Once again, I'm a little late to jump on the bandwagon with this one, but I've just signed up to del.icio.us. It's essentially a way of storing, filing and sharing bookmarked ('favourite') pages. You can peruse my page at del.icio.us/bsaunders – I'm going to stick to expedition-specific stuff, as that's what I'm often asked for advice on (as well as being an area that I'm particularly obsessive about). I've thrown a few of the links on my PowerBook in for now, but there are hundreds more to come…
Elsewhere, David Jensen recently described me as the 'most well-travelled poor person' he knew. True to form, I'm heading to New York later today for a rather exciting event tomorrow night. I'm in town until Sunday – I'll be running around Central Park most days, and the fantastic Gravity Fitness are letting me train in their incredible gym for free (thanks guys!)
More soon..
— Filed under Miscellany
Photos from the fastest North Pole expedition (on foot) in history (Per Nordstrom, Henrik Runell & Magnus Persson's 42-day expedition from Ward Hunt Island, Canada to the North Geographic Pole).
— Filed under Aside
'We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.' – Bertrand Russell
— Filed under Aside
It's a glorious, sunny day in Toronto, and we've had a few great speakers at IdeaCity this morning. One that struck a chord with me and had many laughing out loud was Josh Freed's defence of mess and clutter.
Dwarfed by an immense slide of his (shockingly) messy office, Josh rallied against the notion that an organised desk means an organised mind. 'To me, an empty desk means an empty mind.' He poked fun at the current neatness revolution (my desk is usually a complete shambles, and like many , I've been taking the medicine) and the dozens of reality TV shows that send SWAT teams of clutter-busters bristling with dusters and box files into people's homes ('salvation by sanitation').
'It's time for a messy pride movement', he said, coming to the end of his talk. 'If Archimedes had been neat, he'd never have let his bath overflow..'
— Filed under Rumination
Yowser! I've just noticed that, at some point during the time I was in Greenland, this site was voted 2nd out of nearly 500 designs submitted to this year's CSS Reboot. I'm gobsmacked.
A huge thank you to everyone that voted for my home-brewed design.
Other news: 1) I'm currently skint, so my beloved Cervelo P2K is for sale on eBay (again).
2) It's boiling hot in London at the moment (32°C. at the weekend). Two weeks ago, I was trying to get to sleep at -20. Now it's 50 degrees warmer. All very confusing.
3) I'm off to Toronto for IdeaCity tomorrow morning. As I'm skint, Guy Miller kindly used a mountain of his Air Miles to pay for my flight, and we're sharing a hotel room. Naturally, I'll be blogging from Canada. Guy has challenged me to a running race – I'll let you know how it goes…
4) Bombon (El Perro) is the best film I've seen for ages. Actually, it's the only film I've seen for ages, but don't let that put you off.
— Filed under Rumination
Equop – awesome clothing from an 'an ethical and design-lead fair trade organic clothing company'. What's not to like?
— Filed under Aside
This is cool. I wrote an enormous list of 'life goals' when I was in Greenland (run a sub-2:45 marathon, rip my entire CD collection, start a UK-based pro cycling team, eat locally-bought organic fruit/veg, finish the Hawaii Ironman in under 10 hours, take more french/spanish/dancing/cooking/driving/photography lessons etc etc) and I decided that I wanted to have a tailor.
I worked in the now closed Canterbury branch of Austin Reed when I was 17 and saving up to go to Nepal and India, so I've always appreciated decent tailoring (and secretly hankered after a tailor-made suit). Right now, I couldn't afford a pair of tailored boxer shorts, but thanks to the blogosphere, when the time comes, I think I've found the right man for the job.
— Filed under Rumination
It's high time for an update. First up, the journey back from Greenland: we were picked up from the ice around 1100 on Friday of last week, by a ski-equipped Flugfelag Islands Twin Otter. The landing was pretty spectacular (it touched down a few metres from our tent) and the pilot seemed rather unhappy with the ice conditions, setting off with his shovel to flatten out some of the bumps. We dug the shovels out of our sledges and joined in, sweating under the midday sun, before he waved us on to the plane. The take off wasn't quite as hair-raising as my pick up from near the North Pole last year, but bombing down a snow runway in a ski plane is always an interesting experience.
We landed at Isafjordur (NW Iceland) a couple of hours later to find that all the connecting flights to Reykjavik were full, so we decided to hire a car instead (and offer a lift to the Austrian mountaineer Dagmar Wabnig in the process). The six-hour journey is a bit of a blur, but our one litre Toyota Corolla performed admirably considering Iceland's 'roads' generally look like this and the locals tend to drive this kind of thing. We dropped it outside the (gorgeous) Hotel Centrum looking like a mud-splattered, battle-hardened rally car, before grabbing a quick shower, one of the best steaks on the face of the earth, a couple of hours' kip and the 0745 flight to Heathrow the next morning. I was driven straight from Heathrow to Cheltenham, where I gave two presentations at the Cheltenham Science Festival (which went surprisingly well given the lack of preparation/sleep) and I got back to London around midnight.
The rest of last week was equally manic. The main news is that we've decided to launch the next expedition in four weeks' time. More on that soon. We spent Friday morning on a treadmill at the University of Hertfordshire's Physiology lab, being tested by our merciless human performance guru Dr. Justin Roberts. After a month in Greenland the heat and humidity felt debilitating, but the test results were encouraging – I even managed to hit a new record maximum heart rate of 201 beats per minute. That's 3.3 beats per second. Hardcore training starts again next week and I've been out on both my road bike and my mountain bike today to blow away the cobwebs.
Next week promises to be equally bonkers – I'm off to Toronto on Tuesday, where I'm co-presenting with Dr. Guy Miller at IdeaCity. I'll be packing my running shoes and I'm toying with the idea of taking my road bike – does anyone know how cycle-friendly Toronto is?
I'll upload the Greenland photos soon. Right now, I'm off off to bed.
— Filed under Greenland
