WEBVTT

00:00:00.833 --> 00:00:06.567
So in the oasis of 
intelligentsia that is TED,

00:00:06.567 --> 00:00:09.285
I stand here before you this evening

00:00:09.285 --> 00:00:15.159
as an expert in dragging heavy
stuff around cold places.

00:00:15.159 --> 00:00:18.145
I've been leading polar expeditions 
for most of my adult life,

00:00:18.145 --> 00:00:21.827
and last month, my teammate 
Tarka L'Herpiniere and I

00:00:21.847 --> 00:00:27.025
finished the most ambitious 
expedition I've ever attempted.

00:00:27.025 --> 00:00:30.014
In fact, it feels like I've been
transported straight here

00:00:30.014 --> 00:00:32.666
from four months in the middle of nowhere,

00:00:32.666 --> 00:00:37.754
mostly grunting and swearing, 
straight to the TED stage.

00:00:37.754 --> 00:00:41.935
So you can imagine that's a transition
that hasn't been entirely seamless.

00:00:41.935 --> 00:00:43.815
One of the interesting side effects

00:00:43.815 --> 00:00:46.403
seems to be that my short-term
memory is entirely shot.

00:00:46.403 --> 00:00:48.665
So I've had to write some notes

00:00:48.665 --> 00:00:53.363
to avoid too much grunting and swearing
in the next 17 minutes.

00:00:53.363 --> 00:00:56.211
This is the first talk I've given
about this expedition,

00:00:56.211 --> 00:01:01.683
and while we weren't sequencing genomes
or building space telescopes,

00:01:01.690 --> 00:01:06.474
this is a story about giving everything
we had to achieve something

00:01:06.474 --> 00:01:08.310
that hadn't been done before.

00:01:08.310 --> 00:01:12.455
So I hope in that you might 
find some food for thought.

NOTE Paragraph

00:01:12.455 --> 00:01:16.066
It was a journey, an 
expedition in Antarctica,

00:01:16.066 --> 00:01:20.743
the coldest, windiest, driest and
highest altitude continent on Earth.

00:01:20.757 --> 00:01:22.804
It's a fascinating place.
It's a huge place.

00:01:22.804 --> 00:01:25.119
It's twice the size of Australia,

00:01:25.119 --> 00:01:30.211
a continent that is the same size
as China and India put together.

NOTE Paragraph

00:01:30.220 --> 00:01:32.088
As an aside, I have experienced 


00:01:32.088 --> 00:01:34.312
an interesting phenomenon
in the last few days,

00:01:34.312 --> 00:01:38.087
something that I expect Chris Hadfield
may get at TED in a few years' time,

00:01:38.089 --> 00:01:40.144
conversations that go something like this:

00:01:40.144 --> 00:01:41.767
"Oh, Antarctica. Awesome.

00:01:41.767 --> 00:01:47.604
My husband and I did Antarctica
with Lindblad for our anniversary."

00:01:47.604 --> 00:01:50.951
Or, "Oh cool, did you go there
for the marathon?"

00:01:50.951 --> 00:01:53.060
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:01:54.445 --> 00:01:58.482
Our journey was, in fact,
69 marathons back to back

00:01:58.485 --> 00:02:04.476
in 105 days, an 1,800-mile round trip
on foot from the coast of Antarctica

00:02:04.476 --> 00:02:07.247
to the South Pole and back again.

00:02:07.247 --> 00:02:09.491
In the process, we broke the record


00:02:09.491 --> 00:02:15.084
for the longest human-powered polar
journey in history by more than 400 miles.

00:02:15.087 --> 00:02:19.498
(Applause)

00:02:19.498 --> 00:02:21.913
For those of you from the Bay Area,

00:02:21.913 --> 00:02:26.030
it was the same as walking from 
here to San Francisco,

00:02:26.030 --> 00:02:28.908
then turning around
and walking back again.

