Associate Editor Aileen Mack joined Dockwalk in July 2018. She is a graduate of the University of Florida with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. If she’s not at a concert or coffee shop, she is lost in a book, movie or a YouTube rabbit hole. Email Aileen at aileen@dockwalk.com.
Traveling the world as a yacht captain with a 40-year maritime career garners its own material for a book, but for Captain Grant Maughan, that’s barely where his story begins. Since 2012, he’s run approximately 90 ultramarathons between 100 and 1,000 miles, including a 135-miles race across Death Valley in the middle of summer and pulling a sled across the Iditarod Trail in Alaska. And after writing for a couple years, he has self-published his autobiography Freezing Hot on Amazon.
The book takes readers from his life growing up in Australia to how traveling inadvertently led him to endurance sport, including his life at sea and observations about his journeys to races and climbs.
His seafaring career began on commercial fishing vessels in Australia and included deep sea trawlers fishing for orange roughy, prawn trawlers and purse-seining. Then he saw M/Y Coral Island coming into the harbor in the Seychelles and was convinced he needed to check out yachting — joining Australia’s largest yacht 105ft Southern Cross II as chief engineer after a part-time stint teaching.
While he was captain on 210ft Turmoil, the owner’s son convinced Grant to do a training run with him as he was planning to run a marathon. “I could hardly walk afterwards, but he gave me a book called Ultramarathon Man by Dean Karanzes, and right away I wanted to have the word ultrarunner associated with my name,” Grant shares. “I started running.”
That first year, he ran the Boston Marathon, Miami Marathon, along with four 100-mile races, two half Ironmans, two full Ironmans and some half marathons.
“It is hard to train when you are a yacht captain. Generally, I just have to turn up at an event with what I have and see what happens,” he shares. “You have to be stubborn to finish one of these things and I guess I have plenty of that.”
If the boat pulls into port, the captain tries to do some running, walking or biking. When he was training for the Sahara race while on Turmoil, Grant ran around the decks, up and down all the stairs with a 40lb backpack on. As if ultramarathons weren’t enough of a challenge, he also got into mountaineering in the process, summitting Everest, Denali in Alaska, Aconcagua in Argentina.
“After all these adventures, people kept asking when I was going to write it all down, so I did,” he shares. “It was a labor of love getting it all down but an even harder task to condense it from 1,000 pages to 300.”
Grant is proof that age is just a number and no burden for these adventures as he was 47 when he started running races and climbed Everest at 55. Despite all he’s done, there’s still some left on his bucket list: rowing solo across the Atlantic, ski to the South Pole and across the Greenland ice cap and ride a motorcycle in the Dakar Rally.
“I hope the readers can see that you don’t have to be a superman to do some of these things; you just need a passion to finish a project whether it hurts or is uncomfortable,” he says. “We have such a life of comfort these days, so I feel it is good for people to experience some of these endeavors where you need to rely on yourself and convince your mind to get through it.”
Follow him on Instagram for his latest adventures: @dingofish_express; @freezinghotbook.