Ben Saunders - Polar Explorer, Motivational Speaker

Revision

So, an update. The big news is that SOUTH will now start in November 2008. It's been enormously frustrating to roll back the start date of this project again, but I now realise how naive I was in thinking, three years ago, that this was an expedition that would take a few months to get off the ground. The truth is that it's a monster; the levels of complication and expense of doing something this ambitious in the remotest (and coldest) place on earth have been astonishing. The easy bit of SOUTH will be pulling a sledge for nearly four months. It's the three years that it's taken to get this far that have been truly tough.

The good news is that the change of schedule gives me time to return to the Arctic next spring as I feel I haven't quite got rid of my North Pole itch. I'll post more on this project soon…

Elsewhere, I've just got back from the incredible Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine, best described by a fellow attendee as "a brain spa" (though my legs got a good workout as well - I racked up a decent running mileage in the glorious Camden Hills State Park). After a throat infection picked up on the flight home, I'm training hard this week as part of the build-up to competing for a second time in the Ballbuster duathlon on Saturday 10 November.

Regular blogging will resume with immediate effect - I'd been holding back on announcing the news about SOUTH, and now that I've done so, I'm feeling far happier. I'll leave you with a cartoon that made my day, from the brilliant Anton Uhl.

{ Filed under North Pole 2008, SOUTH on October 24th, 2007 | 6 Comments }

Haile Gebrselassie

Inspiration for a Monday morning: the incredible Haile Gebrselassie broke the world marathon marathon record yesterday, setting a new time of 2:04:26 and knocking nearly half a minute off Paul Tergat's old record.

It turns out that Haile's peculiar running style comes from the fact that he used to run 100km a week (62 miles) as a child, clutching a pile of school books under his left arm.

{ Filed under Inspiration and motivation on October 1st, 2007 | 2 Comments }