As a young boy I once took a train, one hour each way, just to see and touch a yacht called Flyer. It belonged to Conny van Rietschoten, the only skipper ever to win the Whitbread Round the World Race twice. I'd never met him, but Conny was living proof that something extraordinary was actually possible. Not a hero on a pedestal. Just someone who'd done the thing, and showed it could be done. That single afternoon set the direction for most of what followed.

I grew up in the Netherlands, on the water, a lake at first, where curiosity mattered more than results. As a boy I learned to read the weather rather than fight it, and that way of paying attention never left.

Offshore and ocean racing came later. It leaves no room for ego. Long days at sea, making judgement calls in constantly changing conditions, taught me that the hardest moments in any journey are rarely about the problem in front of you. They're about what happens to people when the problem doesn't go away quickly enough, when the will to keep going gets tested hardest, and giving up starts to look reasonable. I know that feeling from the inside. Every time, the choice was the same: stay focused, hold the direction, finish. Giving up was simply never the answer.

In 2003 my team won our class in the Transat Cape to Rio. In 2006 we won the race overall, in sixteen days, on a yacht I'd built and developed myself.