12 NOVEMBER 30-DECEMBER 6, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | move to Boulder, where he’d lived briefl y in 2006. He liked the feel of the city, with its emphasis on health, exercise and environ- mental awareness and its proximity to the mountains. Following his father’s suicide, he didn’t want to be just physically healthy, but to work on his inner life. He’d eventually join a men’s group, while developing a very conscious identity/philosophy around how to interpret the things that happened to him or those close to him. When he talks about creating endurance art, made from discipline and pain, he evokes an ascetic or a monk. After taking on competitive running, cycling and skiing, he became interested in rowing, dabbling in it before deciding to go all in. He signed up for the 2019 Atlantic Challenge row- ing race, which traced a nearly 3,000-mile path from the Canary Islands to the West Indies; it’s been called the toughest row of its kind in the world. After three years of intensive training, while working full-time as a manager at New York-based Deloitte Strategy & Analytics, Tez failed to raise the money to take part in the race. “I was devastated,” he says. He’d bounce back with a new venture and a new home. He launched the United World Challenge, based on some of the same principles as the United World College he’d at- tended in Montenegro. Opened in 1962, United World Colleges is an international network of schools and programs with the aim of “making education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future.” Tez hoped to do something with a global reach that contributed to that sustainable future. With the United World Challenge, he could set his own agenda and take control of the money-raising. If he couldn’t compete in the Atlantic Challenge, could he fi nd a way to use his rowing expertise and help the environ- ment? To facilitate his vision and nurture the piece of him that was introverted, he needed someplace “quieter” than Boulder. He quit his job and moved thirty miles outside of Boulder to Nederland, population 1,471. It reminded him of his hometown of Chestertown, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, population 700. In Nederland, he could concentrate full-time on building the United World Challenge and on his own per- sonal challenge as the face of the organization — rowing alone 2,700 miles from California to Hawaii in a 23-foot pink boat named “Mod- eration,” even though he’d never been to sea. Empty, Moderation weighed 300 pounds, but he’d need 1,200 pounds of supplies to make it across the Pacifi c Ocean. Half of those who’d attempted this journey in a rowboat had failed. Only eight had made it to Hawaii, and no one had ever done it on his fi rst solo row. Tez didn’t just want to test his endurance and skills on the water; he planned to use the trip to create scholarships for United World Colleges and to generate funds to reduce the amount of plastic humans have deposited in the oceans. The path he’d charted would pass directly through the “Great Pacifi c Garbage Patch,” the planet’s largest single accumulation of ocean plastics, an area nearly twice the size of Texas. “World Economic Forum research,” Tez said, “shows that unless we change course, we’ll have more plastic in our oceans than fi sh by 2050. That’s why the United World Challenge is raising funds and taking action to help solve this crisis, by stopping plastic before it fl ows into the ocean.” Years of preparation went into the row to Hawaii, but Tez had only three days and twenty miles of actual training on Modera- tion before loading his supplies and boarding for the expedition. He had myriad worries and doubts about what he’d thrown himself into, but countered them with some of the many sayings he likes telling himself and oth- ers: “Focus on connecting to a purpose that pulls you forward.” “If you don’t love what you do, fall in love with why you do it.” “We all have an ocean to cross. And most times our ocean is more mental than anything else.” This ocean was decidedly physical. He kept a log of events unfolding on his boat. Just before embarking, he wrote: “Last min- ute shopping, repairs, packing, planning… The ocean has so much to teach me and I’m brand new to sea life. But I trust I will learn what I need to…That’s what I’m telling myself now, because when I slow down for a second, my eyes swell with tears…” On July 3, 2020, he took off at night from Monterey Harbor, about 100 miles south of San Francisco. Twenty minutes after pushing away from the dock, he hit a fi fty-foot fi shing boat. The impact struck Moderation’s “crash zone,” which had a fi ve-inch wooden buffer to absorb the shock. Tez didn’t know whether to return to shore to examine/repair the boat or to keep rowing. If he stopped now, he’d miss using the outgoing tide, and the next day’s weather didn’t look good for launching. He trusted that Moderation could withstand the blow, and rowed for the next twenty hours straight. He slept in a small bunk below deck, re- lieved himself in a “humble bucket,” took a CBD supplement and ate 5,000 calories a day, including a lot of protein shakes, to keep up his strength. The waters were choppy — he was lucky to get fi ve or six hours of sleep a night. To freshen the smell, he stashed an orange peel in his sleeping bag. His journal captured the highs, the lows, the breakdowns and breakthroughs, the despair, exhilaration and almost unbelievable mental, physical and emotional demands he was placing on himself. The expedition was as much about the internal forces working on him as the external ones provided by nature. “It’s not tired arms that make a rower want to quit,” he’s said. “It’s a broken spirit.” To cope, he fell back on his main source of motivation when