In endurance running, the longer races become, the more competitive they are for women. Women semi-regularly win multi-day and 100+ mile races, even if women don't have course records at these times/distances. In an event of sufficient time/distance, factors besides strength dominate the outcome.
So, (and knowing very little about rowing), I am not surprised that a woman could take the record here. You can only row so fast. Other factors like weather, currents, nutrition, mental fortitude, navigation, and boat design overcome muscle strength.
All that said: props to Kelsey Pfendler! She definitely knows how to embrace the suck.
> Day 21: Kelsey gave an update on a lesson learned about her mental state, saying she had beaten herself up for sleeping in. But she realized that wasn't productive thinking. "When you're out here, you're not in control," she said. "You are in control of you." She said she realized that the way to respond to problems is much more important than the problem itself.
> Day 44: Kelsey could see O'ahu as she closed in on her goal. "If any part of this made at least one person feel a little bit more powerful in their own skin, I couldn't ask for anything else and I'm happy," she said. "Think about trying to find your own big, hard, scary thing. You might not think that you are strong enough to finish it right now, but you're definitely strong enough to start it and you'll find everything else along the way."
I think you're confusing limited participation and what such a small group of people doing these events means for single individuals to "win" an event. Women are more like to win in these events then others because there is less competition overall so you get more anomalous results rather then the male biological differences stop dominating the outcome.
You are right in that "strength" isn't the dominating factor for these events or why males go so much faster/farther but rather VO2 max and for peak athletes males normally maintain a good 10% lead due to biological factors.
The male vs female 100 meter:
9.58 vs 10.49 = female record is 9.5% longer to run
Male vs female 200 meter:
19.19 vs 21.34 = female record is 11.2% longer to run
Male vs female 50km
2:38:43 vs 2:59:54 = female record is 13.35% longer to run
The difference also doesn't really change once we start going really long either
I'd be interested to know how much progress she made/lost due to drifting overnight. I feel like that alone would have a drastic impact. It would really suck to check your GPS track in the morning to discover you'd lost a day's progress overnight.
It’s quite an accomplishment, but this is done rarely (https://oceanrowing.com/statistics lists less than a thousand completed rows world-wide), and the weather hugely affects how long it will take to do it.
Also, my geographical knowledge may be lacking, but it appears “to Hawaii” is essential here.
https://oceanrowing.com/filter?id=1415 shows a row from Monterey to Hanalei, Kauai in 32 days. That’s in the state of Hawaii, too, but about 200km closer.
I used to row and even the tiniest of waves could make it annoying. You'd slide to the front of your seat and try to insert your oar and catch air instead of water. Then if you overcompensated by trying to insert your oar farther in you'd catch a crab (having the oar ripped out of your control). This is on a lake with tiny waves.
Rowing across an entire ocean is absolutely amazing.
That page was disappointingly sparse. I wanted pictures of the interior - what does it look like to sleep, how much space when it is fully packed with food, is there any accommodations for the bathroom, or do you just go over the edge, etc.
I wonder if it's as much of an issue with those big boats at sea. The wavelength gets pretty long off the continental shelf, so I imagine it's a lot less adjustment than lake waves, with the exception being storm conditions you should probably avoid anyway.
My first thought on hearing about this was, "what's that boat like? I wanna see the boat."
Not to take away from Pfendler's incredible achievement. She's amazing. But, I'm the kind of nerd that immediately went to "surely that is a logistical nightmare, how are you going to carry enough supplies for months at sea in a boat that a human being can propel across the ocean at a decent speed?" It's a bigger boat than I imagined, at 21 feet long and 5.5 feet wide, and 730 pounds. It also has cabins at either end for storage and sleeping.
And, she also discusses some of the technical problems she had in some other videos in the series, like not being able to run her desalination machine because not enough sun and having to dip into here emergency water rations.
The athletic side of a thing like is incredible, but I always want to know the logistics.
I don't know how to verify it, but I've been told that drinking seawater is acceptable to do and is just enough to keep you alive.
If I were to do it though, I would invest in some water filters which are fairly cheap and can remove a lot of things that you wouldn't want to be drinking.
This is false. Sea water is >3% salt and human kidneys can't produce urine with that much salinity or greater. Since they need more water to extract that much salt, the net effect is dehydration. This rower probably had a desalination machine, or just a big reservoir of fresh water.
