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Jason Caldwell is spending the next few days re-learning how to walk. Yesterday, he landed in Hawaii after a record-breaking 30-day row across the Pacific Ocean, which started in San Francisco and shaved a whole nine days off the Guinness World Record for a human powered crossing of the Mid-Pacific. For the past month, Caldwell’s taken a maximum of three steps from his rowing seat to his living quarters, adhering to a strict 24-hour schedule of two hours rowing, two hours off. By now, his walking muscles are almost totally atrophied. He doubts he’ll regain the feeling in his fingertips for another six months.

“You're essentially slowly dying when you're out here,” Caldwell said last week, speaking to GQ from the middle of the ocean as the team approached the last leg of their journey. “It's a brutal, brutal crossing and you're trying to stave off the descent of your body as long as possible.” According to Caldwell, the rowing itself is actually the easiest part of the challenge: the tougher part is everything that needs to get done in between, like personal hygiene, injury maintenance, sleep, and refueling his body. At the end of the day, though, it’s all just keeping him afloat until he can recoup on land, gain a few pounds back, and rebuild the muscles that let him walk.

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Ahead of setting the record, Caldwell spoke about how he prepared for the grueling journey, the unique challenges of a Pacific row, and how his four-person team kept each other going during their month at sea.

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GQ: How is the trip going so far?

Jason Caldwell: It's going well. We're on Day 22, and we’re on track to beat the record by ten days. This team is just so disciplined. Mentally and emotionally, we're so locked in. For three of us it’s not our first crossing, but this has definitely been one of the more versatile rows we've done. We've had headwinds and big water and big waves, and we've also had lulls where the ocean is flat as can be. We've had extremely cold and wet days, and we've also had a lot of dry and hot days lately. It's kind of an amalgam of a lot of different things.

So none of you have done the Pacific before?

Correct. Not many people have ever done the Pacific, and there's only about 50 people that have attempted the San Francisco to Hawaii row. The Atlantic race is more established and it's been going on for longer. A lot of the teams come from Europe, so logistically it's easier than coming from the States.

A lot of eyes are turning to the Pacific, though. It's shorter, but it's tough because you go right off the Golden Gate Bridge and you're met with strong tides, headwinds potentially. And once you're out of California, it's cold. The Pacific's colder and the waves can be bigger, whereas on the Atlantic you kind of have tropical weather the whole way across. For the first week we were in all our Gore-Tex gear every time we were on the deck of the boat. You're constantly soaking wet. On week one of what could be a five-week journey, you're soaked to the bone, seasick, and still trying to figure out what's going on. Even for people with experience like us, it's such a shock when you come out here initially and you're trying to overcome that. While you're doing that you're getting bombarded by waves, you're getting ill.

Once you push through that it starts to get warmer, but you still have this variability of weather, whereas the Atlantic is a consistent nice breeze, nice currents from east to west. On the Pacific the currents can go against you, the wind can go against you, and it's coming from the side of your boat instead of from behind you, which means the waves are just dumping into your boat the entire time. It’s pretty scary at night because you can’t see it coming. On this particular row, the moon was rising late and it was waning, so we had pure darkness and all these rogue waves coming at 90 degrees to the boat. You could just hear them all of a sudden and they smash into the boat and literally will knock you out of your seat. It's very punishing and you don't get a lot of respite. We're just getting to an area where we've had more consistent waves and wind behind us and it's been nice, but a third of this row still left to go, we're holding our breath to see if we're gonna have to hit any bad weather.

Tell me a little about what your schedule is like.

In order to break a world record, you have to keep the boat moving at all times. So you've got two people rowing and two people resting, rotating two hours on and two hours off, 24 hours a day for the entire crossing. Sometimes non-rowing hours are harder than rowing hours. Because we're trained to row, and we're big strong athletes. When you're not on the oars, all you wanna do is just go lie down. But you have tons of responsibilities. You have to keep your body clean and healthy, you gotta brush your teeth, you gotta floss, you gotta wipe yourself down, maintain hygiene, and you have sores and stuff that you need to take care of so they don't get worse. You gotta eat. it's easy to just say, “Oh, I'm so tired, I just wanna lay down,” and then you get on the next shift and you're depleted. We have to repair things on the boat—we've had things fail, we've had to clean things on board. And of course you've gotta find time to sleep, which usually happens during the night.

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What do you eat on board?

I probably have at least a snack on every break. 85% of our food is just freeze-dried rations that we add water to. Our breakfast calories are huge, they're, like, a 1200 calorie meal. And then the PMs are, like, chicken and rice, and those are usually an 800-calorie meal, so I like to have one big breakfast and then two of the PMs, and that's the bulk of my calories.

