He paddled the Mississippi River alone in just 34 days, setting world record
It only took two days until Ilia Smirnov realized the enormity, danger and borderline foolishness of paddling the entire Mississippi River by himself — an awareness that struck in the icy waters of Minnesota, far from help in his lonely canoe.
His dread built to a small breakdown by day five, when he dragged his 18-foot boat nicknamed “Uncomfortable” over a steep portage that lasted nearly half a mile, grasping that he hadn’t yet reached the Twin Cities let alone New Orleans.
Panic reached full volume on day 15, when Smirov paddled face-first into a 20 mph wind from daybreak to sunset, gritting his teeth while the whitecaps crashed around him.
“It literally was like ripping my soul to pieces,” said Smirnov, 42, back home in Harnett County. “It was a full-on fight. The Mississippi did not want to give it to me.”
With grit, meditation and a diet rich in chia seeds, Smirnov finished all 2,350 miles of the river in just 34 days — a world-record now being verified by Guinness.
In a month on the river, he witnessed the United States at its most pristine, paddling the headwaters with a squadron of 100 pelicans, watching otters and muskrats play on the shore.
On the same trip, he saw the country at its most corrupted, passing industrial hulks with flaming smokestacks along the 18-mile stretch of Louisiana known as Cancer Alley.
From north to south, he paddled 15 hours a day, stopping to catch fitful rest in a tent he pitched by the riverside, then heading back out before dawn. This regimen required him to let everything go but the strokes ahead.
“It was just on one side of my mind all the time,” he said. “Holy crap, I cannot hold myself emotionally from all the pressures, all that’s happening, and this absurd physical demand, and all this exhaustion. And then my mind was like, ‘You can do whatever you want to do, and we’ll keep paddling.’”
“So American”
Smirnov came to North Carolina from Russia as a teenager, studying at UNC-Asheville then working as a computer programmer until he and his wife, Megan, wanted a different life.
In a Craigslist ad, they found a canoe outfitter for sale along the Cape Fear River in Lillington, so they launched into a new life with children and a drastically different form of income.
“He didn’t know the difference between a kayak and a canoe at the time,” said his friend Alton Chewning from the Carolina Canoe Club. “He’s since learned the difference.”
Smirnov learned paddling the fiercest whitewater around: the Gauley in West Virginia, the Grand Canyon. But the Mississippi beckoned, running the length of the country, carrying so many of its stories. He ordered road maps from every state it touched and taped them together on the wall, making the long blue line his next big goal.
“It’s so American,” he said.
“Little guy in a canoe”
Those who’ve never seen it imagine the Mississippi as lazy, bucolic, fit for travel by raft.
But Smirnov traveled through 26 locks and dams, calling ahead by marine radio so the lockmaster could let him through.
He paddled alongside hundreds of barges, sometimes eight of them lashed together, a hazard that always threatened to suck him under or capsize him with wakes the size of ocean waves. He called their captains by radio, too, warning them to watch out for a tiny boat up ahead.
Then by the time he reached New Orleans, he met up with ferocious storms that forced him to park his canoe on the rocks and wait. He spent a night beneath a sheet of canvas covering his canoe, riding out the storm with mosquitoes and cockroaches.
Up until the last mile, Smirnov questioned whether he’d reach Mile Zero.
“Every day, the Mississippi would throw something at me that was completely out of whack, totally unexpected,” he said. “It really feels like a turbulent sea with waves everywhere, and I’m just a little guy in a canoe. It was full-on.”
Back home, Smirnov prepares a package full of documentation for the Guinness people, a process he expects to take months.
People ask if he lost weight, and he tells them that he had very little fat to lose after training three to six days a week. Even consuming 5,000 calories a day, supplied by his ground crew on the river, Smirnov burned all available fuel.
Among the endless things he gained is the knowledge of how to find a personal breaking point and push past it, how to float past the world with all its callous indifference and still enjoy the spectacles that swim past — mile after mile.