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The power of one — 3,000 miles to go for a global circuit

CHATHAM — Since leaving London four years ago, Sarah Outen has been plucked from the Pacific by the Japanese Coast Guard, come face to face with a grizzly bear in Alaska, run out of water in the Gobi Desert — and gotten seven marriage proposals. She’s endured pneumonia, salt sores, reckless drivers, capsizings, and her own personal demons.

But she’s also met strangers who have fed and housed her. And mid-Pacific, she got engaged.

Outen is 22,000 miles into a 25,000-mile attempt to circle the globe powered solely by her own muscles — in a kayak, on a bicycle, and by rowboat. She hopes to shove off from Cape Cod in the middle of next week, rowing her 21-foot boat across the Atlantic in the last leg of her quest.

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Outen believes she is the first woman to attempt such an expedition.

Why is she doing it? It’s the adventure of the journey that is driving her, she says. And with the end in sight — she hopes to arrive in England in the fall — she’s both excited and nervous.

“I enjoy the challenge of getting from A to B using my own muscle power,” says Outen, 29. “You see things you wouldn’t see if you’d blasted over in a plane or shot through in a car.’’

These days, she’s in Chatham readying her boat, Happy Socks — and lifting weights. “I need a westerly wind and a clear forecast,” she says on a recent day at Ryder’s Cove Boat Yard. She’s got a sunny smile and a few more freckles than when she took off in April 2011.

Outen’s journey has taken her across the English Channel.Jim Shannon

Outen isn’t new to adventure rowing. In 2009, when she was 24, she became the first woman and youngest person to row solo across the Indian Ocean. “The months alone I spent in the wild like that, I loved it. I felt empowered by it,” says Outen, who rowed on the Oxford University team.

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On her current odyssey, Outen consumes 4,000 calories a day while at sea, each day’s rations packed into plastic bags: peanut butter, nuts, oat cakes, protein shakes, and pasta that she can cook on a small camp stove. She’s got a desalination unit for drinking water and sponge baths.

The bathroom? “That’s a different bucket,” she says.

As she speaks, she’s rolling red foul-weather paint on the bottom of the boat. This is not your mother’s rowboat. It’s high-density foam covered by fiberglass, with a tiny cabin to sleep in and another for storage. It’s equipped with GPS, a compass, solar panel, VHF radio, satellite phone, and is designed to self-right when overturned.

Her affinity for the sea is surprising, given that she grew up in a landlocked village in Oxfordshire — and has a fear of deep water. When she was 21, her father died after suffering from severe arthritis. Outen dedicated her Indian Ocean voyage to him. That trip took four months and earned her three Guinness world records.

Outen had to find sponsors for her current trip, which she has dubbed London2London Via the World. Her four main ones are Accenture, Mars candy, Ernst & Young, and Iridium. She has dozens of others, from corporations to individuals, and her website includes a place to donate to her causes, from breast cancer to clean water. So far, she figures the trek has cost “a few hundred thousand dollars.”

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Outen has traversed the mountains of China.handout

She’s also got a team that supports her — from a distance. A mix of volunteers and paid workers, they include a meteorologist and a psychotherapist. “The mind journey is almost as big as the physical journey,” says Outen, who has suffered depression during setbacks along the way.

Her therapist helped prepare her for the Indian Ocean voyage, too, and Outen remains in regular touch with her.

Outen won’t talk about the most dangerous parts of her expedition; she says thinking of them can retraumatize her. But in a blog post six months after she capsized in the Pacific, she wrote that “an ocean of madness and sadness swamped me, and I would like to encourage folks that it’s okay to ask for help. If you need it, seek it.”

It all began on April 1, 2011, when she set off in her kayak from Tower Bridge in London, paddling down the Thames and through the night across the English Channel. In another kayak was Justine Curgenven, a veteran sea kayaker and filmmaker who is documenting some of the journey.