(Though there might be some obscure edge case, and if you're about to die of dehydration that a little bit of seawater will buy you a minuscule amount of more time? doubt it)
All i think about when people row, kayak or swim these distances in these waters is 'SHARKS'. Which i read and saw enough about that the chances of meeting one isnt that big, but my brain still associates these activities/areas with it.
(I was replying to a child comment on fear of deep waters, seemingly deleted?)
I’ve heard this sentiment before, and can sort of intellectually follow, but man. I love scuba diving, I love the ocean and its varied and alien and multi-scale inhabitants. I’ve spent weeks on a live-aboard boat explicitly to seek out megafauna like sharks and rays (same subclass as sharks).
When I start my descent, I love to turn around and see my exhaled air bubble up, up towards the sun rays in the top layer of the water that slowly fade further away as the pressure on my ears builds and I enter the unknown ocean. It’s the most relaxing feeling, and I often remember it to go to sleep.
How beautifully individual our preferences can be. :-)
Curiously, I relate to both. I have a certain degree of fear or trepidation of sharks when swimming in the ocean. I feel vulnerable, and keep imagining a shark coming up under me or behind me. But I’m also a certified diver and have exactly none of those fears when diving or snorkeling! I think it’s because I have reduced awareness of what’s around me when swimming in the surface. In a sense it’s coming from the same place as a fear of the dark.
I happened upon her via Instagram around day 10 and watched her every day. It was really interesting watching her go through this every day and her authentic posts about what she was feeling. It’s truly great seeing people achieve their goals like this, she is amazing!
If you're young and not married, it sounds like a fun trip I'd love to make. I've done various canoe trips through like the Boundary Waters, but I've never been able to take off enough time from work to pull this off.
This is one of those cases where getting started is hard, but once you get started you probably can do more if you want it because you get a reputation and people will sponsor you. You end up in a lot of cases your job is to get sponsors for this trip and you live in the meantime cheaply just earn enough money that you can afford to take off a couple months to do these things.
That said, it probably isn't all that expensive. You do need to get a canoe, but those are not terribly expensive. You need enough food to last this long. The ideal way is if you're living with your parents or some other situation where you can just stop paying rent while you're on the trip. A large part of living expenses are things that she would not have when she's out on the ocean. Also, if th if this is your goal you're probably living for that so you might be working two jobs to raise money for the trip and then you quit both jobs, take your trip and then you go back to work.
I admire the ambition which likely preceded the trip over a long enough term to make the conclusive 43-day journey end up as the smaller amount of calendar time.
But that which obviously means the most from the standpoint of fulfillment :)
It's about a compromise. You need enough space for all the food and whatever other supplies you need on the way. You want enough stability that it's not going to capsize in whatever waves. Remember that a storm could come up. Her boat has solar panels and a navigation system and other things which are certainly nice to have but not required. I would expect she has some sort of radio on board.
The Polynesians appeared to have used basically canoes with an outrigger to row across the ocean. I'm not an expert on Polynesians, though, and how they got across the ocean. So if someone is an expert, please correct me.
It's kind of buried here, but Kelsey is the fastest human to do this. She beat the male record holder's time by 6 days.
In endurance running, the longer races become, the more competitive they are for women. Women semi-regularly win multi-day and 100+ mile races, even if women don't have course records at these times/distances. In an event of sufficient time/distance, factors besides strength dominate the outcome.
So, (and knowing very little about rowing), I am not surprised that a woman could take the record here. You can only row so fast. Other factors like weather, currents, nutrition, mental fortitude, navigation, and boat design overcome muscle strength.
All that said: props to Kelsey Pfendler! She definitely knows how to embrace the suck.
Here's a nice diary of her trip:
https://www.kcra.com/article/kelsey-pfendler-record-breaking...
Love these updates:
> Day 21: Kelsey gave an update on a lesson learned about her mental state, saying she had beaten herself up for sleeping in. But she realized that wasn't productive thinking. "When you're out here, you're not in control," she said. "You are in control of you." She said she realized that the way to respond to problems is much more important than the problem itself.
> Day 44: Kelsey could see O'ahu as she closed in on her goal. "If any part of this made at least one person feel a little bit more powerful in their own skin, I couldn't ask for anything else and I'm happy," she said. "Think about trying to find your own big, hard, scary thing. You might not think that you are strong enough to finish it right now, but you're definitely strong enough to start it and you'll find everything else along the way."
I think you're confusing limited participation and what such a small group of people doing these events means for single individuals to "win" an event. Women are more like to win in these events then others because there is less competition overall so you get more anomalous results rather then the male biological differences stop dominating the outcome.
