- More than 4,000 people have climbed
to the top of Mount Everest.
More than 600 people have been into outer space.
But still today, less than 100 people
have ever sailed single-handed, nonstop, around the world.
Stamina, the ability to sustain
prolonged physical and mental effort.
(somber violin music)
My name's Alex Thomson and I'm the skipper of Hugo Boss,
a round-the-world race yacht
and my specialty is sailing single-handed,
that's one person, nonstop, around the world.
The race that I've been trying to win
for the last 15 years is a race called the Vendee Globe.
The course is easy, because you come out of France,
you hang a left down the bottom left of Africa,
around Antarctica, left of America,
and back to France again.
It's about 26,000 miles, it takes three months,
the record is 74 days and a true test of not only
a person's physical stamina,
but more importantly, mental stamina.
I am on my own, there is nobody else
to be able to do something.
There is no support vessels, there are no planes
or helicopters that can get to us and help us.
So, the truth is you have to do it yourself.
It's difficult to define what a typical day is
because the day never ends.
Sleeping is one of the hardest things on the boat.
There is no difference between day and nights.
I'm trying to sleep equally through the day
and through the night and it's just constant work.
At the beginning of the race, you sleep
five, 10, 15 minutes at a time.
Maybe halfway through the race,
I'm sleeping 20 to 40 minutes at a time,
but the longest sleep I had in the whole 74 days
of the last race was just one hour.
Basically, it's just brutal, it's relentless
and really people think that we're crazy
to do this kind of job,
but I work with a sports psychologist
and I have to tell him what the challenges are beforehand
and then he works out a technique
to be able to deal with it.
Whether it be that when I'm in the sudden notion
that I'm surfing down waves at 40 miles an hour,
when I say waves, I say waves that are 50 feet tall.
We call that the runway
and when you're in that cockpit outside,
you're going 40 miles an hour down this runway,
it's very exhilarating, it's great fun.
But then, when you go inside the boat
and you know that the boat is made entirely of carbon fiber
and the thickest part of my boat underneath
is just 2.6 millimeters.
When you go inside that, it's a bit
like going inside a coffin that's hurdling down waves
driven by an autopilot at 40 miles an hour.
The defense mechanism of the body
comes into play and your brain's screaming
you're gonna die, you're gonna die!
And all you can think about is the icebergs,
the containers, the whales, the sharks
that you could be hitting.
So, that one we call it the helicopter view,
it's a visualization technique
that takes me out of being inside the boat
and I can visualize from up at cloud-level,
I can look down, I can see any boats going fast,
but it's not too fast, the waves aren't too big.
I can see that there's no containers,
I can see there's no icebergs
and that just allows me to
reduce the adrenaline going through my body,
reduce the heart rate and get some sleep.
I'm an emotional person.
If I'm doing well, I'm happy,
if I'm doing badly, I'm unhappy.
Now, the result when I'm unhappy is I work harder.
I forgo sleep, I don't eat as much,
because I'm working harder to try and catch more miles.
But, what's worse for me and my character
is when I'm high, when I'm doing really well.
The problem for me at this stage is I could be complacent.
So, to deal with that, my sports psychologist
came up with this technique that we recreated
that feeling, that aura of invincibility,
and then we related it very closely to a near car crash.
Now, this is all happening in my mind,
so it took months to practice it,
but what happens now is whenever
I have that aura of invincibility,
whenever things going just fine,
then I get a shot of adrenaline
as you would do if you were very close to crashing your car.
So, by relating those two together,
whenever I have that feeling where I could be complacent,
I get a shot of adrenaline and so it doesn't exist anymore.
When you're out there on the ocean when stuff goes wrong,
it's very hard to see the end,
the light at the end of the tunnel
with some of the things that go wrong.
So, for instance, when I broke my hydrofoil,
I went from thinking I could win the Vendee Globe
to maybe not even finishing the Vendee Globe.
What my sports psychologist has taught me to do
is to be able to break these huge tasks down
into smaller tasks, so I went from trying to win
the Vendee Globe to then being a podium on the Vendee Globe
to then just even finishing the race,
but even that felt too big.
So, he's taught me to carry on reducing my goals
all the way down until I got to the point
where the lowest goal was to eat a packet of nasty,
freeze-dried food and then make a sail change.
Now, once I completed the task I set myself,
I felt better and you feel better as human beings
when we set ourselves a goal and we achieve that goal.
Again, chemical reactions in the brain make us feel better
and if we feel better, if we're happier, we perform better.
My ultimate goal is to win the Vendee Globe in 2020.
(somber violin music)