We've got other snacks like nuts and high-calorie bars and stuff like that to snack on when you don't have time to make a meal. I just had some jerky before I called you, I've got bars and trail mix and I'll just snack on these in the next two hours until I feel satiated. I'm replenishing my calories at every break, it's just not always a big meal. To be fair, everyone works a little differently and I'm someone who doesn't eat as much as most. It's not because I choose not to, it's just the way my body works. I usually lose more weight than anybody. I'm six foot four and I usually come into these things about 220 pounds. Both my last rows I lost 40 pounds, and looking at me right now I'm probably close to that already.

How do you prepare for that kind of weight loss and the physical challenge of the row?

On the training end, you want to build lean muscle mass. That's the slow burning fuel that you're gonna need out here, because fat will burn really quickly. In the first week when you're seasick and you're in shock, your body pulls the fat off real quick. Lean muscle mass is like a big log on the fire that can burn slowly all night. 220 is pretty heavy for me, but about 15 of those pounds is added lean muscle mass that I've done through lifting, rowing a lot on the rowing machine, cross-training and pilates to stay flexible. I do a lot of trail running and some cycling.

I'm very protein and fat heavy for most of my training, and carb-light. That's training my body to pull from its fat storages instead of just always relying on sugar and glucose and carbs, because that's just not as efficient. In the last month of training I allow myself more carbs because in the end you don't have a lot of variety out here with the freeze dried meals, so you want to be prepared to carbo-load all the time with the dried pastas and rices and beans.

How long do you take to prepare for a trip like this?

I always recommend two years as a minimum. If you've never done one before, you would have a lot more to do than I do. You have to get certified in a lot of different courses, learn how to navigate at sea, how to navigate at night, how to use all the equipment on the rowing boat. For our team, this is the boat I bought for my first row, so we know it very well and everything on it, but you still want to make sure everything works.

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And what kind of physical maintenance are you able to do on-board?

You've got a good medical kit here. We've got a Theragun, which is a game changer, we didn't have one on our last row. I traded one of our teammates two Reeses Peanut Butter cups for two Theragun sessions. He basically just takes the Theragun when I'm sitting down about to do my row and goes for three minutes on my lats and my traps, my lower back, my hip flexors, and it just helps repair a little bit. We all do that for each other, we help each other out. But there's nowhere to stretch. This boat is way too small. So there's not much you can do. It's all saved for when we get back home.

What will your recovery look like once you land in Hawaii?

You're on a 30-foot boat with four big guys. That's a very small space. You're sharing two cabins, one on the bow, one on the stern, and every two hours you take two steps to your rowing seat and three steps back to the cabin. So your legs are shot. I can't walk right now. When I get to land, I won't be able to walk very well or walk straight. I'll have lost, like, 40 pounds. My calves are nonexistent and my legs have gotten very very small, because I'm pushing, I'm using them that way, but I'm not using them to walk. So my walking muscles are gone. My chest is gone, but my back is huge. I'm completely unbalanced.

And of course, there are the injuries. I've got an ankle injury right now as a result of getting smashed by a wave that knocked off my seat. You've got sores all over your ass, pardon my French, and tendonitis all in your hands from pulling constantly, so the tendons in your fingers and hands are completely devastated. All my fingertips are numb because you're cutting off blood circulation for so many hours a day.

I'll put the weight on pretty fast 'cause I'm just a big guy. That will probably take a month, and walking right will take four or five days. There are injuries that could take months to recover from. I probably won't get some feeling back into my fingertips for six months. You're essentially slowly dying when you're out here. You start out, you get seasick, you come out of the seasickness and you're feeling real good, and then from day five on it's just a slow descent. Your body's just breaking down. It's a brutal, brutal crossing and you're trying to stave off the descent of your body as long as possible. A big part of it is, what are the little things I can do? How can I air myself out, clean myself in my off hours, change the way I'm holding the oar to give certain body parts a break?

What happens if someone is too sick or injured to take their shift?

We don't keep score on this team. If I need to row an extra shift for somebody so they can get some more rest, we do it. If there's anything we can do for each other, we do, and that's kind of what helps us get through tough things like seasickness and body fatigue and even emotional and mental fatigue that’s associated with being out here for so long. When you see someone having a bad day you do what you can to pick 'em up 'cause you know you're gonna have one and they're gonna be there to pick you up. It's just a beautiful high-performance team.

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