You are right in that "strength" isn't the dominating factor for these events or why males go so much faster/farther but rather VO2 max and for peak athletes males normally maintain a good 10% lead due to biological factors.
The male vs female 100 meter:
9.58 vs 10.49 = female record is 9.5% longer to run
Male vs female 200 meter:
19.19 vs 21.34 = female record is 11.2% longer to run
Male vs female 50km
2:38:43 vs 2:59:54 = female record is 13.35% longer to run
The difference also doesn't really change once we start going really long either
6 hour: 98.5km vs 85km male ran 15% farther
12 hour: 177.410 vs 153.600 male 15.5% farther
24 hour: 319.614 vs 278.621 male 14.7% farther
48 hour: 485.099 vs 436.371 male 11.17% farther
6 days: 1045.519 vs 928.577 male 12.6% farther
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon scroll down to the male vs female records.
>Other factors like weather, currents
I'd be interested to know how much progress she made/lost due to drifting overnight. I feel like that alone would have a drastic impact. It would really suck to check your GPS track in the morning to discover you'd lost a day's progress overnight.
It’s quite an accomplishment, but this is done rarely (https://oceanrowing.com/statistics lists less than a thousand completed rows world-wide), and the weather hugely affects how long it will take to do it.
Also, my geographical knowledge may be lacking, but it appears “to Hawaii” is essential here.
https://oceanrowing.com/filter?id=1415 shows a row from Monterey to Hanalei, Kauai in 32 days. That’s in the state of Hawaii, too, but about 200km closer.
How does a small boat cross the ocean without sinking when waves can be over 30 meters tall[0]?
[0]: https://recon.sccf.org/parameters/wave-height
I used to row and even the tiniest of waves could make it annoying. You'd slide to the front of your seat and try to insert your oar and catch air instead of water. Then if you overcompensated by trying to insert your oar farther in you'd catch a crab (having the oar ripped out of your control). This is on a lake with tiny waves.
Rowing across an entire ocean is absolutely amazing.
Fellow rower here, affirming the above.
Thought folks would be interested in her boat, built for ocean rowing:
https://yourowkelsey.com/about/
That page was disappointingly sparse. I wanted pictures of the interior - what does it look like to sleep, how much space when it is fully packed with food, is there any accommodations for the bathroom, or do you just go over the edge, etc.
Heya, from the page I linked (her boat is named "Lily"):
> Lily is a Rannoch R25 built in 2019.
More info on Rannoch R25:
https://www.rannochadventure.com/boats-2/r25
There are several Youtube videos showing you the interior if you're interested.
I wonder if it's as much of an issue with those big boats at sea. The wavelength gets pretty long off the continental shelf, so I imagine it's a lot less adjustment than lake waves, with the exception being storm conditions you should probably avoid anyway.
My first thought on hearing about this was, "what's that boat like? I wanna see the boat."
Not to take away from Pfendler's incredible achievement. She's amazing. But, I'm the kind of nerd that immediately went to "surely that is a logistical nightmare, how are you going to carry enough supplies for months at sea in a boat that a human being can propel across the ocean at a decent speed?" It's a bigger boat than I imagined, at 21 feet long and 5.5 feet wide, and 730 pounds. It also has cabins at either end for storage and sleeping.
She gives a brief tour of the inside of the boat here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZBUJ2VJvp_/
And, she also discusses some of the technical problems she had in some other videos in the series, like not being able to run her desalination machine because not enough sun and having to dip into here emergency water rations.
The athletic side of a thing like is incredible, but I always want to know the logistics.
That’s incredible.
What does one eat and drink on a trip like this? The article talks about her cooking. With a fire or one of those little butane stoves?
Can a small canoe carry enough water for a trip like this or do you rely on rain water too?
I don't know how to verify it, but I've been told that drinking seawater is acceptable to do and is just enough to keep you alive.
If I were to do it though, I would invest in some water filters which are fairly cheap and can remove a lot of things that you wouldn't want to be drinking.
This is false. Sea water is >3% salt and human kidneys can't produce urine with that much salinity or greater. Since they need more water to extract that much salt, the net effect is dehydration. This rower probably had a desalination machine, or just a big reservoir of fresh water.
(Though there might be some obscure edge case, and if you're about to die of dehydration that a little bit of seawater will buy you a minuscule amount of more time? doubt it)
I recall one article mentioning that there's desalination gear on board (that's what the solar panel is for?)
