Team members: Robert McCall
Hometown: Sharnford, United Kingdom
Race vessel: Seaward Quest Kayak
LOA: 19′
Human propulsion: Epic Mid Wings
Connect: facebook
TL;DR: RuPaul, slavery, English teeth, childbirth, and castration.
At least until later this year/month when The Handmaid’s Tale gets re-classed as predictive non-fiction, look quick—we live in an era when how you are born is less likely than ever to define how you get to be. It’s still pretty much everything, but for thousands of years it was everything-er; essentially everyone stayed one to none standard deviations from how they plopped into the world. Firstborn son of a king? From the screaming “regal” moment when they wipe the goop from your eyes and cut the cord, you’re a king. Born into slavery? You’re gonna spend your life enslaved. For pretty much all of human history unless you got the nod and the snip to sing the high hallelujah, whatever man and/or lady bits you got in the beginning dictated +/- what leading roles you were offered on the global stage. Haters gonna hate, oppression is real and everywhere, and we’re a million miles from fair and easy. The low bar, cold comfort truth is that the hard we have now makes it more possible than maybe ever to jump the line when biology and chance got it wrong, and the thing you are is different than the born-to circumstances the world assigns.
Royals can chuck it all and move to Canada; on this continent, slavery is at least illegal (and increasingly consensual/recreational); surgeries, hormones, and RuPaul exist. We’re nowhere near global economic equality or judgment-free self-determination, but compared to the uniformly oppressive forever of human history, things might be loosening up. At least for now, at least for some things, at least on parts of the West Coast.
Our slightly related and overly diluted point? These days, even the English can become whitewater kayakers.
Imagine the English countryside. What do you see? If you’re like us, it’s sheep, long rock fences, more sheep, and some old guy wearing tweed. Imagine that’s accurate, then imagine you are a young boy with marmite-stained teeth seeking the whitewater adrenaline of the Class 5, Colorado-style rapids depicted in the Mountain Dew commercials of the early 80s. You know you are meant for trick boating the canyons of the Rockies, to do the Dew, but you are trapped flatwater paddling in the bucolic hellscape of Britain’s rolling hills. No hormones or surgery exist for that mismatch of self and circumstance.
In an act of defiance and self-definition, Team Zen Dog didn’t stuff down their truth, marry a beard, and learn to suffer in silence. Robert did what any courageous whitewater-identifying person would do: find the nearest elevation and water flow and start living into his truth.
Since the 20-years-ago time when Team Zen Dog trained and then taught whitewater kayaking in the French Alps, this one-man voyage of self-actualization has unfolded himself to himself and the world—one paddle-stroked endurance race, one marathon, one hate and sufferfest event at a time. He’s run up the Matterhorn and across entire countries (ok, Lichtenstein), paddled nonstop and 125 miles downriver (at least 8 times) on the Devizes to the Westminster race, and the 444 miles of the Yukon River Quest. Why? Because that’s Robert’s true form, and at least since 2014, he’s been working up to the R2AK he saw when we nailed $10,000 to a tree.
Despite his quest to find himself, we know he’s found his tribe of fellow adventure-identifying hooligans because of his plan to race the R2AK on a boat he’s never seen. For 2020 he bought a kayak, which has been in British Columbia, waiting for him for two years. Racing the biggest adventure race of your life in a boat you’ve never even seen? That’s R2AKAF.
A whitewater-identifying Englishman who has no idea what actual boat he’s going to paddle, on the longest, most unsupported version of himself that he is aspiring to become? Regardless of how high your hackles got at the first paragraph of this thing, you’ve got to give a nod to the self-actualized spirit of adventure that Team Zen Dog is living into, and that he might have landed the community who will welcome him as he is.
Give us your tired, wet, and driven masses, longing to be free.
Welcome to the R2AK, Team Zen Dog. Our aspiration is identical to your same-named hotdog stand’s promise: we’ll make you one with everything.