Boathouse Row mourns transatlantic rower Toby Wallace

Source: The Philadelphia InquirerJuly 28--So why were the club flags on Boathouse Row recently at half staff?For a relatively young man (36 years old) who had lived in Philadelphia for just over two years? Who didn't formally belong to any of those boathouses? Who wasn't even American?Did those spiritual descendants of Jack Kelly along the drive named for him believe they recognized a kindred spirit, or hoped so?Did they see a throwback to a time before performance enhancers and luxury suites and Andrew Bynum?Reading his application, Simon Chalk wasn't sure this man Toby Wallace was right for a row across the Atlantic Ocean.自存倉But he hadn't met him yet, didn't know how disarming Toby could be with his 6-foot-71/2 height playing against a cheerfulness that was fairly constant and often contagious."He was quiet, humble," said Gary Marshall, Wallace's boss in the Philadelphia office of Aberdeen Asset Management. "Such a gentle guy."Wallace, who rowed a good portion of the way around the earth, was Cambridge-educated but down to earth."It's not a discipline like flat water rowing," Chalk said of ocean rowing. "Flat water rowing is very exact, training-oriented, very power-based. [Ocean rowing] is not all about stroke or posture. You have to let the thing kind of flow over you a bit because it's not all about control."Chalk, who was organizing a transatlantic voyage, knew plenty of elite rowers."Without being rude, they normally think they're kind of a cut above other people," Chalk said in a telephone interview from England.Wallace was, in fact, a cut above most rowers. The most storied rowing competition in his native England is known simply as the Boat Race -- Cambridge vs. Oxford on the River Thames, first held in 1829. Wallace had won two of them, in 1998 and '99, racing for Cambridge.He had stroked a boat that won the Henley Royal Regatta, the Wimbledon of rowing, and went on to win a national championship in a four. That was unexpected. He and some fellow college boys showed up as underdogs, camped in a tent, and beat some past Olympians.Wallace should have included that last part on the application, about camping in the tent. It gave a better sense of him, as Chalk soon realized."He wanted to grab the experience with both hands," Chalk said.Another thing the skipper soon realized after Wallace joined the international crew: That 6-foot-71/2 inch-frame was not wasted height."An incredibly powerful man," Chalk said. "He just drove the boat."The crew was assembled to attempt a world record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic by rowers. They were on pace, they felt, ahead of it even, until the winds died midway, causing them to fall short -- by "two days, 15 hours, and 31 minutes," Wallace said in April 2012.Chalk has received confirmation, however, that Wallace's name will appear in Guinness World Records, for fastest crossing by eight rowers. (The faster attempt had more rowers.)"It's hard to describe how amazing it is," Wallace said the day of his return to Philadelphia, sitting in his company's Market Street office. "When you're rowing at night, the water is jet black, the sky is jet black. The stars are as bright -- you can see the Milky Way, then you row into dawn."Rowing away from the rising sun."The blackness just becomes a bright blue sky, and the water in the mid-Atlantic is the bluest blue you've ever seen," Wallace said.The boat included carbon-fiber sleep cabins. Wallace's long frame barely fit. "About the size of a dog-kennel cage," Wallace said of the space where he slept. The eight-man team rowed in four-man shifts, what's known in rowing as a quad, each man using two oars.With a blue marker, Toby wrote inspirational sayings on the walls of the cabin, from sources as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre and Hunter S. Thompson. One he adapted from Ralph Waldo Emerson:Live in the sunshine, row in the ocean, drink the wild air.The Hunter Thompson quote showed a good-humored respect for the undertaking:It was the law of the sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.One of their ownToby had tried for the Olympics after college, didn't make the British rowing team, and went looking for new peaks to climb. He got into the money-management business, married, and worked in London, Singapore, and Sydney before coming to Philadelphia."He was living in Australia before he came over," said Marshall, who was not only his boss but his friend. "He was involved in an extreme racing-type thing -- 700 kilometers, running, cycling, hiking, 12 days or more."There were adventures within the adventures. Brushing up against a stinging tree, passing out "like a girl" when a hydrochloric acid treatment was poured over the needles.Another time, he slept against a tree during a race -- just for an hour or two -- when the tre迷你倉新蒲崗 fell and Toby