I was featured in the Telegraph last weekend and something about the article riled me, though it took me a few days to figure out exactly which bit had put my nose out of joint. Turns out it was something Falcon Scott (Captain Scott's grandson) said: "It's a lot easier to do than in my grandfather's day."
And it's not just Falcon. Everyone says much the same thing. Including me, up until a week ago. It's a no-brainer, surely: in Scott's era you sailed to Antarctica in a leaky wooden ship and got scurvy en route, nowadays my buddy Patrick Woodhead will fly you and your friends there in a Gulfstream private jet, and you'll be met by a private chef when you land.
During Douglas Mawson's four-month Antarctic expedition in 1912, his two team mates died, the soles of his feet fell off (due to vitamin A poisoning from eating the livers of his dogs after they died as well), he tied the skin on again with bandages and walked alone for another four weeks before reaching his base camp (where he was welcomed with the words, "My God! Which one are you?"). They didn't sail home until the next year.
By contrast, 21st-century Antarctic explorers, if the ghost-written books and five-part documentaries are to be believed, consist largely of tearful TV celebs trailed by film crews in pick-up trucks and complaining about blisters. Clearly we've gone soft. Clearly the Golden Age is over. Adventurepreneurs? Luxpeditions? Glamping? Pass me the puke bucket.
But wait. Hold. Your. Horses. The platitudes about polar expeditions being easier nowadays make about as much sense, it strikes me, as saying that surfing is easier now than it was a century ago. Or skiing, or climbing, or sailing round Cape Horn, or driving a racing car, or any one of a million pursuits. Duke Kahanamoku surfed in Shackleton's heyday on a wooden board that weighed 52kg, and it would have taken months to travel by ship from London to Hawaii, yet it's clear that today's surfers (and skiers, climbers, sailors, racing drivers et al.) are pushing limits that would have been utterly unattainable to those of 90 years ago, and the same is true of polar expeditions – travelling solo would have been unthinkable, as would swimming across areas of open water, or hauling 180kg (the start weight of my sled in 2004 – in contrast Captain Scott's team pulled 200lbs, or 91kg each).
The polar regions are infinitely more accessible than they were a hundred years ago, but I would argue that the toughest polar expeditions are getting more challenging, not less so. To bolster my case, I'll leave you with some images and video that left me boggle-eyed with the screaming abdabs recently: Mike Horn and Børge Ousland swimming across leads in the dark (in the bloody dark!) during their unsupported winter expedition to the North Pole in 2006.
Here's to those who are still quietly chipping away at the edges of impossibility.
Rather last minute (quelle surprise) but I'm speaking at what promises to be a fantastic event on Thursday evening (the 16th) in aid of the charity Help for Heroes. I'm talking for 20 minutes alongside an amazing line-up, including John Simpson OBE (BBC World Affairs editor), the record-breaking yachstwoman Dee Caffari MBE, Monty Halls, and author of Bravo Two Zero and SAS veteran Andy McNab.
For one unforgettable night, several of the finest speakers in the UK will gather at the Royal Institution, London, to present on the subject of courage, of achievement, of overcoming impossible odds – to celebrate heroism itself.
It's at the Royal Institution, the doors open at 6pm, and I think there are a few tickets left. There's more about the event here.
At eight in the morning on Wednesday June 24th, I sat on a folding wooden chair in a musty village hall in a small village in Berkshire and looked around. It was an inauspicious start to the longest ultra-marathon ever staged in the UK. The same event in California would have warranted a car park full of TV vans bristling with satellite dishes, a giant clock counting down to the start and a dozen sponsors' flags fluttering in the breeze.
Here we had two volunteers at a trestle table, handing out numbers and safety pins, and a lady in the little kitchen brewing builders' tea and instant coffee. The runners -thirty or so- sat around the edge of the hall, some making nervous small talk, others silent; deep in pre-race rituals of Vaseline and tape. A man in a faded vest swigged from a carton of milk. I suspected I was the least experienced ultra-runner there by far. I was almost certainly the youngest.
