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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.

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It was a journey, an 
expedition in 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.

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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)

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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 
most succinctly here

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on the hallowed pages 
of Business Insider Malaysia.

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["Two Explorers Just Completed A Polar Expedition 
That Killed Everyone The Last Time It Was Attempted"]

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Chris Hadfield talked so eloquently

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about fear and about the odds of success,
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.

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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.

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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 multiple, 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
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
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.

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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 weighs 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
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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in 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 won't be at all surprised.

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You've heard that the average American
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
that Scott could never have imagined.

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And we blogged live every evening
from the tent via a 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.

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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 we 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 -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, 
shimmering steel-hard blue surface

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covered with thousands 
and thousands of crevasses,

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these deep cracks 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.

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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.

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If you have the right team around you,
the right tools, the right technology,

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and if you have enough self-belief
and enough determination,

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then anything is possible.

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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 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
full of food.

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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 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 
the calories we should have been 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
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,
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
to be debilitated to that degree.

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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

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that we'd laid on our outward journey.

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We'd laid 10 depots of food,

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literally burying food and fuel,
for our return journey —

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the fuel was for a cooker so you
could melt snow to get water —

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and I was forced to make the decision
to call for a resupply flight,

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a ski plane carrying eight days of food
to tide us over that gap.

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They took 12 hours to reach us
from the other side of Antarctica.

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Calling for that plane 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
every hotel buffet that I can find.

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(Laughter)

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But we were genuinely quite hungry,
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 alive,

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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.

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00:12:36,967 --> 00:12:38,648
On the way back down to the coast,

240
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our crampons — they're 
the spikes on our boots

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00:12:40,839 --> 00:12:43,765
that we have for traveling
over this blue ice on the glacier —

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broke on the top of the Beardmore.

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We still had 100 miles to go downhill

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on very slippery rock-hard blue ice.

245
00:12:49,419 --> 00:12:51,810
They needed repairing almost every hour.

246
00:12:51,810 --> 00:12:53,761
To give you an idea of scale,

247
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this is looking down towards the mouth
of the Beardmore Glacier.

248
00:12:56,758 --> 00:13:00,233
You could fit the entirety of Manhattan
in the gap on the horizon.

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00:13:00,233 --> 00:13:03,447
That's 20 miles between
Mount Hope and Mount Kiffin.

250
00:13:03,447 --> 00:13:09,680
I've never felt as small 
as I did in Antarctica.

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When we got down
to the mouth of the glacier,

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we found fresh snow had obscured
the dozens of deep crevasses.

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One of Shackleton's men described
crossing this sort of terrain

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as like walking over the glass roof
of a railway station.

255
00:13:24,375 --> 00:13:27,289
We fell through more times
than I can remember,

256
00:13:27,289 --> 00:13:30,721
usually just putting a ski
or a boot through the snow.

257
00:13:30,721 --> 00:13:33,324
Occasionally we went in all 
the way up to our armpits,

258
00:13:33,324 --> 00:13:36,767
but thankfully never deeper than that.

259
00:13:36,767 --> 00:13:40,947
And less than five weeks ago,
after 105 days,

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00:13:40,947 --> 00:13:44,522
we crossed this oddly 
inauspicious finish line,

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00:13:44,522 --> 00:13:47,544
the coast of Ross Island 
on the New Zealand side of Antarctica.

262
00:13:47,544 --> 00:13:49,694
You can see the ice in the foreground

263
00:13:49,694 --> 00:13:52,556
and the sort of rubbly rock behind that.

264
00:13:52,556 --> 00:13:56,358
Behind us lay an unbroken 
ski trail of nearly 1,800 miles.

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00:13:56,358 --> 00:13:58,866
We'd made the longest ever
polar journey on foot,

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something I'd been dreaming 
of doing for a decade.

