WEBVTT

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So in the oasis of 
intelligentsia that is TED,

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I stand here before you this evening

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as an expert in dragging heavy stuff
around cold places.

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I've been leading polar expeditions for 
most of my adult life,

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and last month, my teammate 
Tarka L'Herpiniere and I

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finished the most ambitious expedition
I've ever attempted.

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In fact, it feels like I've been
transported straight here

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from four months in the middle of nowhere,

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mostly grunting and swearing, 
straight to the TED stage.

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So you can imagine that's a transition
that hasn't been entirely seamless.

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One of the interesting side effects

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seems to be that my short-term
memory is entirely shot.

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So I've had to write some notes

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to avoid too much grunting and swearing
in the next 17 minutes.

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This is the first talk I've given
about this expedition,

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and while we weren't sequencing genomes
or building space telescopes,

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this is a story about giving everything we
had to achieve something

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that hadn't been done before.

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So I hope in that you might 
find some food for thought.

NOTE Paragraph

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It was a journey, an 
expeditionin Antarctica

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the coldest, windiest, driest and
highest altitude continent on Earth.

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It's a fascinating place.
It's a huge place.

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It's twice the size of Australia,

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a continent that is the same size
as China and India put together.

NOTE Paragraph

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As an aside, I have experienced 


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an interesting phenomenon
in the last few days,

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something that I expect Chris Hadfield
may get at TED in a few years' time,

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conversations that go something like this:

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"Oh, Antarctica. Awesome.

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My husband and I did Antarctica
with Lindblad for our anniversary."

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Or, "Oh cool, did you go there
for the marathon?"

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(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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Our journey was, in fact,
69 marathons back to back

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in 105 days, an 1,800 mile round trip
on foot from the coast of Antarctica

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to the South Pole and back again.

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In the process, we broke the record


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for the longest human-powered polar
journey in history by more than 400 miles.

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(Applause)

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For those of you from the Bay area,

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it was the same as walking from 
here to San Francisco,

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then turning around
and walking back again.

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So as camping trips go, it was a long one,

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and one I've seen summarized

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most succinctly here on the hallowed
pages of Business Insider Malaysia.

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[Two Explorers Just Completed
A Polar Expedition That Killed

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Everyone The Last Time It was Attempted]

NOTE Paragraph

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Chris Hadfield talked so eloquently

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about fear and about the odds of success

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and indeed the odds of survival.

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Of the nine people in history that had
attempted this journey before us,

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none had made it to the pole and back,

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and five had died in the process.

NOTE Paragraph

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This is Captain Robert Falcon Scott.

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He led the last team
to attempt this expedition.

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Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton,

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over the space of a decade,

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both led expeditions battling to become
the first to reach the South Pole

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to chart and map
the interior of Antarctica,

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a place we knew less about, at the time,

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than the surface of the moon,

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because we could see
the moon through telescopes.

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Antarctica was, for the most part,
a century ago, uncharted.

NOTE Paragraph

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Some of you may know the story.

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Scott's last expedition, the 
Terra Nova Expedition in 1910,

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started as a giant
siege-style approach.

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He had a big team using ponies,

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using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors,

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dropping pre-positioned
depots of food and fuel

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through which Scott's final team of five
would travel to the pole,

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where they would turn around and ski 
back to the coast again on foot.

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Scott and his final team of five

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arrived at the South Pole 
in January 1912

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to find they had been beaten to it

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by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen,

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who rode on dogsled.

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Scott's team ended up on foot,

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and for more than a century

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this journey has remained unfinished.

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Scott's team of five died on
the return journey.

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And for the last decade,

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I've been asking myself why that is.

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How come this has remained 
the high water mark?

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Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot.

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No one's come close to that ever since.

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So this is the high water mark of 
human endurance,


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human endeavor, 
human athletic achievement

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in arguably the harshest climate on Earth.

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It was as if the marathon record

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has remained unbroken since 1912.

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And of course some strange and 
predictable combination of curiosity,

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stubbornness, and probably hubris,

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led me to thinking I might be the man
to try to finish the job.

NOTE Paragraph

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Unlike Scott's expedition,
there were just two of us,

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and we set off from the coast
of Antarctica in October last year,

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dragging everything ourselves,

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a process Scott called "man-hauling."

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When I say it was like walking from
here to San Francisco and back,

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I actually mean it was like dragging
something that weights a shade more

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than the heaviest ever NFL player.

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Our sledges weighed 200 kilos,

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or 440 pounds each at the start,

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the same weights that the weakest

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of Scott's ponies pulled.

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Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour.

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Perhaps the reason no one had 
attempted this journey until now,

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for more than a century,

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was that no one had been quite
stupid enough to try.

