Ellen MacArthur: Hell and high water

Ellen MacArthur's PR has, time after time, watched journalists try to fathom Britain's leading woman sailor. They have sat, valiantly attempting to discover what is it about the 5ft 3in, eight-stone, 26-year-old from Derby that makes her risk a particularly gruesome death to hack round the world's oceans in the most godforsaken conditions – often alone – regularly beating men with far more experience to the finishing line. But MacArthur is, apparently, just an ordinary girl who does something extraordinary. "She farts and burps like everyone else," insists Lou, her PR.

That's not quite true, MacArthur herself insists, as we sit in a café in west London, munching on chocolate-chip cookies. "I'm not very loud," she confesses, with a touch of regret. "I'm not half as good as the guys on board were." She stops to ponder, then suddenly brightens. "But if you judge it on a noise-to-weight ratio, I would be up there." MacArthur doesn't like to be beaten. At anything.

The "guys on board" she's referring to were her 13-strong, all-male crew, whom she skippered during her most recent sailing trip, the Jules Verne Challenge. The round-the-world nonstop record attempt began in January: Ellen has just returned, several months earlier than expected.

At the start of the Jules Verne, expectations were high for MacArthur. She had come first or second in nearly all her races since 2001, when she became an instant international celebrity after finishing second in the Vendée Globe, the solo nonstop round-the-world race. Not only that, she had broken two major records, becoming the fastest woman to circumnavigate the world and the fastest Briton to sail around the world solo. By the time she was ready to begin the Jules Verne, MacArthur's business, Offshore Challenges, a project management company for extreme sports, was so confident that her colleagues had taken out a £800 bet that she would beat the record time of 64 days.

But then, on day 26 of the race, in relatively moderate winds in the Southern Ocean, the unimaginable, the unspeakable, the Oh-my-God happened. The mast of her 110ft catamaran, Kingfisher 2, snapped, driving a hole into the bow section of the port hull. Infuriatingly, the boat was a full day ahead of the present record and eating into the even faster time being set by the other contender, the Frenchman Olivier de Kersauson. The team had to retire.

So how has the yachtswoman coped with her first failure? MacArthur, who flew in from Australia the day before our interview, doesn't seem to be despairing. As soon as I arrive, she gets up, asks what I would like to drink and happily lopes off to get in a round of teas, a job the famous normally leave to their PRs. She is dressed in jeans, which, given their sensible fit, won't have come from Topshop, and a black T-shirt that reveals a formidable poitrine – usually hidden under voluminous banana-yellow oilskins. Her hair, as usual, is shorn down to something resembling a skinhead crop. Not for nothing has she become an international gay icon (though we should point out that she is already in a relationship with Ian, a graphic designer who lives in London).

MacArthur doesn't do jetlag (a sign of weakness and a waste of time, one suspects). It may also have something to do, she says, with the fact that she has no regular sleep pattern, having trained herself to sleep in 20-minute bursts for racing. Nor does she cry, at least not as we know it. When Kingfisher 2's mast collapsed, destroying her chances of taking the record after two years of meticulous preparation, she says that she felt merely "numb and a bit empty". Later, when she admits that, yes, tears were shed, she insists that the lachrymose happening could not be described as "crying". "Tears left my eyes, but that's not the same as physically weeping in a corner, I never did that. But it was after the interviews [via satellite phone] and I was absolutely knackered and all of a sudden you realise it's all over and that was sad," says MacArthur.

Within minutes of the dismasting, Kingfisher 2's crew leapt into action – including the injured MacArthur, despite having just had her left hand stitched up by the on-board doctor after catching her little finger in a rope. Together they repaired the hole and cut away the mast before it could cause further damage. A makeshift mast was quickly fashioned out of the boat's 65ft boom, and, using storm sails, they creaked their way at a relatively pitiful speed towards Fremantle, 2,000 miles away in Australia.