Outen has been blogging and tweeting and says the online response has been good company. “Sleep deprivation is pretty big on a kayak,” she says. “We often had huge paddles of over 12 hours. Our longest was 18 hours of paddling to reach land.”

After the channel crossing, in Calais, Outen hopped on her bike, which she named Hercules, to begin cycling 11,000 miles through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, China, and back into Russia’s far eastern reaches. The whole thing took about six months.

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One of her favorite times was when a young Chinese man decided to cycle with her across the country. “He didn’t even own a bike, but he got one,” she says. His name, Gao, is now inscribed on her boat, and the quote: “Being scared of something is never a good reason not to do it.”

Next, she kayaked and cycled more than 1,000 miles to Japan, where she wintered while preparing for her 4,500-mile row across the north Pacific to Canada.

But 28 days into it, her boat was hit by 50-foot waves during Tropical Storm Mawar. She had strapped into her bunk. “It was just horrendous. There was so much foam and spume, I would look out the hatch and just see white.”

Terrified, she kept in hourly touch with team members. Eventually her communications system ripped away, and water seeped into her cabin. The Japanese Coast Guard picked her up 600 miles at sea. Her boat, Gulliver, was lost.

Dehydrated, sick, and traumatized, Outen flew back to England and spent nine months at home, recovering. It was then that she met Lucy Allen, who runs a family farm in Oxfordshire, and fell in love.

In April 2013, two years after setting out from London, Outen began rowing from Japan across the Pacific again, aiming for the west coast of Vancouver Island. Back at sea — “my 66th day, July 1, 2013” — she proposed via satellite phone to Allen, who said yes.

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Sarah Outen is set to embark from Chatham to cross the Atlantic and finish her 25,000-mile journey.Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff

Hampered by stormy weather, Outen diverted north to the remote Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Five months after setting out, she completed the Pacific leg, suffering from pneumonia and debilitating allergies. She returned to the UK to recuperate and train for a 1,500-mile kayak trip.

A year ago, she and Curgenven set out in their kayaks from Adak Island in the Aleutians. The island chain is in the Bering Sea, one of the world’s most dangerous bodies of water. Carrying a tent, they camped every night for 101 days, visiting isolated communities. “They’re subsistence farmers and hunters and everyone was so lovely,” Outen says.

Last August, Outen hopped on Hercules in Homer, Alaska, to cycle from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic — 5,000 miles through Alaska, Canada, and the United States during one of the worst winters on record in parts of the nation. Along the way, she stopped to speak at schools and fund-raisers, sleeping in a frozen tent she carried in her saddle bags, or staying with friends and strangers who were following her trip online.

“I loved the biking but drivers are idiots. They don’t give a damn about bikes and they’re on their cellphones,” she says. More than once, she was forced off the road and came close to being hit. Seven months later, she reached Chatham.

Word of her journey spread to Pleasant Bay Community Boating members on the Cape. As a result, she’s been living free of charge in a Chatham rental property since early April. Chatham Health Club has given her access to its gym; the masseuse has been giving her free massages.

“Chatham has been especially kind to me,” she says.

Outen’s team also includes some volunteers from the Boston area. Charlie Clapp of Hingham rowed on the US team that won a silver medal at the 1984 Olympics. He recently arranged a fund-raiser for Outen at the Duxbury Bay Maritime School.

“Any one leg of what she’s doing is ambitious,” Clapp says. “Cycling across America is a big ride, and she did it from Alaska this winter, and with a big smile on her face. She’s pretty remarkable.”

Weather permitting, she’ll be on the Atlantic when she turns 30 later this month. “I’m excited because then I will have had a birthday alone on the boat on three oceans, including two on the Pacific,” she says.

Most of all, she’s looking forward to getting home, two years after her projected arrival. “This journey has taught me that family and friends are the most important thing in life.”

And her mother, though supportive, “is a little more gray than when I started out.”


Bella English can be reached at english@globe.com.