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And while I can't claim we were exploring

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in the genuine Edwardian
sense of the word

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— we weren't naming any mountains
or mapping any uncharted valleys —

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I think we were stepping into uncharted
territory in a human sense.

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Certainly, if in the future we learn
there is an area of the human brain

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that lights up when one curses oneself,

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I wouldn't be at all surprised.

NOTE Paragraph

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You've heard that the average American


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spends 90 percent of their time indoors.

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We didn't go indoors
for nearly four months.

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We didn't see a sunset either.

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It was 24-hour daylight.

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Living conditions were quite spartan.

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I changed my underwear 
three times in 105 days

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and Tarka and I shared 
30 square feet on the canvas.

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Though we did have some technology


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that Scott could never have imagined.

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And we blogged live every evening
from the tent via laptop

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and a custom-made satellite transmitter,

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all of which were solar-powered:

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we had a flexible photovoltaic
panel over the tent.

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And the writing was important to me.

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As a kid, I was inspired by the 
literature of adventure and exploration,

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and I think we've all seen
here this week

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the importance and 
the power of storytelling.

NOTE Paragraph

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So we had some 21st-century gear,

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but the reality is that the 
challenges that Scott faced

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were the same that way faced:

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those of the weather and of 
what Scott called glide,

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the amount of friction between
the sledges and the snow.

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The lowest wind chill we experienced
was in the minus 70s,

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and we had zero visibility,
what's called white-out,

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for much of our journey.

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We traveled up and down one of the largest

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and most dangerous glaciers
in the world, the Beardmore glacier.

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It's 110 miles long: most of its surface
is what's called blue ice.

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You can see it's a beautiful,
steel-hard blue surface

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covered with thousands and thousands

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of crevasses, these deep cracks

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in the glacial ice, up to 200 feet deep.

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Planes can't land here,

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so we were at the most risk,

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technically when we had the slimmest
chance of being rescued.

NOTE Paragraph

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We got to the South Pole
after 61 days on foot,

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with one day off for bad weather,

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and I'm sad to say, it was
something of an anticlimax.

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There's a permanent American base,

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the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station
at the South Pole.

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They have an airstrip,
they have a canteen,

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they have hot showers,

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they have a post office, a tourist shop,


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a basketball court that doubles
as a movie theater.

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So it's a bit different these days,

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and there are also acres of junk.

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I think it's a marvelous thing


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that humans can exist
365 days of the year

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with hamburgers and hot showers
and movie theaters,

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but it does seem to produce
a lot of empty cardboard boxes.

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You can see on the left of 
this photograph,

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several square acres of junk

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waiting to be flown out
from the South Pole.

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But there is also a pole at the South Pole,

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and we got there on foot, unassisted,

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unsupported, by the hardest route,

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900 miles in record time,

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dragging more weight
than anyone in history.

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And if we'd stopped there 
and flown home,

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which would have been
the eminently sensible thing to do,

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then my talk would end here

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and it would end something like this.

NOTE Paragraph

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If you have the right team around you,

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the right tools, the right technology,

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and if you have enough self-belief

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and enough determination,

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than anything is possible.

NOTE Paragraph

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But then we turned around,

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and this is where things get interesting.

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High on the Antarctic plateau,

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over 10,000 feet, it's very windy,
very cold, very dry, we were exhausted.

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We'd covered 35 marathons,

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we were only halfway,

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and we had a safety net, of course,

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of ski planes and satellite phones

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and live, 24-hour tracking beacons
that didn't exist for Scott,

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but in hindsight,

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rather than making our lives easier,

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the safety net actually allowed us

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to cut things very fine indeed,

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to sail very close to our absolute limits

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as human beings,

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and it is an exquisite form of torture

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to exhaust yourself to the point
of starvation day after day

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while dragging a sledge

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full of food.

NOTE Paragraph

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For years, I'd been writing glib lines
in sponsorship proposals

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about pushing the limits
of human endurance,

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but in reality, that was
a very frightening place

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to be indeed.

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We had, before we'd got to the Pole,

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two weeks of almost permanent
headwind, which slowed us down.

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As a result, we'd had several days
of eating half rations.

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We had a finite amount of food
in the sledges to make this journey,

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so we were trying to string that out

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by reducing our intake to half

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the calories we should be eating.

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As a result, we both became
increasingly hypoglycemic:

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we had low blood
sugar levels day after day

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and increasingly susceptible

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to the extreme cold.

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Tarka took this photo of me one evening

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after I'd nearly passed out
with hypothermia.

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We both had repeated bouts of hypothermia,

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something I hadn't experienced before,

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and it was very humbling indeed.

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As much as you might
like to think, as I do,

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that you're the kind
of person who doesn't quit,

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that you'll go down swinging,

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hypothermia doesn't leave you much choice.

