As a phlegmatic sort of chap, it's rare that I'm genuinely moved by something. It's rarer still that it happens thanks to a YouTube video clip with a cheesy soundtrack. The video is below, and the story behind it is amazing.
Dick Hoyt (now 65) and his son Rick have competed together in more than 900 endurance events, including six Ironman triathlons and 64 marathons (with a best time of 2:40:47). In itself, that's pretty remarkable, but there's more: Rick is a quadraplegic with cerebral palsy. He can't talk or walk, and he's confined to a wheelchair. For every race, he has been pushed (in a wheelchair), pulled (in an inflatable boat) or carried (on a specially-built bike) by his dad. When they started racing together, Dick was in his forties and he'd never run before. "Then it was me who was handicapped," he said. "I was sore for two weeks." Dick went on to run the Boston marathon in a time that was just 35 minutes off world record pace. Pushing a wheelchair. I've never felt more humbled, or more inspired. You can read more at the Team Hoyt website.
The presentation I gave at the 2005 TED conference in Monterey, California has just been posted on the TED Talks website (alongside a talk given this year by one of my heroes, Burt Rutan). I think nerves got the better of me at the very start and there a couple of howlers - the Arctic Ocean isn't 5,500 square miles, it's 5.4 million. D'oh.
I stumbled across a fantastic article on Charles Leadbeater's site today. I heard Charles ('one of the world's leading authorities on innovation and creativity in organisations') give a fantastic talk at last year's TED Global conference, and we shared the stage at a recent event for IDEO in London, where the theme was 'happiness'.
Whereas I managed to sidestep answering the question of what actually makes us happy by telling a few stories about frostbite, polar bears and flying around in rickety Russian helicopters, Charles had clearly gone to the trouble of thinking seriously about his response, and he gave a thought-provoking talk.
I suppose we are truly happy - or at least we have the possiblity of being truly happy - when these two strands come together: we escape into commitment. Voluntary commitment becomes the true mark of happiness, when we feel we belong and when we choose to invest ourselves in things.
Expeditions, to me, embody this idea of 'escaping into commitment' absolutely. Being dropped by helicopter at the start of my 2004 North Pole trip represented, on the one hand, utter escape. I was alone in no man's land, thousands of miles from the fetters of civilised society. Yet I was also entering a period of complete commitment; the amount of thought and energy that goes into merely staying alive in those conditions is remarkable. To do so while also walking 1,000km took (perhaps understandably) more focus than I'd ever given anything before.
Charles' article on luxury (pdf) had me nodding in agreement as well:
Luxury experiences come in all shapes and sizes these days. Cheap technology means the average person can walk down a road listening to better quality music than a King could have summoned up a century ago… In every city in the world luxury brands – Gucci and Prada, Armani and Mont Blanc – sell the same products. Anything you can buy in an airport is not a luxury. That means luxury will come from finding oddity, idiosyncrasy, something that has not been discovered by others, and does not have a brand upon it… In a more cacophonous, relentlessly always on world, people will look for sanctuary: pockets of calm and breathing spaces where they can be themselves.
Breathing spaces don't come much bigger than the Arctic Ocean, the Greenland icecap or the Antarctic plateau, yet before today I'd never really thought of expeditions as luxuries. From tough guy to epicure in the blink of an eye…
Ben Saunders is the youngest person to ski solo to the North Pole and holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Briton.
