Sarah Outen

Sarah Outen took up long-distance rowing after her father's death, and in 2009, in her early twenties, became the youngest woman and the first woman to row solo across the Indian Ocean, a crossing that took over four months alone in a small ocean rowing boat with no support vessel nearby, managing both the physical grind of rowing for hours daily and the psychological strain of prolonged isolation.

She followed this with a far larger undertaking she called London2London: Via the World, an attempt to circumnavigate the globe using only human power, combining kayaking, cycling and ocean rowing with no motorised transport at any stage. The plan required stitching together entirely different disciplines and skill sets across years of travel, from cycling across Asia to rowing open ocean stretches alone.

During an attempt to row across the North Pacific in 2012, a typhoon struck her small boat, capsizing it repeatedly and forcing a mid-ocean rescue by the Japanese Coast Guard, an experience that left her seriously shaken and led her to pause the expedition entirely for a period afterward while she dealt with the psychological aftermath, an honesty about fear and limits that she wrote about directly rather than minimising.

She resumed and eventually completed the full circumnavigation in 2015, having crossed oceans and continents under nothing but her own effort. She has continued writing and speaking about the expedition since, focusing as much on the mental toll of long solo endurance challenges as on the physical feat itself.