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You become utterly incapacitated.

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It's like being a drunk toddler.

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You become pathetic.

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I remember just wanting
to lie down and quit.

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It was a peculiar, peculiar feeling,

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and a real surprise to me

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to be debilitated to that degree.

NOTE Paragraph

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And then we ran out of food completely,

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46 miles short of the first of the depots

00:11:28.802 --> 00:11:30.567
that we'd laid on our outward journey.

00:11:30.567 --> 00:11:31.960
We'd laid 10 depots of food,

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literally burying food and fuel,
for our return journey

00:11:34.607 --> 00:11:37.254
— the food was for a cooker so you
could melt snow to get water —

00:11:37.254 --> 00:11:40.481
and I was forced to make the decision

00:11:40.481 --> 00:11:43.361
to call for a resupply flight,

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a ski plane carrying eight days of food

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to tide us over that gap.

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They took 12 hours to reach us

00:11:49.699 --> 00:11:51.812
from the other side of Antarctica.

NOTE Paragraph

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Calling for that plane

00:11:53.716 --> 00:11:55.458
was one of the toughest
decisions of my life,

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and I sound like a bit of a fraud
standing here now with a sort of belly.

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I've put on 30 pounds
in the last three weeks.

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Being that hungry has left
an interesting mental scar,

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which is that I've been hoovering up

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every hotel buffet that I can find.

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But we were genuinely quite hungry,

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and in quite a bad way.

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I don't regret calling
for that plane for a second,

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because I'm still standing here

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alive with all digits
intact telling this story,

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but getting external assistance like that
was never part of the plan,

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and it's something my ego
is still struggling with.

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This was the biggest dream I've ever had,

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and it was so nearly perfect.

NOTE Paragraph

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On the way back down to the coast,

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our crampons — they're the spikes

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on our boots that we have for traveling
over this blue ice on the glacier —

00:12:44.125 --> 00:12:45.750
broke on the top of the Beardmore.

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We still had 100 miles to go downhill

00:12:47.445 --> 00:12:49.419
on very slippery rock-hard blue ice.

00:12:49.419 --> 00:12:51.810
They needed repairing almost every hour.

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To give you an idea of scale,

00:12:53.761 --> 00:12:55.665
this is looking down towards the mouth

00:12:55.665 --> 00:12:57.058
of the Beardmore Glacier.

00:12:57.058 --> 00:12:58.753
You could fit the entirety of Manhattan

00:12:58.753 --> 00:13:00.378
in the gap on the horizon.

00:13:00.378 --> 00:13:03.977
That's 20 miles between
Mt. Hope and Mt. Kiffin.

00:13:03.977 --> 00:13:07.065
I've never felt as small

00:13:07.065 --> 00:13:10.060
as I did in Antarctica.

00:13:10.060 --> 00:13:11.825
When we got down
to the mouth of the glacier,

00:13:11.825 --> 00:13:14.240
we found fresh snow had obscured

00:13:14.240 --> 00:13:16.631
the dozens of deep crevasses.

00:13:16.631 --> 00:13:18.303
One of Shackleton's men described

00:13:18.303 --> 00:13:19.952
crossing this sort of terrain as like

00:13:19.952 --> 00:13:22.483
walking over the glass roof

00:13:22.483 --> 00:13:24.665
of a railway station.

00:13:24.665 --> 00:13:27.289
We fell through more times
than I can remember,

00:13:27.289 --> 00:13:30.981
usually just putting a ski
or a boot through the snow.

00:13:30.981 --> 00:13:32.281
Occasionally we went in

00:13:32.281 --> 00:13:33.604
all the way up to our armpits,

00:13:33.604 --> 00:13:37.157
but thankfully never deeper than that.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:37.157 --> 00:13:39.757
And less than five weeks ago,

00:13:39.757 --> 00:13:41.313
after 105 days, we crossed

00:13:41.313 --> 00:13:44.912
this oddly inauspicious finish line,

00:13:44.912 --> 00:13:47.814
the coast of Ross Island on the
New Zealand coast of Antarctica.

00:13:47.814 --> 00:13:49.834
You can see the ice in the foreground

00:13:49.834 --> 00:13:52.876
and the sort of rubbly rock behind that.

00:13:52.876 --> 00:13:54.757
Behind us lay an unbroken ski trail

00:13:54.757 --> 00:13:56.568
of nearly 1,800 miles.

