Vicki Anstey

So you've had this life-changing experience, and your brain is telling you that there's been this huge shift, but you've come back to a world... Mundanity.

Well, just a world that hasn't changed, and you kind of have.

So I found that really hard.

But actually, the next...

challenge was kind of handed to me so I did a press event for SAS Who Dares Wins and someone came up to me and said do you want to row an ocean?

And I honestly couldn't think of a good reason to say no.

And my mind's racing with all of these kind of thoughts of, I don't even know what an ocean rowing boat looks like.

Which ocean?

How long does it take?

I knew nothing about it.

But I did know that I still hadn't overcome my fear of water because I'd had...

one task in the SAS show that hadn't ended well, almost a sort of what felt to me like a reenactment of that childhood drowning scene.

And I realised that I had to face that properly and it felt like rowing an ocean.

The first thing I did was to sit on a rowing machine for two hours because that would have been the rotation for four people, two hours on, two hours off.

And I thought, well, I'd better find out how two hours feels like.

And I learned my lesson very quickly to be extremely selective with underwear because I ended up with the worst shape imaginable.

So that was a very early lesson.

An awful backache.

And so, yeah, I thought, my God, what am I doing?

Regretting my decisions immediately.