But the worst moment of the trip wasn't being beaten bloody by two hurricanes, the near breakup of her 23-foot boat or even the prospect of her own death.
The lowest point was when she had to summon rescuers and call it quits 900 miles short of her goal.
The second she pressed the emergency beacon to call for help, she had regrets because it was the first time that the hard-driving McClure had experienced personal failure.
"Setting off the beacon was worse than dying," she said during a telephone interview from her home in Louisville, Ky. "That, to me, was unbearable."
McClure, who succeeded in becoming the first women to row across the Atlantic alone on her third try in 1999, will speak Wednesday in Billings at an event sponsored by Rocky Mountain College.
The title of her speech, "Dare Mighty Things," is a quote from Teddy Roosevelt, who said that it is better to "dare mighty things ... even though checked by failure" than to "live in the gray twilight that knows no victory or defeat."
McClure said that her Billings speech will be about how people can dare mighty things in "the pick-and-shovel work of ordinary lives."
Growing up in Kentucky, McClure always was athletic and played on church-league teams as a child. In high school, basketball was her major sport.
If you go
Tori Murden McClure will present a speech, "Dare Mighty Things," at a secretaries and administrative assistants' lunch at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Sheraton Billings Hotel. It is sponsored by the Rocky Mountain College OutReach Community Services.
The cost is $25 per person or $165 for a table of eight. For information, call the OutReach office at 657-1040.
Letters that McClure wrote about her rowing trips across the Atlantic, particularly of her 1998 adventure, make fascinating reading. To find them, go to:
https://www.adept.net/americanpearl/. |
She took up rowing as a college student at Smith College in Northhampton, Mass. Later, she would earn a master's degree in divinity at Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Louisville.
In the 1980s, McClure cross-country skied across Antarctica to become one of the first two women and among the first Americans to reach the South Pole by an overland route.
She also has ice climbed, sea kayaked and scaled major mountains in Alaska, Kenya and Bolivia.
Taking on difficult physical challenges like the Atlantic crossing happened one step at a time, she said.
She wasn't looking for records to break or any world firsts to achieve. Instead, her motivation was to learn the lessons that pushing herself to the limits of her considerable physical abilities would teach.
She also sought a life that was something more than just amassing the maximum amount of personal luxuries.
She made her first try to row the Atlantic in 1997 when she was part of a two-woman team. During the first day of that trip, she got so sick from food poisoning or a virus acquired before leaving the Canary Islands that she became severely dehydrated and was unable to move. After the boat was towed back to the Canary Islands, McClure spend a couple of days in a hospital recovering.
Starting out again, the women had to turn back once more after an electrical problem depleted batteries used to desalinate water.
On her second try in 1998, McClure went solo, this time planning a different trans-Atlantic route, rowing from the west to the east. After she had rowed about 3,000 miles, she was hit by the full brunt of Hurricane Danielle.
During a day and a half, the storm capsized her self-righting boat numerous times, including several times in a "pitchpole," end-over-end fashion.
Hurricane experts to whom she has talked about Danielle have estimated that McClure encountered waves 70 feet high.
While her boat was somersaulting, McClure was slammed around the tiny cabin.
"Head over heals, heals over head: wood, fiberglass, flesh and one, all interacted in unnatural ways," she wrote in a letter posted on a Web site about the trip.
One capsize dislocated her shoulder, and another capsize snapped the shoulder back in its socket.
Convinced that her boat would break apart, she thought about setting off a distress beacon that would bring rescuers. But the storm was so nasty that she couldn't ask others to risk their own lives to save her.
Eventually, Danielle abated, and the sun came out. McClure bailed out her boat and thought she could continue if she had a little rest.
But, after about a day of good weather, the outer edge of a second hurricane, Earl, blew, through further depleting her waning strength.
Her boat rolled three more times, during which she hit her head, opening a wound.
It was then that she set off the distress signal and was rescued.
By giving up, she felt defeated. What she didn't realize then was that that deeply eviscerating experience broke open something inside her -- the ability to love and be loved.
"Before, I was respected, but not loved," she said.
It enabled her to be receptive to love when her husband-to-be, Mac McClure, came into her life a little while later.
In 1999, Tori McClure completed a solo crossing in 81 days, traveling east to west, from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. During the trip, she again ran into a hurricane, but one that did less damage than Danielle.
McClure happily turned 40 last month because, she said, she now will be among the younger women competing in master's rowing races.
Mary Pickett can be reached at 657-1262 or at mpickett@billingsgazette.com.
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