Roz Savage
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Rosalind (Roz) Savage is a British amateur rower and runner.
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[edit] Background
Savage was born on December 23, 1967 in Cheshire. She took up rowing at University College, Oxford, and went on to gain two half-blues for representing Oxford against Cambridge, and to win blades with the Univ Women's 1st VIII in 1988 and 1989.
In 2003 she became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and took part in an Anglo-American expedition that discovered Inca ruins in the Andean cloudforests near Machu Picchu. She then spent a further three months in Peru, travelling solo and researching her first book, Three Peaks in Peru.
She ran in the London and New York marathons, finishing in the top 2% for women in each, and has run a personal best of 3 hours 19 minutes.
A latecomer to the life of adventure, she was previously a management consultant (Accenture and CHP) and investment banker (UBS), before realising at the age of 34 that there might be more to life than a steady income and a house in the suburbs.
[edit] The Voyage
The Voyage is a 7-year project that will take her all around the globe, using surface transport to minimise environmental impact.
[edit] First Leg
On March 14, 2006 she completed the first leg by finishing the Trans-Atlantic Rowing Race as the only sole female competitor, taking 103 day to complete the crossing. This she did unsupported, despite breaking all four of her oars and having to row with patched-up oars for more than half the race. Her cooking stove failed after only 20 days, then her navigation equipment and music player. She managed to maintained her daily weblog right up until day 80 when her satellite phone failed, leaving only the movement detected by her positional transponder to indicate that she was still alive.
Despite all this, and the danger of having to cut off the rope to her failed sea anchor in shark infested waters, she arrived safely at the finish in Antigua. At 5 ft 4 in high and weighing only 105 pounds, she looked an unlikely ocean rower. She is only the 5th woman to row solo across the Atlantic from East to West.
[edit] Second Leg
She has stated her intention of becoming the first woman ever to row solo across the Pacific Ocean, completing it in 3 stages starting from San Francisco in Summer 2007.
