Who Are You Out There on Your Own?
Nine days from Hawaii, alone in the Pacific, Kelsey Pfendler is mourning the person she got to be out there. You don't have to row an ocean to understand why.
Right now, a woman named Kelsey Pfendler is alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, rowing a 24-foot boat toward Hawaii.
I’ve been following her journey for weeks and I can’t look away.
Kelsey is the 31-year-old Grand Canyon river guide who set off from California on May 21 — no motor, no crew — and has since taken off in our social feeds.
She sleeps about four hours a night. She puts cream on the salt sores every couple of hours so they don’t open. If she makes it, she’ll be the first American woman to do this solo, and maybe the youngest and fastest woman on record.
On Saturday, she was 457 miles out and had just rowed 73 miles in a single day, the fastest of her whole trip.
Right On Time is our weekly series of lessons in courage, clarity, and change for those rewriting their story.
Kelsey rowed the same route in 2024 as the skipper of a four-woman crew. She spent years getting ready to come back with a faster boat, weather routers, a safety team onshore. She did her homework. She seems incredibly well-prepared; I’ve enjoyed her video boat tours as she walks us through all her supplies and back-up plans.
Can you ever really feel completely ready for something like that? Out in the wild, on your own… it’s not like she could change her mind and call a cab to come home.
At some point the planning is done, the conditions still aren’t perfect, and the only way to make it the right time is by going ahead.
And so she pushed off anyway, right into headwinds that shoved her backward for a week. Her hands blistered by the second day. She kept going anyway.
Kelsey drew a finish line about 46 days out, and she’s rowing toward it. She’ll land, take a shower, go home.
And on a day she was clearly winning, she said she’d spent the day in two different trains of thought. “I’m so excited that everything’s going so well, and I’m doing the thing I came out here to do.” That was the first one.
The second: “There’s also part of me that spent the day just kind of grieving the loss of this row a little.”
She has maybe nine days left, and she’s already grieving it.
“I’ve been mourning the person I got to be out here in the middle of nowhere, alone for the last 37 days.”
She found someone out there she’s going to miss, and she’s mourning her before the row is even over.
That’s the part most of us could actually borrow. You don’t have to row an ocean. You can pick a thing: a few months in a country you’ve only visited, a season trying the work you keep circling.
Put a start date and an end date on it. Try a different life on for size, with a clear way back.
The way back is what makes it doable. It doesn’t mean you’re coming back the same.
Kelsey will be home soon, and that version of her will start to fade, the way it does once you’re back inside a normal week.
But she got to meet her. And that only happened because one morning in May, she stopped waiting for better conditions and pushed off.
There’s a version of you out there, too… not a better one, but the one you don’t see inside the safety and comfort of your routines. She doesn’t show up because you finally feel ready. She shows up on the far side of a start date you actually keep.
✌🏻 Miranda
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