The journey back took two weeks, and it severely tested MacArthur's leadership skills. When the project started, she had been nervous at the thought of skippering such a large crew. All were older than her and a number were considerably more experienced – including one who was on his eighth circumnavigation. To pass the time, they made their own chess and backgammon boards, and packs of cards. Andrew Preece, one of the crew, says: "It was a pretty amazing atmosphere on the boat. Everyone teased each other and had a laugh. And it was Ellen who created that ambience."

What was it like for MacArthur, navigator as well as skipper, being the only woman among 13 men? For the first and only time during our talk, there's a tiny but perceptible setting of her jaw. "Dunno, dunno. I can't answer that question," says the sailor, who admitted in her autobiography, Taking On the World, that she always resented being a girl as a child. "It felt just like every other day. It didn't make any difference. We were all there with the same objectives, so who cares what size or sex anyone is? It doesn't matter," she says, picking at the scabs on her injured hand.

MacArthur doesn't see the dismasting of Kingfisher 2 as a failure. She gained vast experience, she says, and – in her goal-setting, goal-achieving world – as long as she's learning something, she's happy. "You learn how to deal with people a bit better, how to read people a bit better, maybe how to predict how people are feeling a bit better. It was awesome sailing with those guys – it was hard, it was very challenging, and there were some very tough days – but the overall experience was unbelievable," she says.

MacArthur grew up in the decidedly unsalty air of rural Whatstandwell, Derbyshire. Her will was apparent from early on. She first went sailing, on her Aunt Thea's boat, at the age of four and was immediately hooked. She started earnestly saving up to buy her own, putting all her Christmas and birthday money into a tin on her radiator. She preferred Practical Boat Owner magazine to Bunty, and at primary school would draw tiny dinghies on her pencil case, rubbers and exercise books.

Secondary school provided another vital source of income to add to her savings – her dinner money. She would take bread and a tomato or banana to school with her instead; by 11 she had bought her first boat with £200 of her own savings and a £300 gift from her grandmother. She moved her bed into the barn so that there was room to keep the ropes, oars and sails in her tiny bedroom, while she bedded down in a sleeping bag on the floor next to them.

A tomboy who climbed and abseiled with her male friends, at school she felt more of an observer than a participant. One boy remarked: "God, you're ugly," and she became quieter still. Socialising in the pub was such an ordeal that she would take yachting magazines with her to read; that way she felt she had got something constructive out of the evening.

Life at home was also uncomfortable at times. Her father, a craft, design and technology teacher, began to feel the stresses of the job and appeared to take it out on his only daughter, the middle child. In her autobiography, she writes: "I could see the anger in Dad's eyes and how close to boiling point he was when he came home late in the evenings. He seemed to turn to me to vent his anger on... I felt I was to blame and was nervous when he came back in the evenings. Sometimes during these explosions I would run away down the field to hide."

Nevertheless, MacArthur says the pair managed to remain "mates" during the sticky period and would go off to farm sales together. "Everyone has problems with their parents at some stage. My dad's a fantastic person. We share a lot of the same passions for the outdoors, the countryside and the animals," she says now.

At the same time, soon after her grandfather died, she began to develop an interest in boats large enough to have cabins. "I think independence was what attracted me and these boats could be more easily lived on. They promised both comfort and escape," she wrote.

At 15 she bought another boat and, with practical skills learnt from her father, built everything from the chart table to the drainage system. Her direction in life was confirmed when she fell ill with glandular fever while studying for A-levels (at the time she intended to become a vet). Confined to bed, she watched and rewatched the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race and decided she wanted to make sailing her life.

At 18 she was the BT/Yachting Journalists' Association Young Sailor of the Year, and several months later, sailed single-handed around Britain. In 1997 she raced single-handed across the Atlantic and was named BT/YJA Yachtsman of the Year for 1998. At 21 she lived in a Portakabin for 18 months, spending only £10 a week on food (lots of baked beans and economy bread), while working on a boat belonging to Mark Turner (now her business partner at Offshore Challenges), while she tried to find a sponsor for a transatlantic race.