00:02:28.908 --> 00:02:33.827
So as camping trips go, it was a long one,

00:02:33.827 --> 00:02:36.994
and one I've seen summarized 
most succinctly here

00:02:36.994 --> 00:02:40.720
on the hallowed pages 
of Business Insider Malaysia.

00:02:40.720 --> 00:02:46.246
["Two Explorers Just Completed A Polar Expedition 
That Killed Everyone The Last Time It Was Attempted"]

NOTE Paragraph

00:02:46.247 --> 00:02:48.917
Chris Hadfield talked so eloquently

00:02:48.917 --> 00:02:54.139
about fear and about the odds of success,
and indeed the odds of survival.

00:02:54.139 --> 00:02:58.014
Of the nine people in history that had
attempted this journey before us,

00:02:58.019 --> 00:03:00.712
none had made it to the pole and back,

00:03:00.712 --> 00:03:04.590
and five had died in the process.

NOTE Paragraph

00:03:04.590 --> 00:03:07.237
This is Captain Robert Falcon Scott.

00:03:07.237 --> 00:03:10.000
He led the last team
to attempt this expedition.

00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:12.438
Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton,

00:03:12.438 --> 00:03:15.154
over the space of a decade,

00:03:15.154 --> 00:03:19.414
both led expeditions battling to become
the first to reach the South Pole,

00:03:19.427 --> 00:03:22.446
to chart and map
the interior of Antarctica,

00:03:22.446 --> 00:03:24.581
a place we knew less about, at the time,

00:03:24.581 --> 00:03:26.485
than the surface of the moon,

00:03:26.485 --> 00:03:28.830
because we could see
the moon through telescopes.

00:03:28.830 --> 00:03:32.964
Antarctica was, for the most part,
a century ago, uncharted.

NOTE Paragraph

00:03:32.964 --> 00:03:34.475
Some of you may know the story.

00:03:34.475 --> 00:03:37.288
Scott's last expedition, the 
Terra Nova Expedition in 1910,

00:03:37.288 --> 00:03:39.802
started as a giant
siege-style approach.

00:03:39.802 --> 00:03:42.031
He had a big team using ponies,

00:03:42.031 --> 00:03:44.778
using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors,

00:03:44.778 --> 00:03:48.175
dropping multiple, pre-positioned
depots of food and fuel

00:03:48.175 --> 00:03:51.883
through which Scott's final team of five
would travel to the Pole,

00:03:51.883 --> 00:03:55.187
where they would turn around and ski 
back to the coast again on foot.

00:03:55.187 --> 00:03:57.599
Scott and his final team of five

00:03:57.599 --> 00:04:01.284
arrived at the South Pole 
in January 1912

00:04:01.284 --> 00:04:06.274
to find they had been beaten to it
by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen,

00:04:06.274 --> 00:04:07.908
who rode on dogsled.

00:04:07.908 --> 00:04:09.997
Scott's team ended up on foot.

00:04:09.997 --> 00:04:14.595
And for more than a century
this journey has remained unfinished.

00:04:14.595 --> 00:04:17.520
Scott's team of five died 
on the return journey.

00:04:17.520 --> 00:04:19.633
And for the last decade,

00:04:19.633 --> 00:04:22.954
I've been asking myself why that is.

00:04:22.954 --> 00:04:26.246
How come this has remained 
the high-water mark?

00:04:26.246 --> 00:04:28.596
Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot.

00:04:28.596 --> 00:04:30.497
No one's come close to that ever since.

00:04:30.497 --> 00:04:33.318
So this is the high-water mark 
of human endurance,

00:04:33.318 --> 00:04:35.839
human endeavor, 
human athletic achievement

00:04:35.839 --> 00:04:38.510
in arguably the harshest climate on Earth.

00:04:38.510 --> 00:04:41.018
It was as if the marathon record

00:04:41.018 --> 00:04:44.037
has remained unbroken since 1912.

00:04:44.037 --> 00:04:49.141
And of course some strange and 
predictable combination of curiosity,

00:04:49.145 --> 00:04:51.095
stubbornness, and probably hubris

00:04:51.095 --> 00:04:55.165
led me to thinking I might be the man
to try to finish the job.

