News Around the World
Decisions, decisions. Ice quality and type, temperature, wind strength, direction, course configuration, runner choices, sail choices, spar choice, maybe beam stiffness? And that’s after you’ve dragged your DN around a state or two in pursuit of raceable conditions
the surface when reconstituted. It didn’t matter which meal you ate – it was all just grim. I can clearly remember sitting with a bowl of freeze-dried chilli,
wedged in the nav station, where my titanium spoon would rise to my mouth, then bounce off my pursed lips, just like trying to feed a recalcitrant baby. I had struggled to eat it at the start of the leg, but by then my body refused to even allow it into my mouth. It was so awful that at significant expense the boat changed its entire food programme after that leg, on which I lost 12kg… which was 15 per cent of my body weight. I can possibly smile about it now, but right when we needed
simple and straightforward nutrition I was eating the worst food that I have ever tasted. Not the best way to treat the body and brain, when asked to helm in the bitter cold of the Southern Ocean, at night, into 60kt+ gusts and 20m swells. But hang on, that was 20 years ago… surely crews have access
to tastier, well-designed, more nutritious and a lot more satisfying and appealing food now? Well, the good news is they do, and I dis- covered it a long way from home, right back where I learned to sail. In late July last year I flew back to Jersey to live with my parents
for a time, to care for my father in the final chapter of his life. During that four-month period of long days and longer nights a good mate in the Special Forces found out what I was doing and gave me some meals and breakfasts from a company called Radix, to help me out when I didn’t have time to cook. It was a revelation, and helped me in two ways. Firstly, it was such an intense time, when I was putting in long
hours with broken sleep and while making some critical decisions, then trying to communicate these with broader medical and health- care teams. So cooking slipped down the list for me. Ever since the Southern Ocean experience I had viewed all
32 SEAHORSE
dehydrated food with an almost shuddering suspicion but, respect- ing my friend’s generosity, and judgement, I tried one of the break- fasts after a long and difficult night. And it was a game changer. A seriously big lightbulb moment for me, right there and then. It was actually a shock to feel and realise what good, clean, high-
protein food did to me, physically and mentally lifting my morning. It is pretty obvious after experiencing it, but really easy to overlook when you are intensely physically and emotionally focused – meaning that pretty much everything else gets shunted down that list. I can see nutritionists and dieticians out there smiling quietly,
reaching to present graphs with work rate, cognition and blood sugar levels descending into the low figures, and fatigue climbing to the top right corner of the page. But when your nose is pressed up hard against the coalface, loaded with varying levels of stress, it really is not that straightforward. The second part that Radix played was that my father in his
advanced years had no appetite at all, and it was a daily struggle to try to find something that he could consume. In the pack that my mate had sent me were some smaller protein powder sachets, and it was the variation of these flavours that made them palatable above the shop-bought alternatives. Again, I witnessed the energy lift these supplied to him and, honestly, it was a godsend. Clearly I am now a convert, but it set me thinking. Looking back
on countless offshore races, yacht deliveries and ocean crossings, I dug deep into my memory to recall accidents and close calls, and then I wondered what part our lack of nutrition, basically consuming low-quality fuel, had contributed to poor decision making and poor response time. Food on most racing yachts was always way down the list of
priorities, sometimes to an almost masochistic degree (we’ll be right, mate…). Today, with such intense focus on sail and aero
ANNA SUSLOVA
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