The Bob Graham Round

A quick video (masterfully edited by Al) to give you a glimpse of one of the things we've been up to recently:

{ Filed under Running, Training on December 10th, 2008 | 6 Comments }

On intensity and bike racing

Your brain can be your best friend or your enemy. If you can break it down to, ‘I must kill everyone,’ or ‘I must destroy,’ then you’re fine. But if you start thinking, ‘Do I really need to be doing this? It’s raining out. The road is slippery. People are crashing everywhere. It’s cold. My whole body hurts.’ That’s when it’s negative, and the desk job seems quite good. But if you can use your mind to make your body like a motorcycle — you just turn the throttle and go — if you can make it like that, you’re fine. That’s normally how it is in training, you take out the elements of stress and performance, and you enjoy it. That’s the key to racing.

- Pro cyclist Tom Danielson, interviewed by VeloNews

'I ride my bike 45,000km a year,' he says. 'People ask you to come here and there and I say, "I can't." And they say, "Yeah, I realise you're tired, I realise you just want a bit of peace and quiet." And it's like, no. I. Am. Fucked. I'm totally, utterly exhausted. My body is eating itself because I'm so tired.'

- Pro cyclist Mark Cavendish, interviewed by the Guardian

{ Filed under Cycling, Inspiration and motivation on December 2nd, 2008 | 2 Comments }

Explore – Expedition & Fieldwork Planning Weekend

It's rather short notice, but if you're planning an expedition at some point and you can get to London this weekend, you ought to come to Explore at the Royal Geographical Society. It kicks off on Friday evening with a talk by Paul Rose and there are workshops and presentations all weekend.

I'm running the polar panel on Saturday afternoon, and Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop and I are giving a talk about expedition comms on Sunday morning (hopefully involving a live Skype video call via BGAN satellite phone with Ed Stafford in the Peruvian rainforest!)

{ Filed under Miscellany, Speaking on November 20th, 2008 | No Comments }

Nutrition for a South Pole Race

I was interested to read a PDF of advice published by the team behind the South Pole Race (a 430-nautical mile race part-way from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole scheduled to start later this year) that advocates eating every two-and-a-half hours while hauling a pulk.

I might be letting slip one of my secret weapons here, but the longest I'll go on an expedition without eating is 90 minutes. I was taking in 260 calories per hour (predominantly carbohydrate) on my North Pole speed record attempt this spring and I've never felt stronger – or travelled faster – on a polar expedition. There's some great background on this approach in Steve Born's excellent piece, Proper Caloric Intake During Endurance Exercise.

I'll post something slightly less geeky later today.

{ Filed under North Pole 2008, Other expeditions, SOUTH on November 12th, 2008 | 3 Comments }

Explorer, Tennis Player, Entrepreneur

Following my post last week analogising exploration and tennis, a fabulous bit of perspective in an email from the inimitable Ethan Zuckerman:

"I wanted to object – strenuously – to your tennis analogy. You mentioned Børge Ousland and his nine journeys over 22 years. That struck me as a huge number. But I'm thinking as an entrepreneur, not as a tennis player. In my experience, everything worth doing in my life has taken a minimum of four years. That's true for Tripod, Geekcorps and now for Global Voices. As I'm reconfiguring my life right now to get off the road and write a book, I'm praying that it won't take four years, but I won't be surprised if that ends up being the interval, from starting to think about the topics to the last talk I give supporting the new volume.

I don't think that four years is some sort of magical figure – I think everyone's got their own periodicity – but I think that folks who achieve big, complex things take long, long times to do so. It's deeply frustrating – I'd like to think that I've got time enough to try a hundred crazy ideas and fail at most of them. Increasingly, I think I'll get ten or fifteen chances to try something big and worthwhile and give a proper go of it.

If you're thinking as an entrepreneur, not as a tennis player, nine completed projects would be the thing of legend – even someone like Steve Jobs is associated with a couple of successes, not a dozen. And I think you're more of an entrepreneur than you'd strictly like to be – as much as it would be wonderful for these expeditions to be athletic contests where you put your strength and will against the terrain and the elements, it's clear that they require as much strength, creativity and passion to organize, research, train and  – god help us all – fundraise."