NOTE Paragraph

00:04:55.182 --> 00:04:58.873
Unlike Scott's expedition,
there were just two of us,

00:04:58.873 --> 00:05:01.996
and we set off from the coast
of Antarctica in October last year,

00:05:01.996 --> 00:05:04.214
dragging everything ourselves,

00:05:04.214 --> 00:05:06.814
a process Scott called "man-hauling."

00:05:06.814 --> 00:05:09.837
When I say it was like walking from
here to San Francisco and back,

00:05:09.837 --> 00:05:13.214
I actually mean it was like dragging
something that weighs a shade more

00:05:13.214 --> 00:05:15.638
than the heaviest ever NFL player.

00:05:15.638 --> 00:05:17.681
Our sledges weighed 200 kilos,

00:05:17.681 --> 00:05:20.746
or 440 pounds each at the start,

00:05:20.746 --> 00:05:25.020
the same weights that the weakest
of Scott's ponies pulled.

00:05:25.020 --> 00:05:28.200
Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour.

00:05:28.200 --> 00:05:31.887
Perhaps the reason no one had 
attempted this journey until now,

00:05:31.887 --> 00:05:33.145
in more than a century,

00:05:33.145 --> 00:05:38.418
was that no one had been quite
stupid enough to try.

00:05:38.418 --> 00:05:40.437
And while I can't claim we were exploring

00:05:40.437 --> 00:05:43.454
in the genuine Edwardian
sense of the word —

00:05:43.454 --> 00:05:47.192
we weren't naming any mountains
or mapping any uncharted valleys —

00:05:47.192 --> 00:05:51.573
I think we were stepping into uncharted
territory in a human sense.

00:05:51.573 --> 00:05:54.962
Certainly, if in the future we learn
there is an area of the human brain

00:05:54.962 --> 00:05:58.779
that lights up when one curses oneself,

00:05:58.779 --> 00:06:01.945
I won't be at all surprised.

NOTE Paragraph

00:06:01.945 --> 00:06:05.997
You've heard that the average American
spends 90 percent of their time indoors.

00:06:05.997 --> 00:06:09.253
We didn't go indoors
for nearly four months.

00:06:09.253 --> 00:06:11.495
We didn't see a sunset either.

00:06:11.495 --> 00:06:13.151
It was 24-hour daylight.

00:06:13.151 --> 00:06:15.306
Living conditions were quite spartan.

00:06:15.306 --> 00:06:20.148
I changed my underwear 
three times in 105 days

00:06:20.148 --> 00:06:24.072
and Tarka and I shared 
30 square feet on the canvas.

00:06:24.072 --> 00:06:28.813
Though we did have some technology
that Scott could never have imagined.

00:06:28.813 --> 00:06:32.180
And we blogged live every evening
from the tent via a laptop

00:06:32.180 --> 00:06:34.225
and a custom-made satellite transmitter,

00:06:34.225 --> 00:06:36.085
all of which were solar-powered:

00:06:36.085 --> 00:06:38.482
we had a flexible photovoltaic
panel over the tent.

00:06:38.482 --> 00:06:41.940
And the writing was important to me.

00:06:41.940 --> 00:06:48.493
As a kid, I was inspired by the 
literature of adventure and exploration,

00:06:48.493 --> 00:06:51.014
and I think we've all seen
here this week

00:06:51.021 --> 00:06:55.265
the importance and 
the power of storytelling.

NOTE Paragraph

00:06:55.265 --> 00:06:57.081
So we had some 21st-century gear,

00:06:57.081 --> 00:06:59.868
but the reality is that the 
challenges that Scott faced

00:06:59.868 --> 00:07:01.865
were the same that we faced:

00:07:01.865 --> 00:07:05.602
those of the weather and of 
what Scott called glide,

00:07:05.603 --> 00:07:08.951
the amount of friction between
the sledges and the snow.

