The Great Yachtie Fitness Arms Race
#26/0307. With Courtesy of Erica Lay & The Mallorca Bulletin. Erica Lay is owner of EL CREW International Yacht Crew Agency http://www.elcrewco.com/ erica@elcrewco.com
The Great Yachtie Fitness Arms Race
Nobody ever plans for it to happen… It starts innocently enough… One crew member buys a Garmin watch because they want to get a bit fitter. Another signs up for a local 10km race. Somebody else starts cycling on their days off. Nobody thinks much of it. Then, somehow, everything escalates.
Six months later, the crew mess is full of conversations about VO2 max scores, resting heart rates, protein intake and whether cold-water immersion is genuinely beneficial or simply a way for grown adults to make themselves miserable before breakfast.
Welcome to the Great Yachtie Fitness Arms Race.
Like most things in yachting, it begins with good intentions and rapidly spirals out of control. I’ve seen it happen countless times over the years. One crew member starts running and suddenly everyone is running. Somebody enters a triathlon and before long half the marina is discussing training plans. One person buys a bicycle and within a year they’re riding something made entirely of carbon fibre that costs more than my first car.
The strange thing is that yacht crew aren’t naturally competitive at all.
Only joking.
Yachting attracts ambitious, driven people. Put a group of them together and almost anything can become a competition. If somebody hikes ten kilometres, somebody else immediately wants to do twelve. If one person signs up for a half marathon, another decides a full marathon sounds more impressive.
And if somebody mentions they’ve completed an Ironman, there will almost certainly be a yachtie somewhere quietly Googling Ironman entry requirements before the conversation has even finished.
So yeh, technology hasn’t exactly helped. Once upon a time, people simply went for a walk. Now they track the walk. They analyse the walk. They compare the walk with previous walks and then upload the walk to an app so everyone else can admire the walk. “Let’s be Strava friends!” is something we never thought we’d hear young people saying to each other but here we are, liking, sharing, congratulating each other on our activities.
I know all this because I’m almost just as guilty. Some years ago, after I got properly into hiking (which coincided with our Big Move to the countryside and adopting a rather feisty German Shepherd who needed a lot of exercise), my husband Jimmy bought me one of Garmin’s all-singing, all-dancing watches. Officially, this was because I have a remarkable talent for falling over absolutely nothing, and he felt the emergency features might prove useful if I disappeared into the Tramuntana. Or perhaps more accurately, off the side of part of the Tramuntana.
Unofficially, I suspect he realised that if I had an accident, our German Shepherd Nala would be about as much use as an embarrassed teenager. Rather than raising the alarm, she’d probably pretend not to know me and wander off looking for sheep to play with.
The safety features were sensible. The obsession that followed was not. What began as a way to track hikes quickly became a fascinating source of statistics. Distance. Elevation. Heart rate. Recovery times. Sleep scores. Training readiness. Suddenly every walk, hike and run generated data. And once you start collecting data, it’s surprisingly difficult to stop.
The same thing seems to happen throughout the yachting community. Before long, conversations that once revolved around crew parties and marina gossip are replaced with discussions about training plans, hydration strategies and whether anyone has signed up for the next race.
Of course, there are worse obsessions to develop… I tell myself.
Many crew discover that exercise provides balance alongside a demanding career. It creates friendships, improves mental health and encourages people to make the most of being berthed in places like Mallorca. If the occasional fitness gadget helps motivate somebody to get outside and explore the island, that’s probably no bad thing.
Still, it’s difficult not to laugh at how quickly things escalate.One minute you’re buying a watch because it might help in an emergency. The next you’re standing in a marina comparing recovery scores with a chief engineer and wondering whether your sleep quality has been negatively affected by that second coffee.
And somewhere nearby, a newly arrived yachtie is looking on in confusion.
Give them a year… They’ll have a Garmin too.
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