Tez Steinberg has made history, and he can be an inspiration to us all. Just an everyday 36-year-old man from Colorado, Tez put his mind and his limits to the test when he embarked on a solo rowing excursion that last over 125 days. During his four-month journey, he traveled from Hawaii to Australia, where he was greeted by a crowd of supporters who had followed along with his journey. There, he was given the first bottle of fresh, cold water that he'd had since December 2023, when he set off from Hawaii.
When reminiscing on the journey, Tez described it as a "challenging expedition" in a statement to ABC News. In order to overcome the conditions and being alone, he instead focused on the one thing he could control: his own reaction.
"I try to focus on what's in my control," he explained. "I can't change the wind and the waves. All I can change is how I react to it." But Tez's journey didn't begin in Hawaii. It actually started in 2020.
More from LittleThings: 81-Year-Old Best Friends Who Traveled The World Still Have More Adventures On Their List
That year, the 36-year-old traveler rowed solo for 71 days from Monterey, California, to Oahu, Hawaii. In a previous interview, he told ABC News that his first journey inspired him to "go back out again" for his second one.
"I was so surprised by the experience of being on the ocean, by how beautiful the ocean is, and also how much plastic I saw," he said. He also opened up that his love for rowing came as a way to help him during his battle with depression, which he started experiencing in college. Endurance sports became a way to help him cope.
"It helped me feel better, which isn't a surprise," Tez shared. "But as I went farther and farther, pushing myself through marathons and triathlons, I discovered this belief in myself that I'm so much stronger than I thought I was."
In 2016, the sudden death of his father, who died by suicide, pushed Tez to challenge himself to solo rowing across an ocean. Upon successfully enduring the journey without any prior professional experience, he said he realized he could use his story to "inspire other people to believe in themselves and their potential to change and grow."
From his journey, he created United World Challenge, a nonprofit organization with a mission to "accelerate solutions for the ocean plastic crisis and inspire a more courageous world," according to the website. The purpose of his second expedition was to focus on "ocean conservation, and specifically ocean plastic," he said. "All the plastic I saw at sea was just heartbreaking."
"I couldn't come back and ignore it, and [I] needed to find some way to make a difference," he shared. "And so with [the] next expedition, [we] launched a crowdfund. And we're raising funds to build river barriers in some of the most polluted rivers of the world, stopping plastic before it flows to sea."