00:07:08.951 --> 00:07:12.799
The lowest wind chill 
we experienced was in the -70s,

00:07:12.801 --> 00:07:15.378
and we had zero visibility,
what's called white-out,

00:07:15.378 --> 00:07:18.391
for much of our journey.

00:07:18.391 --> 00:07:20.742
We traveled up and down one of the largest

00:07:20.742 --> 00:07:23.955
and most dangerous glaciers
in the world, the Beardmore glacier.

00:07:23.955 --> 00:07:27.381
It's 110 miles long; most of its surface
is what's called blue ice.

00:07:27.381 --> 00:07:30.979
You can see it's a beautiful, 
shimmering steel-hard blue surface

00:07:30.979 --> 00:07:34.817
covered with thousands 
and thousands of crevasses,

00:07:34.817 --> 00:07:38.798
these deep cracks in the glacial ice 
up to 200 feet deep.

00:07:38.798 --> 00:07:40.315
Planes can't land here,

00:07:40.315 --> 00:07:43.775
so we were at the most risk,

00:07:43.775 --> 00:07:48.219
technically, when we had the slimmest
chance of being rescued.

NOTE Paragraph

00:07:48.219 --> 00:07:52.115
We got to the South Pole
after 61 days on foot,

00:07:52.115 --> 00:07:54.694
with one day off for bad weather,

00:07:54.694 --> 00:07:57.261
and I'm sad to say, it was
something of an anticlimax.

00:07:57.261 --> 00:07:59.726
There's a permanent American base,

00:07:59.726 --> 00:08:03.044
the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station
at the South Pole.

00:08:03.044 --> 00:08:04.995
They have an airstrip,
they have a canteen,

00:08:04.995 --> 00:08:06.448
they have hot showers,

00:08:06.448 --> 00:08:08.353
they have a post office, a tourist shop,


00:08:08.353 --> 00:08:12.091
a basketball court that doubles
as a movie theater.

00:08:12.091 --> 00:08:14.066
So it's a bit different these days,

00:08:14.066 --> 00:08:15.862
and there are also acres of junk.

00:08:15.862 --> 00:08:17.292
I think it's a marvelous thing


00:08:17.292 --> 00:08:22.576
that humans can exist
365 days of the year

00:08:22.586 --> 00:08:26.131
with hamburgers and hot showers
and movie theaters,

00:08:26.131 --> 00:08:28.887
but it does seem to produce
a lot of empty cardboard boxes.

00:08:28.887 --> 00:08:30.949
You can see on the left of 
this photograph,

00:08:30.949 --> 00:08:32.384
several square acres of junk

00:08:32.384 --> 00:08:34.897
waiting to be flown out
from the South Pole.

00:08:34.897 --> 00:08:38.929
But there is also a pole at the South Pole,

00:08:38.929 --> 00:08:42.325
and we got there on foot, unassisted,

00:08:42.325 --> 00:08:43.971
unsupported, by the hardest route,

00:08:43.971 --> 00:08:46.316
900 miles in record time,

00:08:46.316 --> 00:08:48.364
dragging more weight
than anyone in history.

00:08:48.364 --> 00:08:50.333
And if we'd stopped there 
and flown home,

00:08:50.333 --> 00:08:53.467
which would have been
the eminently sensible thing to do,

00:08:53.467 --> 00:08:55.348
then my talk would end here

00:08:55.348 --> 00:08:58.938
and it would end something like this.

NOTE Paragraph

00:08:58.938 --> 00:09:03.743
If you have the right team around you,
the right tools, the right technology,

00:09:03.743 --> 00:09:07.481
and if you have enough self-belief
and enough determination,

00:09:07.481 --> 00:09:10.926
then anything is possible.

NOTE Paragraph

00:09:12.656 --> 00:09:15.289
But then we turned around,

00:09:15.289 --> 00:09:18.048
and this is where things get interesting.

00:09:18.048 --> 00:09:20.842
High on the Antarctic plateau,

00:09:20.842 --> 00:09:24.841
over 10,000 feet, it's very windy,
very cold, very dry, we were exhausted.

