How a Manasquan chiropractor prepared four Army veterans to row across the Atlantic Ocean

MANASQUAN – Despite her wide range of experience as a chiropractor, from fine-tuning Olympic athletes to helping a 95-year-old gain enough mobility to care for his ailing wife, Veera Gupta never faced a challenge quite like the one before her this fall.

“How do I get Green Berets to know I mean business?” the Wall resident said.

Asked to prepare four middle-aged former Amy Rangers to row a boat across the Atlantic Ocean, Gupta got their attention at their very first meeting. She asked the strongest of the four to hold his arm out, and for the second-strongest to push that arm down. It required a moderate amount of pressure.

Then she commanded the strongest: “Say, ‘This row is killing me, I can’t stand this,’” while holding the arm out.

“I said to the second guy, ‘Now push his arm down,’” Gutpa said. “And his arm goes flying down.’”

Now Gupta instructed the strongest, “Say, ‘this is the most epic row of my life, I love my brothers,’ and say it three times.”

He did, and Gupta once again prompted the second-strongest to push the arm down. Turns out, he couldn’t. That arm suddenly was like a rock.

“What’s going to get you through this row is not how strong you are,” she told the quartet of veterans. “It’s how connected you feel to the other people in that boat.”

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That connection will be tested by Mother Nature, hunger and sleep deprivation starting Dec. 12, when the four special ops veterans – Joe Leach, Guy Phillips, Craig Foreman and Dave Figgins – embark on the 3,000-mile odyssey from the Canary Islands to Antigua as part of a competition known as the “World’s Toughest Row.” They’re doing it to raise money and awareness for Fight Oar Die, a nonprofit that supports veterans who are facing mental-health challenges.

Gupta’s role in their preparation has gone well beyond aligning their bodies on the chiropractor’s table. This has been a crash course in mindset – how the brain can will the body to do amazing things, especially when camaraderie is the fuel.

It started when she jumped off a cliff.

'Why do you hate Joe right now?'

Gupta grew up in Marlboro and Manalapan and attended Tulane University, where she competed as a collegiate rower. She runs her Manasquan-based practice, Optimum Health Chiropractic, along with her husband and fellow chiropractor John Volpe. Always in search of new insights, she traveled to Poland to attend a clinic by Wim Hof, an extreme athlete noted for his ability to withstand low temperatures.

As part of the clinic, which was mostly attended by men, “there was this cliff you had to jump off of into six feet of ice water,” Gupta said. “Guess who was the first person to jump off that cliff?”

Among those who witnessed Gupta leaping first was fellow clinic attendee Leach, who served in the Army from 1989-2021 and now lives in North Carolina. He was impressed, and when it came time to prep for the World’s Toughest Row, Leach sought Gupta’s assistance in getting the quartet physiologically right.

“I didn’t realize all the ancillary benefits she’d be able to bring,” the 52-year-old said.

Gupta has helped them acquire BrainTap, a headset that enhances sleep. She’s recommended nutritional supplements that will maximize their energy. She’s led them through eye and coordination exercises to improve efficiency. And she’s worked on their communication skills, both verbal and bodily – “love languages” is what she calls them.

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“When you’re hungry and scared, you’re going into a completely closed-off state,” she said. “You have to know how to communicate when you’re at your lowest point.”

It’s been a kind of therapy for everyone involved.

“Our bodies are ready to do this – the biggest thing is mental,” Leach said. “You have four men on this boat and at some point we’re going to want to be cavemen. When we inevitably lose sleep, we’re down 30 pounds, we’re in 30-foot waves, it’s cold and we’re miserable, what do we do at that point? Do we throw each other off the boat or figure out how to maintain some kind of homeostasis?”

To achieve the latter required some honest talk.

“We had to get everything on the table and go to blows verbally and mentally; that’s the biggest thing she helped us with,” Leach said. “She’s like the mom, saying ‘Guy, why do you hate Joe right now?’ We're not emotional guys (who would typically talk about this stuff). Now we’re a cohesive team that is ready to work as one unit. Without that, we’ll fail out there.”

Phillips, a 54-year-old from Ohio, put it this way: “Try talking to special ops guys about their love languages. Veera is the only person who could have pulled that off.”

The peril is real

The World’s Toughest Row, which has 39 entrants this year, lasts anywhere from 35 to 55 days depending on the winds and currents. The peril is real. Last year’s Fight Oar Die boat capsized – the four rowers (different veterans from this year’s crew) were rescued at sea but the vessel was lost – clouding the future of the nonprofit, whose annual participation in the row is its main fundraiser.

“We raised enough money to get another boat and get it back on track,” Leach said.

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He said although the four rowers’ reasons for participating are deeply personal, from coping with post-traumatic stress disorder to “finding a new path” in life, they’ve come to realize they are far from alone.

“With all the people that we met, we’ve got thousands of people in the boat with us now,” Leach said. “The row is the final part of the journey.”

Gupta is one of those people. She plans to be in Antigua when the Fight Oar Die boat arrives. Though most of her work with the four rowers has taken place virtually, Leach and Phillips came to Manasquan for three days earlier this month. They expressed gratitude for her “taking on four broken dudes,” as Leach put it, and helping them forge bonds.

Gupta is all-in on their mission, if not with Leach’s wording.

“The thing is,” she told them, “I never thought you guys were broken.”

For more information on Fight Oar Die, to donate, or to follow the quartet’s progress in the World’s Toughest Row, visit www.usvetrow.org.

Jerry Carino is community columnist for the Asbury Park Press, focusing on the Jersey Shore’s interesting people, inspiring stories and pressing issues. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: NJ chiropractor trained US Special Forces to row Atlantic Ocean