We started (too fast, most of us later concurred) in blazing sunshine, running in small packs at a conversational pace. It was unseasonably hot, and avoiding dehydration soon became a challenge. I refilled my two-litre Camelbak twice before the first checkpoint -at 27 miles- and I spent much of my time scanning for taps, or friendly-looking people with hosepipes.
The run turns to a walk on the morning of day two. Photo by Alastair Humphreys
The checkpoints were heavenly. The first, in dappled shade in the corner of a field, felt like a picnic at a school sports day. I jogged in grinning to quiet applause, like I'd come third in the long jump, and lowered my bum into a stripey deck chair. I hadn't expected to be waited on, but one of the event's big-hearted volunteers came over with my bags, and a minute later with a cup of sweet tea. I stuffed my face with a chocolate protein shake, a fistful of flapjack and a few strips of biltong (happily, much like Doc's car in Back to the Future II, my stomach seems to burn anything) and trotted off again.
As our individual paces waxed and waned I would meet other runners and, often without knowing each other's name, we would launch into abstract and weighty conversation. One fellow competitor described the self-loathing that fuelled his ultra-running; another exchange touched on the joy of parenthood, and one runner's fear that his young children might see through his facade of confidence and wisdom. It had never occurred to me that having children might bring a fear of the unknown: later that evening I ran alone in happy tears, thinking of my mother and her bravery. She had never seemed overwhelmed to me as a boy, despite bringing my brother and I up on her own for a period, barely out of her mid-twenties. My run seemed a paltry challenge compared to that.
There were highs and lows throughout. I still smile at memories of the sheer beauty of parts of the Thames, the raw, shining spirit of my fellow runners and the magnanimity of the volunteers that stayed up to nurse us through this bizarre test. And I still clench my jaw with rage when I recall the jarring news at the second checkpoint that three runners had been mugged, on three separate occasions during the night (one apparently on his knees, begging to keep his stopwatch, another beaten by three men as a fourth filmed the scene on a mobile phone). We're a peculiar species.
I walked and jogged through the brief hours of darkness with two companions, one agitated, belching and cursing under his breath to no one in particular, the other with a metronomic gait and wire-rimmed glasses. The early sunrise brought primeval joy, and clouds of riverside flies, which gave the burping chap something else to swear at. In fairness, it later transpired that his feet were in a terrible state.
Later that morning I shuffled from the Thames to the Grand Union Canal, though any of the canal's previous grandeur was masked by graffiti, semi-submerged traffic cones and scuttled shopping trolleys, like some strange robotic beaver had tried to dam the stream. My mood fluttered lower as my right ankle started to hurt. There had been dull background pain for a while (I'd clocked up 75 miles by this point) but this was something sharper; more insistent, and at the third checkpoint, at 82.25 miles, I decided it would be prudent to throw in the towel.
Out for the count after 82 miles non-stop. Photo by Sam Christmas
I'm still second-guessing that decision today, though I felt gladly vindicated at the weekend when I heard that Dean Karnazes, widely seen as one of the world's finest ultra-marathoners, had pulled out of the Western States 100 after 62 miles. Dean called his race a "spectacular failure", but I'm being a little easier on myself. Two thirds of the field dropped out of the Thames Ring 250 – nine had retired before I did – and I've never run 82-and-a-bit miles in one go before. Another to falter before the finish line was the ebullient Rajeev Patel, and I'll let him have the final word, with a quote from a fizzingly enthusiastic email he sent the field a few days ago:
"The voice of caution knows nothing of real joy. What joy is there in doing what there was no doubt you could do? Try something you could fail at… that just could be living."
In 48 hours time, I'll be toeing up to the start line of the UK's longest ever non-stop running race, the Thames Ring 250. Two hundred and fifty refers to the distance in miles, and the cut-off time is 100 hours. Nearly ten marathons in four-and-a-bit days. It's organised by the two chaps that mastermind the Grand Union Canal Race (145 miles, and until this week, the longest non-stop running race in the UK) and in wonderfully understated British style, the Thames Ring doesn't even have a website. Orchestration so far has been via a series of emailed Word documents; one mentions "You will be travelling a full marathon between checkpoints", another that says checkpoints will have "Rice pudding… Marmite sandwiches… crisps… custard". Nothing isotonic, no hype, no hyperbole, no bullshit. As soon as I heard about the event, I knew it was the perfect opportunity to sort my head out.