{ Filed under Inspiration and motivation on October 23rd, 2008 | 2 Comments }

Blood, Sweat and Frozen Tears

Kenton Cool and Rob Casserley, arguably two of the world's best Everest guides (Kenton summited twice in a week last year) are giving a talk on "the modern face of Mount Everest… a one-off insight into the world of professional guiding" at the Royal Geographical Society in London next Tuesday evening (October 21st).

You can book tickets through World Expeditions or pay on the door, and if you're into high-altitude tales of derring-do tempered with a level of self-effacement that verges on the absurd, you'd be daft to miss it.

{ Filed under Inspiration and motivation, Other expeditions on October 16th, 2008 | No Comments }

Mocking and Elusive Dreams

From The North Pole, Robert Peary's account of his 1909 expedition (published in its entirety as a free Project Gutenburg ebook):

"The consequent delay of a year, was a serious blow to me. It meant that I must attack the problem one year older; it placed the initiation of the expedition further in the future, with all the possible contingencies that might occur within a year; and it meant the bitterness of hope deferred.

Yet, when I gathered myself together and faced the situation squarely, I realized that the project was something too big to die; that it never, in the great scheme of things, would be allowed to fall through. This feeling carried me past many a dead center of fatigue and utter ignorance as to where the rest of the money for the expedition was to be obtained. The end of the winter and the beginning of the spring of 1908 were marked by more than one blue day for everybody concerned in the success of the expedition.

But the money still came hard. It was the subject of my every waking thought; and even in sleep it would not let me rest, but followed with mocking and elusive dreams. It was a dogged, dull, desperate time, with the hopes of my whole life rising and falling day by day."

Anyone who's been following Al's prolific blogging will know the story already, but it's high time I announced it here and gave you a little back-story: we're postponing SOUTH by another year, and Al and I will leave for Antarctica in late October 2009. The principle reason is that we don't have the funding in place. Six months ago I was sure that Ernst & Young, the title sponsor for my North Pole speed record attempt this spring, would extend their support. But they pulled out at around the time the word "downturn" started cropping up in the news and I watched my dream slipping out of reach, racing ahead of me to the horizon I've dreamt of for so long.

I've chosen a peculiar career. The Norwegian übermensch of the polar expedition world, Børge Ousland, has been in this game for 22 years, yet has embarked on just nine major polar journeys. If a tennis player knew their career would span a mere nine games or an artist were told they could only exhibit nine works in a lifetime, the pressure to get it right would be immense. And there's the rub. To accomplish anything new; to break new ground, you've got to risk getting it wrong.

I got it wrong this spring, and the impact of my defeat in the Arctic this year has taken a while to appreciate. The silver lining of having to postpone SOUTH is that it gives me a chance to return to the Arctic and finish the job. Al and I were planning a training camp at Mark Twight's Gym Jones in Utah this summer (which in turn has been postponed – I'm planning to go in December now) and Mark sent me a perfectly-timed morale-boosting note a few weeks back. I hope he won't mind me reproducing it here:

"To have been shut down by gear failure up north when you were so invested, and clearly moving with the necessary speed, is an ugly outcome to live with every day. I understand this. Revisiting that challenge while the knowledge and lessons learned are still fresh, when you know well what needs to be done beforehand, when you have the confidence born from having been equal to the task yourself, makes better sense than letting it slide with the intent of coming back to it later.

In 1998 Steve House and I few on to Denali to try the (Czech) Slovak Direct. We got acclimated by tagging the top via an easier route. Then we did some reconnaissance of the actual climb and realized our tactics were unsound: we needed a third to share the work. So it didn't happen that year. Life got in the way the following year but we both kept our attention on the route, figured out the team (we had actually hoped to go as a foursome but Rolo bailed last minute), formulated tactics, dealt with gear, etc. And we trained for that specific task. All that to say that we kept the fire burning brightly, without distraction and it was one of several reasons we were able to do the route in "exactly" the way we wanted in 2000."

More soon.

{ Filed under Inspiration and motivation, North Pole 2008, North Pole 2009, SOUTH on October 8th, 2008 | 4 Comments }