00:09:24.841 --> 00:09:26.711
We'd covered 35 marathons,

00:09:26.711 --> 00:09:28.297
we were only halfway,

00:09:28.297 --> 00:09:30.328
and we had a safety net, of course,

00:09:30.328 --> 00:09:32.452
of ski planes and satellite phones

00:09:32.452 --> 00:09:36.505
and live, 24-hour tracking beacons
that didn't exist for Scott,

00:09:36.515 --> 00:09:38.257
but in hindsight,

00:09:38.257 --> 00:09:40.323
rather than making our lives easier,

00:09:40.323 --> 00:09:42.482
the safety net actually allowed us

00:09:42.482 --> 00:09:46.337
to cut things very fine indeed,

00:09:46.337 --> 00:09:50.104
to sail very close to our absolute
limits as human beings.

00:09:50.104 --> 00:09:53.577
And it is an exquisite form of torture

00:09:53.577 --> 00:09:56.414
to exhaust yourself to the point
of starvation day after day

00:09:56.414 --> 00:10:00.676
while dragging a sledge
full of food.

NOTE Paragraph

00:10:00.686 --> 00:10:04.613
For years, I'd been writing glib lines
in sponsorship proposals

00:10:04.613 --> 00:10:07.724
about pushing the limits
of human endurance,

00:10:07.724 --> 00:10:12.136
but in reality, that was 
a very frightening place to be indeed.

00:10:12.136 --> 00:10:14.045
We had, before we'd got to the Pole,

00:10:14.045 --> 00:10:17.509
two weeks of almost permanent
headwind, which slowed us down.

00:10:17.509 --> 00:10:20.159
As a result, we'd had several days
of eating half rations.

00:10:20.159 --> 00:10:22.878
We had a finite amount of food
in the sledges to make this journey,

00:10:22.878 --> 00:10:24.880
so we were trying to string that out

00:10:24.880 --> 00:10:28.793
by reducing our intake to half 
the calories we should have been eating.

00:10:28.793 --> 00:10:32.412
As a result, we both became
increasingly hypoglycemic —

00:10:32.412 --> 00:10:35.236
we had low blood sugar 
levels day after day —

00:10:35.236 --> 00:10:39.994
and increasingly susceptible
to the extreme cold.

00:10:39.994 --> 00:10:42.097
Tarka took this photo of me one evening

00:10:42.097 --> 00:10:44.227
after I'd nearly passed out
with hypothermia.

00:10:44.227 --> 00:10:49.035
We both had repeated bouts of hypothermia,
something I hadn't experienced before,

00:10:49.035 --> 00:10:50.746
and it was very humbling indeed.

00:10:50.746 --> 00:10:54.414
As much as you might
like to think, as I do,

00:10:54.414 --> 00:10:56.670
that you're the kind
of person who doesn't quit,

00:10:56.670 --> 00:10:58.664
that you'll go down swinging,

00:10:58.664 --> 00:11:00.916
hypothermia doesn't leave you much choice.

00:11:00.916 --> 00:11:03.726
You become utterly incapacitated.

00:11:03.726 --> 00:11:06.907
It's like being a drunk toddler.

00:11:06.907 --> 00:11:08.880
You become pathetic.

00:11:08.880 --> 00:11:12.999
I remember just wanting
to lie down and quit.

00:11:12.999 --> 00:11:15.173
It was a peculiar, peculiar feeling,

00:11:15.173 --> 00:11:20.412
and a real surprise to me
to be debilitated to that degree.

NOTE Paragraph

00:11:20.412 --> 00:11:24.894
And then we ran out of food completely,

00:11:24.894 --> 00:11:28.352
46 miles short of the first of the depots

00:11:28.352 --> 00:11:30.217
that we'd laid on our outward journey.

