Atlantic pairs world record rowers Mark Slats and Kai Weidmer ponder overall record attempt

Rowers Mark Slats’ and Kai Weidmer’s performance in the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge is already becoming stuff of legend. The world-record setting pair, competing in team Row4Cancer, won overall – beating even the four-person teams despite having half the manpower. They left from La Gomera on December 12, and arrived in Antigua after 32 days 22 hours, 13 minutes. It is five days faster than the former pairs record set in the 2017-18 race by Dave Spelman and Max Thorpe in team Resilient: X. Slats and Weidmer both put that success down to their shared mindset, pride in each other’s efforts and willingness to hear the other’s ideas. “It was amazing. It was so good together. We never had an argument,” Slats, 37, said. When Slats and Weidmer left La Gomera their tactic was to compete against each other shift by shift to motivate themselves to go as fast as possible. “This didn’t work. We found it was much better to do it the opposite way around: I was proud of his time, and he was proud of how much I did. We did it together. It wasn’t about how much I do, it was about how much we did together,” Slats said. Atlantic rowing race winners set world record From the start, the pair’s aim was to win the race outright. They knew they could be faster than the four-person teams if the wind was in their favour because their boat was lighter. But the wind was not favourable. They met two weeks of head winds, or no winds at all. In those conditions, it should have been “impossible” to go as faster as four people, Slats said, and yet they managed it. View this post on Instagram A post shared by MARK SLATS (@markslatsofficial) “We had to up the plan, we decided we had to row longer, we had to be smoother between shifts. We were constantly upgrading. But we never disagreed. Always, Kai came up with an idea, I thought “good, this is an upgrade of one or two per cent”. We became such a strong team,” Slats said. “Every shift, we talked about how we can make the boat go faster,” he said. “And we always had a bit of humour and a smile on our faces.” Slats is no stranger to success. In the 2017-18 race, he set the solo world record. He finished in 30 days, taking 19 days of the pervious record. He was just 17 hours behind the overall world record, set by the Four Oarsmen the same year. View this post on Instagram A post shared by MARK SLATS (@markslatsofficial) “I was very very aware that if the campaign went wrong people would blame me because he has proven himself,” Weidmer, 25, said. “But I didn’t care about that. I learned so much from minute one of the experience. I knew this was going to be such an amazing experience to learn from. He is the perfect mentor.” Weidmer loved the row more than he expected, but his relative inexperience was clear in the first three days. He struggled and could not sleep. It was “horrific”, he said, and he wondered if he could last a whole month. “It is a skill to fall asleep in these circumstances,” he said. Weidmer had to learn about all the noises. He needed to assign them a place in his mind’s eye so he knew that a particular clang or bump did not mean Slats was overboard or they’d hit something. “All the noises had a place, and when I found this, I could fall asleep,” he said. The start of an ocean row is often the hardest bit as the body adjusts to the new environment. Aches and pains can appear everywhere. But the pair had embarked on tough 24-hour rows for training. Weidmer said: “Physical pain goes. You have to push yourself in training so you learn this, otherwise you might worry.” Slats echoed Weidmer: “It’s all a game between the mind and the body. It’s the mind saying you cannot go any more. I used to think it was the body saying it couldn’t go, but it’s the mind stopping you to preserve the body. Once you get going, the pain goes after a few days.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by MARK SLATS (@markslatsofficial) To start, the conditions were good. They could surf down waves, and were being pushed by the wind. But then it died and they had no help from mother nature at all. “When there’s light wind all of a sudden it feels like the boat weights a ton, it is full of bricks, the oar feels different in the water,” Slats said. “It’s a different movement and the pains return. Massive pains in our hands because we’re pulling so hard, but we didn’t want to lose miles.” Marking 20 years since first Chinese rower crossed the Atlantic They were burning with competitive drive for every second of the row. Bad conditions and headwinds were their time to push. They knew they could only gain a few miles a day on their competition in good winds, but if they pulled hard in headwinds, when everyone else had stopped to wait out the bad patch, the could draw away. Slats was so tired, he’d forget Weidmer’s name. He hallucinated children crying, people climbing on the boat and rowing under bridges. “Headwinds, rowing for two hours with a heartrate of 180. What are we doing here? Ah, I just love it. In the elements, in the most remote places in the world, I just enjoy these moments so much,” Slats said. “I have a rule, every shift you should row like it’s your last. Only care about your next shift when you start it.” Hongkonger’s ‘anxiety mixed with excited’ on cusp of Atlantic row Between discussing how to get the boat to move faster, the pair were also letting their minds wander to the future. “We were at sea talking about doing it a second time because we didn’t break the Four Oarsman record, which was impossible in those winds,” Slats added. “I think we went as fast as we could.”