the Vendee Globe in 1996 never came home. His boat capsized, we know that because there are photos from the Chilean coastguard. But I don't know why. Nobody knows what happened.'
Mirroring Ed's sentiment that his conscious decision to do one extraordinary thing a year, grew year on year, MacArthur believes that her success isn't down to extraordinary inner strength, but rather that her endeavours have allowed her to find that strength and tap it, 'If you never push yourself, you are a small part of what you could be. I think we all have it. I think often we don't put ourselves, or don't find ourselves in a position that allows us to find it. But most people put in an adverse situation would deal with it. I work with a lot of young people who have cancer and leukaemia and you have no idea how those young people cope, or how their families cope. And they are from all walks of life and all different ages and somehow they keep it together. You cannot believe it but they do'.
The powerful feeling of being at one with the boat and in communion with nature is her driving force and so she relates to Ed's goal to live 'like a human animal' because what she loves most about extreme solo endeavours is learning from nature. 'Sailing around the world you are living at the rhythm of nature, at the rhythm of the wind, the waves, totally connected to the elements'.
'We live in a house, we travel in a vehicle - we don't have the same challenges that animals have in the wild. We put ourselves in a position where we don’t have to deal with things.
An albatross, born in South Georgia, can fly round the world in 60 days and go back to the same nest on the same island. Pigeons fly home, we don't really know how, they have no GPS, no electronics and yet they can do it, and it's instinct. An animal brought up in total separation from any of its ancestors or relatives, knows how to feed. We as humans have lost some of that animal instinct. I am not saying I can navigate around the world without a GPS, but if you go out there and do something which pushes you to your limits you reconnect with a lot of what I think we have lost. You are in a heightened state of awareness, your senses sharpened, you are totally tuned in to what’s around you.'
MacArthur expects Ed will find it hard to return to a normal pace of life, but that it is hard to sustain the other way of living, 'You are at another place in your head if you’ve lived on adrenaline, if you’ve lived to survive, and that does take a while to come back from, it's not like normal life.'