Her racing successes were such that the retail business group Kingfisher became her sponsor in 1998, stumping up £2m for the design and construction of Kingfisher, which she sailed in the Vendée Globe – the world's toughest sailing race. Her preparations included figuring out how she would sew her tongue back on in the event that she bit it off during the race, as had happened to a friend when he was struck by the boom. She practised by stitching up a pig skin.

MacArthur spent 94 days alone and unsupported at sea, battling against storms, icy seas, exhaustion, rigging failures and an almost fatal collision with a submerged object. Then, too, she was reduced to tears, but she is at pains to point out that so, also, were the other top five sailors in the race. "You are not crying because you're upset, you're crying because there's absolutely nothing left inside you any more, and the only thing that your body can do is release some of that energy by crying. And that's not because you're upset, it's your body's physical reaction to being lower than low." Even before crossing the finishing line, MacArthur, who received 52,000 e-mails during her voyage, was a hero to millions.

As she headed towards the quayside at the French port of Les Sables d'Olonne, hundreds of thousands of people were lined up screaming her name. Tony Blair would soon be on the phone to congratulate her. MacArthur, meanwhile, was trying to get over not having won. All she wanted to do was to turn round and head back out to the relative comforts of a perilous sea in the precious boat she called "my friend".

If she was close to losing it during the race, being back on dry land brought her even closer to the edge. Utterly exhausted and with nothing left to give, she wanted only to hide away and write her autobiography. But there was the press to satisfy, and a world that now wanted a piece of her. "The pressures were absolutely enormous. You come back to a life which is not the same as the one you had before," she says. At one stage she felt so stressed she started hitting Mark Turner as if she was trying to kill him. (He forgave her.)

Meanwhile, the adulation continued. A mountain in South Georgia, in the Southern Ocean, was named after her, as was a sweet pea. Thousands wrote to her – and still do – to say what an inspiration she is. People started jacking in their boring jobs. The terminally ill took up sailing. One man wrote in utter gratitude, saying she had inspired him finally to get his mower mended after years of procrastination. At the end of the year, the Queen appointed her MBE.

Unaffected and very likeable, MacArthur has survived celebrity well. It is not, however, something with which she is entirely comfortable. When, last November, she finished first in the Route du Rhum, a gruelling solo transatlantic race from St Malo, France, to Guadeloupe in the French West Indies, during which her boat was swept up and, she says "physically thrown" by the sea, she was almost mobbed. "It's quite scary, sometimes, the way people treat you. There were people there just wanting to touch me and that's pretty strange, because you're just getting on with what you do. Everyone's hands were going out – it was really weird."

The world will no doubt respect MacArthur even more for having been dismasted – it's proof, after all, that she is fallible and therefore human. She, of course, would rather go down in history as having won, and will no doubt again attempt both the Vendée and the Jules Verne (Olivier de Kersauson failed to beat the record).

Does she ever think she's done all right for a 26-year-old? "No, never. I think, 'We did a good job with that project, we could have done better.' There are always issues, you never do anything perfectly. I'm pretty tough on myself: I put myself under a lot of pressure. I always want to do everything better than the time before. I always want to learn. I hate stopping and switching off – although I realise it's important to do that," she says, suddenly sounding like she's repeating advice her mother might have given her. "I like projects, I like being driven. I hate feeling I'm wasting time. I hate it."

She occasionally goes to the cinema, and enjoys the countryside and animals, but that's about it as far as interests go on dry land. So what does she do for a laugh? "Sail round the world nonstop," she replies.

Before I go, I ask what is the most common misconception people have about her. "That I'm some incredible person. I just do something a bit different," she says. "It would be nice just to be classed as normal."

But being normal doesn't, of course, get you first over the finishing line.