00:11:30.217 --> 00:11:31.560
We'd laid 10 depots of food,

00:11:31.560 --> 00:11:34.277
literally burying food and fuel,
for our return journey —

00:11:34.277 --> 00:11:37.554
the fuel was for a cooker so you
could melt snow to get water —

00:11:37.554 --> 00:11:43.361
and I was forced to make the decision
to call for a resupply flight,

00:11:43.361 --> 00:11:47.930
a ski plane carrying eight days of food
to tide us over that gap.

00:11:47.930 --> 00:11:51.289
They took 12 hours to reach us
from the other side of Antarctica.

NOTE Paragraph

00:11:51.289 --> 00:11:54.998
Calling for that plane was one of 
the toughest decisions of my life.

00:11:54.998 --> 00:11:58.474
And I sound like a bit of a fraud
standing here now with a sort of belly.

00:11:58.474 --> 00:12:01.314
I've put on 30 pounds
in the last three weeks.

00:12:01.314 --> 00:12:04.389
Being that hungry has left
an interesting mental scar,

00:12:04.389 --> 00:12:08.996
which is that I've been hoovering up
every hotel buffet that I can find.

00:12:08.996 --> 00:12:10.774
(Laughter)

00:12:10.774 --> 00:12:16.468
But we were genuinely quite hungry,
and in quite a bad way.

00:12:16.468 --> 00:12:18.909
I don't regret calling
for that plane for a second,

00:12:18.909 --> 00:12:20.911
because I'm still standing here alive,

00:12:20.911 --> 00:12:22.971
with all digits intact, 
telling this story.

00:12:22.971 --> 00:12:27.709
But getting external assistance like that
was never part of the plan,

00:12:27.709 --> 00:12:30.913
and it's something my ego
is still struggling with.

00:12:30.913 --> 00:12:33.955
This was the biggest dream I've ever had,

00:12:33.955 --> 00:12:36.047
and it was so nearly perfect.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:36.967 --> 00:12:38.648
On the way back down to the coast,

00:12:38.648 --> 00:12:40.839
our crampons — they're 
the spikes on our boots

00:12:40.839 --> 00:12:43.765
that we have for traveling
over this blue ice on the glacier —

00:12:43.765 --> 00:12:45.420
broke on the top of the Beardmore.

00:12:45.420 --> 00:12:47.185
We still had 100 miles to go downhill

00:12:47.185 --> 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.

00:12:51.810 --> 00:12:53.761
To give you an idea of scale,

00:12:53.761 --> 00:12:56.758
this is looking down towards the mouth
of the Beardmore Glacier.

00:12:56.758 --> 00:13:00.233
You could fit the entirety of Manhattan
in the gap on the horizon.

00:13:00.233 --> 00:13:03.447
That's 20 miles between
Mount Hope and Mount Kiffin.

00:13:03.447 --> 00:13:09.680
I've never felt as small 
as I did in Antarctica.

00:13:09.680 --> 00:13:11.785
When we got down
to the mouth of the glacier,

00:13:11.785 --> 00:13:16.431
we found fresh snow had obscured
the dozens of deep crevasses.

00:13:16.431 --> 00:13:19.381
One of Shackleton's men described
crossing this sort of terrain

00:13:19.381 --> 00:13:24.375
as like walking over the glass roof
of a railway station.

00:13:24.375 --> 00:13:27.289
We fell through more times
than I can remember,

00:13:27.289 --> 00:13:30.721
usually just putting a ski
or a boot through the snow.

00:13:30.721 --> 00:13:33.324
Occasionally we went in all 
the way up to our armpits,

00:13:33.324 --> 00:13:36.767
but thankfully never deeper than that.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:36.767 --> 00:13:40.947
And less than five weeks ago,
after 105 days,

00:13:40.947 --> 00:13:44.522
we crossed this oddly 
inauspicious finish line,

00:13:44.522 --> 00:13:47.544
the coast of Ross Island 
on the New Zealand side of Antarctica.

00:13:47.544 --> 00:13:49.694
You can see the ice in the foreground

00:13:49.694 --> 00:13:52.556
and the sort of rubbly rock behind that.