00:13:56.568 --> 00:13:59.076
We made the longest ever
polar journey on foot,

00:13:59.076 --> 00:14:01.026
something I've been dreaming of doing

00:14:01.026 --> 00:14:03.255
for a decade.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:03.255 --> 00:14:05.461
And looking back,

00:14:05.461 --> 00:14:07.876
I still stand by all the things

00:14:07.876 --> 00:14:09.338
I've been saying for years

00:14:09.338 --> 00:14:11.637
about the importance of goals

00:14:11.637 --> 00:14:15.329
and determination and self-belief,

00:14:15.329 --> 00:14:17.117
but I'll also believe that I haven't given

00:14:17.117 --> 00:14:19.810
much thought to what happens

00:14:19.810 --> 00:14:23.432
when you reach the all-consuming goal

00:14:23.432 --> 00:14:27.240
that you've dedicated most
of your adult life too,

00:14:27.240 --> 00:14:29.051
and the reality is that I'm still figuring

00:14:29.051 --> 00:14:30.630
that bit out.

00:14:30.630 --> 00:14:34.461
As I said, there are very few
superficial signs that I've been away.

00:14:34.461 --> 00:14:35.762
I've put on 30 pounds.

00:14:35.762 --> 00:14:37.155
I've got some very faint

00:14:37.155 --> 00:14:39.500
— they're probably covered
in makeup now — frostbite scars.

00:14:39.500 --> 00:14:40.893
I've got one on my nose,
one on each cheek,

00:14:40.893 --> 00:14:42.333
from where the goggles are,

00:14:42.333 --> 00:14:44.608
but inside I am a very

00:14:44.608 --> 00:14:47.116
different person indeed.

00:14:47.116 --> 00:14:49.925
If I'm honest,

00:14:49.925 --> 00:14:52.387
Antarctica challenged me

00:14:52.387 --> 00:14:55.010
and humbled me so deeply

00:14:55.010 --> 00:14:56.473
that I'm not sure I'll ever be able

00:14:56.473 --> 00:14:59.027
to put it into words.

00:14:59.027 --> 00:15:02.603
I'm still struggling to piece
together my thoughts.

00:15:02.603 --> 00:15:06.248
That I'm standing here telling this story

00:15:06.248 --> 00:15:08.640
is proof that we all

00:15:08.640 --> 00:15:11.356
can accomplish great things,

00:15:11.356 --> 00:15:13.260
through ambition, through passion,

00:15:13.260 --> 00:15:15.582
through sheer stubbornness,

00:15:15.582 --> 00:15:17.347
by refusing to quit,

00:15:17.347 --> 00:15:18.833
that if you dream something hard enough,

00:15:18.833 --> 00:15:19.971
as Sting said,

00:15:19.971 --> 00:15:23.384
it does indeed come to pass.

00:15:23.384 --> 00:15:25.520
But I'm also standing here saying,

00:15:25.520 --> 00:15:28.051
you know what, that cliche

00:15:28.051 --> 00:15:30.628
about the journey being more important

00:15:30.651 --> 00:15:32.671
than the destination?

00:15:32.671 --> 00:15:35.992
There's something in that.

00:15:35.992 --> 00:15:38.221
The closer I got to my finish line,

00:15:38.221 --> 00:15:42.377
that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island,

00:15:42.377 --> 00:15:43.631
the more I started to realize

00:15:43.631 --> 00:15:45.395
that the biggest lesson

00:15:45.395 --> 00:15:47.741
that this very long, very hard walk

00:15:47.741 --> 00:15:49.761
might be teaching me

00:15:49.761 --> 00:15:51.293
is that happiness

00:15:51.293 --> 00:15:53.754
is not a finish line,

00:15:53.754 --> 00:15:55.194
that for us humans,

00:15:55.194 --> 00:15:57.400
the perfection that so many of us

00:15:57.400 --> 00:15:58.793
seem to dream of

00:15:58.793 --> 00:16:02.740
might not ever be truly attainable,

00:16:02.740 --> 00:16:05.666
and that if we can't feel content

00:16:05.666 --> 00:16:11.029
here, today, now, on our journeys

00:16:11.029 --> 00:16:13.676
amidst the mess and the striving

00:16:13.676 --> 00:16:15.534
that we all inhabit, the open loops,

00:16:15.534 --> 00:16:18.204
the half-finished to-do lists,

00:16:18.204 --> 00:16:21.106
the could-do-better-next-times,

00:16:21.106 --> 00:16:24.055
then we might never feel it.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:24.055 --> 00:16:27.631
A lot of people have asked me, what next?

00:16:27.631 --> 00:16:31.299
Right now, I am very happy just recovering

00:16:31.299 --> 00:16:34.597
and in front of hotel buffets,

00:16:34.597 --> 00:16:39.612
but as Bob Hope put it,

00:16:39.612 --> 00:16:41.678
I feel very humble,

00:16:41.678 --> 00:16:45.347
but I think I have the strength
of character to fight it.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:45.347 --> 00:16:47.297
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:47.297 --> 00:16:50.975
(Applause)