competing in long-distance races: his sense of curiosity. “I want to know,” he wrote, “and actively explore the difference between my perceived and real limits. I pick races and challenges that seem nearly impossible. And I try to surprise myself by doing them anyway.” Days three through seven brought a severe storm, and he wrote that he was “strapped down to my bunk with a helmet on my head — like living inside a washing machine tumbling down a never-ending staircase. During the mayhem…a key part of my steering system breaks, my storage hatches fl ood, and water begins pooling in my stern cabin...there’s no way I’ll make it to Hawaii. “I am covered in bruises from bouncing into my cabin walls…I had looked forward to this time to myself to enjoy audiobooks and take photos and videos. Unfortunately, two days ago my iPhone reset itself while in my pocket. My music…the audiobooks and espe- cially the camera on the phone that I bought specifi cally for this journey are all gone… there’s not much to keep me busy anymore.” Without his technology, he did what countless earlier seafarers had done, spending hours staring at sunlight or moonlight playing on the face of the water, at the ever-changing shapes and colors of the ocean, and at the con- stant, mesmerizing “dimples, ripples, fl utters” of the waves. As he gazed at the Milky Way and the massive number of stars he was seeing for the fi rst time, he asked himself what was he doing, why he was doing it, and if taking on the Pacifi c was too big a challenge. Then he went back to rowing, drifting off course at times because of the winds and having to make up ground when the ocean was calmer. Surrounded by sea birds, jellyfi sh, squid, dolphins, fl ying fi sh, zebra fi sh and albatross, he watched humpback whales in full breach. When he wasn’t counting the wildlife around him, he meticulously documented the end- less debris — discarded plastic, liquor bottles, rope, etc. — passing by every day. Days 8-28: “Every day doubts and demons rage inside me, shouting at me to go home before it’s too late. But I know I can choose to listen to my doubts or replace them with something else. So I start to tell myself — out loud: ‘I can quit, but not today’…I keep reminding myself to look for beauty.” He grew so weary of the food on board that he had to force himself to eat. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were often three or four spoonfuls of the chocolate/hazelnut spread Nutella. He was losing weight, and his injuries were piling up. “Survival,” he wrote, “is a matter of man- aging the decline…Humans are incredibly adaptable — it’s our greatest strength!” He’d brought along a satellite phone, but made only three calls during the entire trip. Instead of talking on the phone, he spoke to the ocean and the birds, expressing his doubts to them. Day 45: “The [rowing] seat bearings are grinding to dust, and I don’t have spares. I get out my camp stove and begin boiling strips of plastic, shaping them into new bearings… as crazy as this idea is, it actually works!... Suddenly, a massive cloud lifts from my ex- perience…From Day 46 onwards, although tendonitis, salt burns and bone-deep fatigue are my closest companions, I love being at sea...It’s no longer a matter of if I would reach Hawaii — it becomes a matter of when.” The more exhausted he became, the more he leaned on the natural world to sustain him. Day 55: “The deep, vibrant blue beneath me, its waves adorned with white jewels from one horizon to the other. The soft, silky, baby blue sky above me, hugging the world with a dreamy cradle of clouds. I can’t get over how many shades of blue this ocean creates. I sit in awe all day…” Day 60: “I’ve been hit by fl ying fi sh. A group of four of them at once. At fi rst I thought I was hallucinating when I saw something fl ying under the moonlight towards me. And they went thwack-thwack-thwack into me and started fl opping around my feet. I shrieked and laughed and then threw them each back in.” Approaching Hawaii, he rowed the last 36 hours without a break. Day 71 (the fi nal one): “Arriving is one of the hardest days in the whole trip. The heat feels so intense that I keep checking to make sure that I’m still sweating — a sign that I’m not in heat stroke. Then I begin repeating to myself, again and again, ‘My body is hot, but I am fi ne. I’m rowing to the fi nish.’ At fi rst, it’s just a whisper. But slowly it grows into a full shout and I pull the oars while bursting, ‘I am rowing to the fi nish!’” During his trip, the United World Chal- lenge raised $77,000 through donations, enough to remove 5,000 pounds of ocean plastic: Each dollar prevented thirty bottles from entering the water. Returning to Nederland, he took what he’d learned from ten weeks at sea and began shar- ing it as a public speaker with Tez Talks (he has an enthusiastic, youthful and upbeat voice that makes just about anything seem possible). After recovering from the 2,700-mile trip across the Pacifi c, he started planning a larger adventure: rowing 5,000 miles alone from Hawaii to Aus- tralia, requiring about two million oar strokes. This time he wouldn’t just be rowing and writing down his observations. He’d gather data on biodiversity, on global warming’s ef- fects on the waters, and — in conjunction with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography — on the impact of micro-plastics on marine health. He’d also try to penetrate a fundamental scientifi c mystery: What becomes of most of the plastic that humans feed into our oceans? Researchers estimate that 90 percent of it is “missing.” Tez would use the expedition to raise funds to build Testing the Waters continued from page 11 continued on page 14 Tez Steinberg aboard his 23-foot boat, Moderation. UNITEDWORLDCHALLENGE.ORG
