If you’re going to label yourself as knowledgeable in a certain area, then you really need to maintain some semblance of currency. I once met this guy, back in 2012 at an office barbecue, who wore the rattiest Ironman finisher t-shirt. The date inscribed on the garment was 2001, and you could just tell he was dying for someone to ask him about it, some eleven years later.

Me, I had less than zero interest in engaging that man because in my mind, he was not someone who was still doing much of anything in the endurance athlete realm. Rather, he was squeezing every last drop out of his glory days by wearing a shirt from a time where technical tees were not yet standard issue for competitions. Call me a scrutinizing jerk, but I just couldn’t take the bait. I instead opted to sit and chat with my buddy Mike, an incidental two-time Ironman who, oddly enough, had no interest in engaging with this man either.

And while I’m filing people under “has-beens” I recently got to take a lovely two-week cruise in the Mediterranean Sea. It was a fantastic experience, but while preparing to embark I did feel a definite sense of trepidation. When you’re in a job like mine—one with a title that suggests that the sea is your second home—you really should be able to claim some recent underway experience if you want to feel a solid sense of worth. At least that’s how I look at things in a broad sense.

Unfortunately all of my real sea time spans from 2000-2008, and as you can well imagine, all of my shipboard apparel looks a lot like it was pulled from the same closet as Mr. Ironman Finisher 2001. I’m kind of a member of the has-been club.

But I love to go to sea, and the opportunity to go on even a short voyage immediately stamped out my sense of washed up unsuitability. As I stepped aboard the French ship and humped my belongings up a set of ladderwells that brought me to my home away from home, I instantly felt a rush of familiarity.

By and large, ship life is ship life no matter where you go. While I had trepidation about committing some gaffe that would betray my rank, I soon found my body settling into routines that felt familiar. I had a nice big stateroom– complete with a top bunk that demanded minimal gymnastics and included the introvert’s best friend while at sea, the privacy curtain. My roommate was really great– and when I say that, it means that I hardly saw her.  All in all, things were starting off well.

Every morning the ship conducted its official wake up time at 7:30am. They did this by playing a song over the loudspeaker. Many ships do this back in America, and from what I hear in other countries too. In the past I have been rousted from my sleeping quarters with a little Rage Against the Machine. Honestly some days you need the extra kick in the ass to get going. On one of the first mornings underway from France, I walked down the passageway and was suddenly serenaded by a ballad from OneRepublic. I had Timbaland’s voice stuck in my head for days. After such an eye-raising start, I was soon reassured by a dramatic shift on the following day while outside for some morning fresh air. The selection was an AC/DC track. I was ready to start my day.

A lot of people wanted to know what the food would be like. In my American experience, breakfast on board a ship is my favorite meal because I expect (and usually get) the exact same thing every time. The other meals, I am more than happy to sleep through because invariably, the Sunday holiday routine chili mac or the Wednesday sliders are not exactly cuisine that will pull me from the drawn curtains of my stateroom cave. Breakfast on board for us was most days a piece of baguette, coffee and some yogurt. On a couple of days, however, the cooks got to flex their French heritage.

We got pain au chocolat one morning after being at sea for about a week. It was quite an exciting event for a person who has never consumed such a thing underway, and I happily tore mine into pieces before stowing my tray and moving on with my daily routine. When I came across one of my British peers later that morning, he commented that he suspected the cook left the pain au chocolate in the oven for about 20 minutes too long. Aghast! How could he possibly give out about the fact that we had these lovely chocolate croissants at all?

While at sea, everyone has their little rituals or routines that serve to keep them hallway sane. Smoking, chewing tobacco, coffee Haribo, music, whatever. For me, I am all about finding my way to a workout each day. I’ve been in the South China Sea attempting yoga poses in the quest to maintain mental and physical balance (a hilarious notion, in retrospect), and here in the relatively calm Med I was thrilled to discover that the ship had a fantastic facility. Each day I got to head up to the salle de gym and sweat through a session that was set to a workout playlist interspersed with the chop of helicopter blades on the deck just above. Happy.

And no non-American ship is complete without a bar. On most evenings before supper we would all file in for a single beer and some paltry attempt to not talk about what we did that day. At sea you are looking at the same people over and over again, so it’s a real treasure when you find yourself living amongst people whom you would actually converse if you were back on land and in an environment of your own shaping. My British friend, he’d point to the cans of 1664 and tell us, “Back home we just call that ‘Numbers'”.   Ahh the French and the Brits. Fantastique.

And since we’re on the subject of rum rations (or at least beverages that come closest to such in the modern day), I will cover the other question of wine served in the dining facility. Here she be. Rosé or red. Served up in the same glass that you saw on my breakfast tray– and if it’s mashed potato and rognon night, then maybe you’ll just skip the main course and stick with the bottomless glasses of wine. I was quite lucky as the cooks copped on early that I was vegetarian and started giving me extra portions of salad or yogurt that paired quite nicely with the red.

There was other stuff that I could tell you about my short time back at sea. Highlights like finding ourselves far away from everything on land- heading outside after supper where you were blind in the pitch black but then after ten minutes suddenly everything was unveiled like we had new eyes. We’d stare at a night sky with more constellations than I had ever memorized in school, and the international camaraderie had us learning the different ways to say things like the Milky Way. La Voie lactée. La Via Lattea.

But like all things in life, the repetition quite often will lose its sheen. I like to joke that once gone from a ship, you only remember the good things about being at sea. And of course that is largely true. But even on this French excursion, I found myself starting to gripe like my British friend on the morning that we were to pull back into port. I passed by the crew’s mess decks, and came face to face with the most unappetizing interpretation of a pain au chocolate that I had ever seen. Quelle horror, I thought to myself as I looked at the super bien cuit and charred specimens. The French had a revolution over less than this! Clearly, I had gone native and had found my French sea legs. My misplaced fear about being a reborn nautical neophyte had been misplaced.

It was another gorgeous dawn on the morning that we made preps to come alongside. The tugs were out early and the lights on shore coupled with cell phone reception let us know that soon we would be back to our old routines: green smoothies for breakfast (that’s me), pain au chocolat procured from reputable boulangeries (that’s me when in France).

Coming back to the pier, the weatherdecks were filled with people as we watched the linehandlers do their thing as the land around us went from pastel pink to a more green and sand scrabble yellow. For me it was bittersweet as I knew full well that this was probably the last time I would be at sea in this type of capacity. The opportunity to spend so much time away from dry land, being motivated or flogged by our Navy’s best and not so best, has taught me so much over the past 18 years.  Even still on this short trip I could tell that my mostly non-seagoing self had learned a great deal.

It’s funny, because in my line of work you get some people who swear off sea duty once they are done. They are quite happy to never go back and instead look to a future where they will sport a weathered ship t-shirt or VFW cap while itching for people to ask about their glory days at sea. And that’s fine. Then there are others whose eyes light up and say, “if I was single, I’d stay at sea forever.” Me, I’m somewhere in between these two perspectives.  There is so much about the sea that I do miss–there are colors, sights and interactions that simply cannot be had anywhere else. I’ve got an incredible job, and if this is my last experience, I am thankful to the French and their subpar viennoiserie to have provided it.