Roz showed neither ability nor enthusiasm for sport while at school, but took up rowing when she arrived at University College, Oxford, because she wanted to be able to eat more without getting fat. She took to rowing with all the zeal of the convert, and went on to gain two half-blues for representing Oxford against Cambridge, in 1988 and 1989. She graduated in 1989 with an honours degree in Law.
In the summer of 1988, she took part in the Greek Trireme expedition, rowing a reconstruction of an ancient Greek battleship around the Aegean with a crew of 170 oarsmen.
After moving to London she rowed for 5 years at Thames Rowing Club. She ran in the New York Marathon in 1998 and London Marathon in 2001 finishing in the top 2% of women in both races and clocking a personal best of 3hrs 19mins.
She was a management consultant with Accenture from 1989 until 1994 (during which time she met her husband, from whom she is now amicably divorced), then moved to a smaller consultancy firm, CHP Consulting. She was an IT project manager with UBS from 1997 to 2000. She finally realised at the age of 34 that there might be more to life than a steady income and a house in the suburbs.
She wheedled her way into becoming the sponsorship organiser for 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. Through her participation in this expedition she was elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, where she met Dan Byles, who had rowed in the first ever Atlantic Rowing Race with his mother. This chance meeting would have far-reaching effects.
After Peru she spent a while searching for the next big project, dabbling in organic baking, houseboat renovation, motorbiking, yoga and coffee shop management. Her environmental conscience was awakened during this period, while researching for a possible motorbike expedition to the homelands of the Hopi tribe of North America. She determined that her next venture had to combine the elements of adventure, travel, physical challenge, environmental awareness and solitude. Finally inspiration struck, and on 11 November 2004, she announced her intention to compete solo in the 2005 Atlantic rowing race.
She is currently in the US, a country that she has loved ever since her first visit when her father went on a work exchange to a Methodist Church in San Diego in 1984. At the tender age of 16, she was profoundly influenced by, its can-do attitude and philosophy of self-determination. She has returned many times over the intervening years, including a summer working in Maine (1987), and a year and a half living in New York's West Village (2000-2001, leaving just before 9/11).
Now that she has discovered her adventurous side Roz has numerous plans for future expeditions all around the globe, using surface transport to minimise environmental impact.