Portable desalinators exist.
Kārlis Bardelis has rowed the Pacific, India and South Atlantic Oceans and cycled everything in-between. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2025/11/record-bre...
All i think about when people row, kayak or swim these distances in these waters is 'SHARKS'. Which i read and saw enough about that the chances of meeting one isnt that big, but my brain still associates these activities/areas with it.
(I was replying to a child comment on fear of deep waters, seemingly deleted?)
I’ve heard this sentiment before, and can sort of intellectually follow, but man. I love scuba diving, I love the ocean and its varied and alien and multi-scale inhabitants. I’ve spent weeks on a live-aboard boat explicitly to seek out megafauna like sharks and rays (same subclass as sharks).
When I start my descent, I love to turn around and see my exhaled air bubble up, up towards the sun rays in the top layer of the water that slowly fade further away as the pressure on my ears builds and I enter the unknown ocean. It’s the most relaxing feeling, and I often remember it to go to sleep.
How beautifully individual our preferences can be. :-)
Curiously, I relate to both. I have a certain degree of fear or trepidation of sharks when swimming in the ocean. I feel vulnerable, and keep imagining a shark coming up under me or behind me. But I’m also a certified diver and have exactly none of those fears when diving or snorkeling! I think it’s because I have reduced awareness of what’s around me when swimming in the surface. In a sense it’s coming from the same place as a fear of the dark.
I thought sharks only attack stuff that looks like wounded animals. Would a shark really attack a boat?
I happened upon her via Instagram around day 10 and watched her every day. It was really interesting watching her go through this every day and her authentic posts about what she was feeling. It’s truly great seeing people achieve their goals like this, she is amazing!
I wonder what was going on in her life that made her say, "I want to spend the next 43 days rowing alone across the ocean."
If you're young and not married, it sounds like a fun trip I'd love to make. I've done various canoe trips through like the Boundary Waters, but I've never been able to take off enough time from work to pull this off.
This is one of those cases where getting started is hard, but once you get started you probably can do more if you want it because you get a reputation and people will sponsor you. You end up in a lot of cases your job is to get sponsors for this trip and you live in the meantime cheaply just earn enough money that you can afford to take off a couple months to do these things.
That said, it probably isn't all that expensive. You do need to get a canoe, but those are not terribly expensive. You need enough food to last this long. The ideal way is if you're living with your parents or some other situation where you can just stop paying rent while you're on the trip. A large part of living expenses are things that she would not have when she's out on the ocean. Also, if th if this is your goal you're probably living for that so you might be working two jobs to raise money for the trip and then you quit both jobs, take your trip and then you go back to work.
"Because it's there"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory
Some people are just driven to do things for the accomplishment. I don't think we need more psychologizing than that.
This isn’t the first time she’s done it.
She spent 41 days making the same trip with 2 other people
I admire the ambition which likely preceded the trip over a long enough term to make the conclusive 43-day journey end up as the smaller amount of calendar time.
But that which obviously means the most from the standpoint of fulfillment :)
Usual answer is to get away from the wife (or partner), but she doesn't seem married so I'm baffled...
There's a good book "The Pacific Alone" about a guy that did this in a kayak
Why do these extreme rowing and sailing boats look so weird
Its always a form factor I’ve never seen before
Where can I learn more about this scene?
It’s an ocean-going row boat with 2 cabins. Most row boats you’ve seen are probably hyper-light and designed for still water.
The model of this boat:
https://www.rannochadventure.com/boats-2/r25
It's about a compromise. You need enough space for all the food and whatever other supplies you need on the way. You want enough stability that it's not going to capsize in whatever waves. Remember that a storm could come up. Her boat has solar panels and a navigation system and other things which are certainly nice to have but not required. I would expect she has some sort of radio on board.
The Polynesians appeared to have used basically canoes with an outrigger to row across the ocean. I'm not an expert on Polynesians, though, and how they got across the ocean. So if someone is an expert, please correct me.
I always assumed it was because they had storm resistant cabins for sleeping and supply storage.
Daily use boats probably don’t need as much in that respect.
Because there are big waves in the open ocean and people need to sleep?
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48790512
kelsey still holds the record btw, but yeahh another runner up is insane
great how the article doesn't explain any of the interesting aspects of this
Her rowboat is fascinating: https://yourowkelsey.com/ https://yourowkelsey.com/about/
then write about it in the article
Yeah, it is cool, but this article is not HN appropriate.