Team members: Doug Shoup
Hometown: Sedro Woolley, WA, USA
Race vessel: Modified Sailing Angus Row Cruiser
LOA: 19’9″
Human propulsion: Hobie Mirage Drive
Connect: facebook, instagram, youtube
TL;DR: Animal killing, boobs, armpit farts, Karen shaming, and some shoddy philosophy references.
Out of the gate, we want to make it clear: we know we’re wrong.
Given the number of times we skipped class, we’re way out of our depth here, but from what we remember from the hungover back row of Freshman year Philosophy, the thing that tied Socratic and Confucian thinking was they both believed there was a relationship between the name of things and the thing’s behavior. What you called something not just influenced how the world perceived it, but changed how it perceived itself, changed how it acted in the world.
Whoa.
No, this is not the invitation for you to correct us and finally prove that your Masters in Philosophy was actually useful. Thanks for asking, Simon. Regardless of the truth of it, the thought experiment stands:
- Did a generation of Karens create their own bad rep or were they blameless and doomed by their parents?
- It makes sense that no one names their kid Dogshit Failure, but why not Billionaire or Madame President?
It’s hard to know the chicken/egg difference between cause and effect, causation, and correlation, but whether Team Perseverance was inspired to live into their name or divined their true self into word form, the conclusion is the same: over the 4 years we’ve known this guy, we’ve never known him to be anything but perseverance in human form.
It might have been his smart-sounding name, but in this case, Confucius was right.
We met Doug when he applied to R2AK in 2017. He had a ton of outdoor experience, but mostly the kind where you kill something then eat part of it while you drink beers around a campfire that’s within sight of your truck. He wanted to race in a small boat, but tipped the scales at over 300 pounds, had little experience on the water, and wanted to go alone. We told him no, but in the polite way that sounds like “Not yet”. We told him to get in touch if he had addressed the sum total of those issues.
To our surprise, he did—unlike everyone else we said that to before him.
He dropped 90 pounds, literally training his ass off over the winter. He took his tiny boat into winter gales in the tidal treadmill of Deception Pass and big exposed waters just outside. That he did the thing we said, and that he did it to the hilt impressed the hell out of us. We said yes, welcomed him to the R2AK, and he’s been part of the family ever since. (Grab some kleenex and check out his 2018 bio. We’re not crying, you’re crying.)
Doug’s never made it to Ketchikan, but he’s an R2AK legend. He made it to Campbell River in 2018 and then prudently exited when his knees gave out. He was back in 2019 after a rushed 9-month build of an Angus Row Cruiser that was “done enough” by the starting gun. He persevered across the maelstrom of 30+ knots weather in Stage 1; even after the 6-foot waves broke his newly completed daggerboard “It was chunky out there!” (Daily update recap here)
2022 has Doug persevering yet again. Building another, slightly larger custom Angus Row Cruiser, training his ass off again, battling with bodyweight—all with his sights on Ketchikan glory.
Race to Alaska is a lot of things. A poke at pinky-up sailing culture, polite society, and the safe and normal in general. We don’t hold your hand to Alaska, we’re the kid who double dares you to go, then sits in the back making armpit farts and saying “boobs” to see if we can get a reaction.
Boobs.
If we’re doing it right, it’s all in service of creating the double dare that pole vaults people into their own version of incredible. Yes, it’s a race, and yes, someone will come in first, win some money, and earn a headline in a paper or two. To the spirit of the R2AK, incredible is more important than first, and Team Perseverance is our brand of whiskey. Each time we get an application from the Dougs of the world, it feels like we’re doing something right.
Welcome back to the R2AK, Team Perseverance. We can’t wait to see how far you go.