267
00:14:03,256 --> 00:14:05,271
And looking back,

268
00:14:05,271 --> 00:14:07,666
I still stand by all the things

269
00:14:07,666 --> 00:14:09,248
I've been saying for years

270
00:14:09,248 --> 00:14:11,367
about the importance of goals

271
00:14:11,367 --> 00:14:14,809
and determination and self-belief,

272
00:14:14,809 --> 00:14:19,520
but I'll also admit that I hadn't given
much thought to what happens

273
00:14:19,520 --> 00:14:23,432
when you reach the all-consuming goal

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00:14:23,432 --> 00:14:26,750
that you've dedicated 
most of your adult life to,

275
00:14:26,750 --> 00:14:30,330
and the reality is that I'm 
still figuring that bit out.

276
00:14:30,330 --> 00:14:33,931
As I said, there are very few
superficial signs that I've been away.

277
00:14:33,931 --> 00:14:35,382
I've put on 30 pounds.

278
00:14:35,382 --> 00:14:38,910
I've got some very faint, probably 
covered in makeup now, frostbite scars.

279
00:14:38,910 --> 00:14:42,383
I've got one on my nose, one on 
each cheek, from where the goggles are,

280
00:14:42,383 --> 00:14:47,128
but inside I am a very 
different person indeed.

281
00:14:47,128 --> 00:14:49,625
If I'm honest,

282
00:14:49,625 --> 00:14:54,800
Antarctica challenged me
and humbled me so deeply

283
00:14:54,800 --> 00:14:58,503
that I'm not sure I'll ever be able
to put it into words.

284
00:14:58,503 --> 00:15:02,603
I'm still struggling to piece
together my thoughts.

285
00:15:02,603 --> 00:15:06,248
That I'm standing here 
telling this story

286
00:15:06,248 --> 00:15:11,026
is proof that we all can 
accomplish great things,

287
00:15:11,026 --> 00:15:13,180
through ambition, through passion,

288
00:15:13,180 --> 00:15:15,342
through sheer stubbornness,

289
00:15:15,342 --> 00:15:16,857
by refusing to quit,

290
00:15:16,857 --> 00:15:19,813
that if you dream something 
hard enough, as Sting said,

291
00:15:19,813 --> 00:15:22,884
it does indeed come to pass.

292
00:15:22,884 --> 00:15:26,230
But I'm also standing here 
saying, you know what,

293
00:15:26,230 --> 00:15:32,211
that cliche about the journey being 
more important than the destination?

294
00:15:32,211 --> 00:15:35,532
There's something in that.

295
00:15:35,532 --> 00:15:37,901
The closer I got to my finish line,

296
00:15:37,901 --> 00:15:41,657
that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island,

297
00:15:41,657 --> 00:15:44,851
the more I started to realize
that the biggest lesson

298
00:15:44,851 --> 00:15:49,431
that this very long, very hard walk
might be teaching me

299
00:15:49,431 --> 00:15:53,124
is that happiness is not
a finish line,

300
00:15:53,124 --> 00:15:54,694
that for us humans,

301
00:15:54,694 --> 00:15:58,170
the perfection that so many of
us seem to dream of

302
00:15:58,170 --> 00:16:02,250
might not ever be truly attainable,

303
00:16:02,250 --> 00:16:10,716
and that if we can't feel content
here, today, now, on our journeys

304
00:16:10,716 --> 00:16:15,184
amidst the mess and the striving
that we all inhabit,

305
00:16:15,184 --> 00:16:17,904
the open loops, 
the half-finished to-do lists,

306
00:16:17,904 --> 00:16:20,756
the could-do-better-next-times,

307
00:16:20,756 --> 00:16:24,055
then we might never feel it.

308
00:16:24,055 --> 00:16:27,631
A lot of people have asked me, what next?

309
00:16:27,631 --> 00:16:34,629
Right now, I am very happy just recovering
and in front of hotel buffets.

310
00:16:34,629 --> 00:16:38,982
But as Bob Hope put it,

311
00:16:38,982 --> 00:16:41,278
I feel very humble,

312
00:16:41,278 --> 00:16:45,347
but I think I have the strength
of character to fight it. (Laughter)

313
00:16:45,347 --> 00:16:47,297
Thank you.

314
00:16:47,297 --> 00:16:50,975
(Applause)