She Rowed Across the Atlantic in Near Silence

It's a coin toss as to what's harder: Rowing solo across the Atlantic Ocean, or not sleeping for any period longer than 90 minutes while doing so. Zara Lachlan did both. Guinness World Records confirms the 21-year-old British woman broke a trio of records by rowing 4,366 miles (3,794 nautical miles) across the Atlantic in 97 days, 10 hours and 20 minutes. She departed from Lagos, Portugal, in a 24-foot boat and ended up in Cayenne, French Guiana. Her records:

• First female to row across the Atlantic from Europe to South America (mainland to mainland).
• Youngest person to row solo across the Atlantic from Europe to South America.
• Youngest person to row any ocean solo (female).

"I just really enjoyed the whole experience. I thought I would be a lot more scared than I was," she told Guinness World Records. Although the start doesn't sound very enjoyable. The favorable winds she had hoped for didn't materialize initially, leading her to write in her diary that 35 of her initial 39 days were "soul-destroying."

She says she quickly realized that her hope of completing the journey in 60 days wasn't realistic. Guinness adds that her boat capsized around day 40, leaving her without music, audiobooks, and podcasts to entertain and distract her. "I was in complete silence for two months," she said. "And because I'm in complete silence, and because I'm getting so little sleep, I hallucinated, like, almost daily," seeing waves crest into grey horses, for instance. Though she had been a rower for five years, she had never done so on the ocean. "[Before my trip] I had never actually been around sea life or anything like that, so I had never seen a fish in the ocean before I left."

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As for that sleep detail, Lachlan said she rowed a minimum of 17 hours every day and never slept for more than four hours total: one 90-minute sleep cycle and 20-minute power naps. "That doesn't work for everyone, but I'm young and I know that I can work off of that amount of sleep," she said. Lachlan, who used the journey to raise funds for two charities, Team Forces Foundation and Women in Sport, will join the British Army in September as a technical officer, the BBC reports.