slammed to the ground, still asleep.He ran the Sydney Marathon and raised $2,679.46 for a Yes to Life charity. He joined the Manly Life Saving Club at Sydney's Manly Beach, raced surf boats, won a state championship in Australia as part of the beach patrol team.The lifeguards and surfers in Sydney saw Toby as one of their own, just as Boathouse Row's denizens would.'He's crazy'Nick Robinson rowed for Oxford in the '98 Boat Race, lost to Wallace's Cambridge crew, and ended up in a boat with him that summer representing Britain at the World Rowing Under 23 Championships in Greece."Before we went to row at the world championships, we did quite a long training camp in Belgium," Robinson said. "Toby and I shared a room. There were three training sessions a day, long and exhausting. I remember in the morning, he would wake up and do press-ups and sit-ups. I remember thinking he's crazy."Robinson asked Wallace what was with the extra work. Wallace told him the coach said he needed more upper-body strength."He was quite happily doing it," Robinson said. "I had this realization, 'I understand why [Oxford] lost the Boat Race.' "All these years later, Robinson said, he also understood how Wallace could row 12 hours a day for 34 days across the Atlantic.As fate would have it, Wallace and his Oxford rival Robinson both ended up working for Aberdeen. The two Brits rowed together one last time in Philadelphia, in the Dad Vail Regatta several years ago, in Aberdeen's eight in the Corporate Challenge. They were the two ringers. The rest of the boat pretty much consisted of novices."A lot of good rowers who end up in a difficult boat don't have much patience," Robinson said. "Toby was very cheerful. All he really cared about was getting the most out of the people in the boat, rather than trying to show everybody what a great rower he was. It was a good happy day. We had a good laugh that day."Sudden endToby didn't die alone.There had been another ocean crossing by the same boat this spring, but Wallace couldn't get enough time off from work, so he signed on for a shorter adventure.In Britain, a popular challenge for cyclists is to ride from the bottom of the island to the top, Land's End at the extreme southwest to John o' Groats at the northeast tip of Scotland.Andrew McMenigall, a 47-year-old former British Army officer who is a senior investment manager in Aberdeen's Edinburgh office and a triathlon coach who trained potential Olympians, put together the ride to raise funds for the Kirsten Scott Memorial Trust, in memory of a former Aberdeen colleague who had died of cancer two years ago. It is the same charity Wallace raised funds for on his ocean crossing.The men planned to cycle 960 miles in seven days.They made it just past 40 miles.Of all Toby's adventures, it turned out that riding a bicycle on the shoulder of a highway was the most dangerous.Hours into the first day, on July 2, both bicycles were hit by a 32-ton truck. Both men died instantly. The driver of the truck was arrested, charged with suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving, and released on bail. One bicycle, broken apart, ended up on the highway. The other, just as mangled, was in high grass by the side of the road.Services for Toby were Thursday in England.Favorite dayDunstan Bertschinger, a former Cambridge teammate, didn't wait to eulogize Toby. He posted a 9 minute, 38 second video on YouTube July 5, and wound it up with maybe the only message you can really take away from such a horrific event."Just don't sit around waiting," he said through his tears. "Toby never sat around and waited. He got off his [butt] and did stuff. He did what he wanted to do. He had a big heart and, you know, he connected with other people. So get off your [butt] and do it. Do something today that you've been meaning to do. You never know. Tomorrow might be too late. Do it today."Bertschinger also acknowledged that even among their Cambridge crew, Toby was the one still doing it. Others had grown fat and fallen out of shape, their glory days behind.The day Toby returned to Philadelphia last year after his sea voyage, he talked of other goals -- maybe one day taking on the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race or the Dakar Rally off-road race. But he wanted another go at the Atlantic."Now we've kind of got this unfinished business with the ocean, to go and try it again," Wallace said.The crew this year had purposefully left the inspirational messages from last year's crossing.One Toby had written in his cabin needed no attribution."What day is it? asked Pooh."It's today," squeaked Piglet."My favorite day," said Pooh.Contact Mike Jensen at mjensen@phillynews.com. Follow on Twitter @jensenoffcampus.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Philadelphia Inquirer Visit The Philadelphia Inquirer at www.philly.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉出租