00:13:52.556 --> 00:13:56.358
Behind us lay an unbroken 
ski trail of nearly 1,800 miles.

00:13:56.358 --> 00:13:58.866
We'd made the longest ever
polar journey on foot,

00:13:58.866 --> 00:14:03.256
something I'd been dreaming 
of doing for a decade.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:03.256 --> 00:14:05.271
And looking back,

00:14:05.271 --> 00:14:07.666
I still stand by all the things

00:14:07.666 --> 00:14:09.248
I've been saying for years

00:14:09.248 --> 00:14:11.367
about the importance of goals

00:14:11.367 --> 00:14:14.809
and determination and self-belief,

00:14:14.809 --> 00:14:19.520
but I'll also admit that I hadn't given
much thought to what happens

00:14:19.520 --> 00:14:23.432
when you reach the all-consuming goal

00:14:23.432 --> 00:14:26.750
that you've dedicated 
most of your adult life to,

00:14:26.750 --> 00:14:30.330
and the reality is that I'm 
still figuring that bit out.

00:14:30.330 --> 00:14:33.931
As I said, there are very few
superficial signs that I've been away.

00:14:33.931 --> 00:14:35.382
I've put on 30 pounds.

00:14:35.382 --> 00:14:38.910
I've got some very faint, probably 
covered in makeup now, frostbite scars.

00:14:38.910 --> 00:14:42.383
I've got one on my nose, one on 
each cheek, from where the goggles are,

00:14:42.383 --> 00:14:47.128
but inside I am a very 
different person indeed.

00:14:47.128 --> 00:14:49.625
If I'm honest,

00:14:49.625 --> 00:14:54.800
Antarctica challenged me
and humbled me so deeply

00:14:54.800 --> 00:14:58.503
that I'm not sure I'll ever be able
to put it into words.

00:14:58.503 --> 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 --> 00:15:11.026
is proof that we all can 
accomplish great things,

00:15:11.026 --> 00:15:13.180
through ambition, through passion,

00:15:13.180 --> 00:15:15.342
through sheer stubbornness,

00:15:15.342 --> 00:15:16.857
by refusing to quit,

00:15:16.857 --> 00:15:19.813
that if you dream something 
hard enough, as Sting said,

00:15:19.813 --> 00:15:22.884
it does indeed come to pass.

00:15:22.884 --> 00:15:26.230
But I'm also standing here 
saying, you know what,

00:15:26.230 --> 00:15:32.211
that cliche about the journey being 
more important than the destination?

00:15:32.211 --> 00:15:35.532
There's something in that.

00:15:35.532 --> 00:15:37.901
The closer I got to my finish line,

00:15:37.901 --> 00:15:41.657
that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island,

00:15:41.657 --> 00:15:44.851
the more I started to realize
that the biggest lesson

00:15:44.851 --> 00:15:49.431
that this very long, very hard walk
might be teaching me

00:15:49.431 --> 00:15:53.124
is that happiness is not
a finish line,

00:15:53.124 --> 00:15:54.694
that for us humans,

00:15:54.694 --> 00:15:58.170
the perfection that so many of
us seem to dream of

00:15:58.170 --> 00:16:02.250
might not ever be truly attainable,

00:16:02.250 --> 00:16:10.716
and that if we can't feel content
here, today, now, on our journeys

00:16:10.716 --> 00:16:15.184
amidst the mess and the striving
that we all inhabit,

00:16:15.184 --> 00:16:17.904
the open loops, 
the half-finished to-do lists,

00:16:17.904 --> 00:16:20.756
the could-do-better-next-times,

00:16:20.756 --> 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 --> 00:16:34.629
Right now, I am very happy just recovering
and in front of hotel buffets.

00:16:34.629 --> 00:16:38.982
But as Bob Hope put it,

00:16:38.982 --> 00:16:41.278
I feel very humble,

00:16:41.278 --> 00:16:45.347
but I think I have the strength
of character to fight it. (Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

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

NOTE Paragraph

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