Mental Spinach
I've always found music to be incredibly powerful stuff, and its ability to conjour emotion, to stir feelings and to inject energy into fatigued muscles seems directly proportional to your distance from civilization. The further away you are from home, the more powerful it gets.
On last year's expedition I listened to a lot of music (30 hours of tunes on three iRiver mp3 players). It started out as an occasional treat – a few tracks in the sleeping bag at night, but as I passed the 85 degree mark and really started to crank out decent daily mileages, I had it on full-blast, often for ten hours a day.
I'd meant to bring one of the very same mp3 players on this expedition, but I managed to leave it in my bag of personal gear in the aircraft hangar at Isafjordur (which I'll be picking up in a couple of weeks time). So I'm music-less.
Or at least I thought I was. Ten minutes ago, Tony reached over and handed me his mp3 player (it had been tucked away in his rucksack) and I'm currently in my sleeping bag, plugged in and grinning like a loon. It's full of great stuff – everything from Stevie Wonder to The Streets, Joss Stone to Jurassic Five, Kenny Loggins to the sublime KT Tunstall, and we've just been discussing the best motivational skiing tunes. Tony describes Christopher Cross' 'St. Elmo's Fire' as 'mental spinach' and he's convinced the 'Training Montage' from Rocky takes 20kg out of his sledge. Me, I'm struggling to pick out a favourite from last year's 30 hours. I remember Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power' getting me over a particularly nasty set of pressure ridges. Reef's 'Place your Hands' followed by the Ramones' take on 'What a Wonderful World' pulled me out of a rotten mood one morning, Cat Power's 'I found a reason' moved me to tears more than once and Survivor's 'Eye of the Tiger' seemed to double my skiing pace.
So, it's over to you. Any suggestions for more mental spinach to haul sledges to?
— Filed under Greenland