If you've been following along for a while, you've probably surmised that I didn't make it back to the North Pole this spring. The problem this time wasn't a dodgy ski binding, it was a dodgy global economy, though much like the equipment failure that scuppered last year's expedition, it was a hurdle I never expected to bring me crashing down, and I still lose sleep wondering if I could have avoided the situation, or if I could somehow have overcome it with a little more effort or ingenuity.
I curse myself along more than I praise myself. Perhaps this is an unavoidable part of the English condition; we (or at least I, certainly) feel awkwardly self-conscious giving high-fives, but we revel in self-contained suffering. Expiation with a stiff upper lip (from the Latin expiare – to end something by suffering it to the full).
And if the Thames Ring 250 sounds like anything (to laypeople and dilettante joggers, at least), it sounds like dreadful, pointless suffering. Blisters, chafing, sunburn, sleep deprivation, endless miles of towpath. I faced a volley of questions over a sunny Sunday afternoon barbeque this weekend, largely on my motivation. On many levels it's near-impossible to justify: it's plainly a stupid thing to attempt.
I have two reasons. The first, Sri Chinmoy would call self-transcendence, and -while I balk at any talk of spirituality (I'm English) and "the Will of the Absolute Supreme" (I'm an atheist)- I'm relishing the chance to plumb the depths of my mind, my ability and my potential as a human, and to slay a few demons (in what I am sure will be a bizarrely bucolic backdrop). The second is the chance to distance myself -and bear with me if this sounds macho- from what Mark Twight ruthlessly terms "[The] wannabes, pretend-to-bes, has-beens and never-will-bes".
I'll be posting updates from the race on Twitter, and I'll publish a write-up here with some photos at the beginning of next week.
It's high time I wrote a proper update, but it ain't going to happen just yet, alas – it's nearly midnight and I'm up at 6am to go running. In the mean time, I wanted to share something I'm excited about, and to extend an invitation to those of you in London (or that might fancy a trip to the big smoke): I'm speaking at the School of Life at 7pm on the 15th of May.
"Who hasn’t dreamt of setting off to distant lands in search of adventure, or wondered what it would be like to really push yourself to your mental and physical limits? Somehow, for most of us, ordinary life gets in the way.
Ben Saunders is the youngest person ever to ski to the North Pole and holds the world record for the longest solo Arctic journey completed by a Briton. This evening he shares his extraordinary tales of dogged determination, strength and courage, telling us with unflinching honesty how it feels to step into the complete unknown.
If you secretly harbour dreams of pursuing a life of extreme adventure, or want to adopt a spirit of adventure closer to home, come and hear Ben’s advice on motivation, teamwork, success, failure, risk-taking and achieving our dreams, no matter how steep the odds."
I can guarantee that I won't be giving my usual schtick, and I'm already giddy about the prospect of speaking at a place that has wonderful people like this behind it. Do come along if you can.
Tickets are £10 including drinks. To book please call the School of Life on 0207 833 1010
Many of you will have already deduced that my dwindling post rate on this blog can be attributed, in the large part, to Twitter, the fast-creepng ivy that is wrapping itself around the seasoned bark of so many online diaries.
It's a wonderful medium in a heap of ways, but I occasionally wonder if it isn't all just utterly inane, and I was gobsmacked to read (in David Crane's brilliant biography of Captain Scott, Scott of the Antarctic) that Shackleton thought the same about his first Antarctic diary, 107 years ago:
I turned in about 1am. What a ridiculous thing it must seem to other people to read a diary where such a statement as 'I turned in at 1am' appears as if they were interested in the time another fellow mortal at the other end of the world went to bed… Those sort of items are the penalties that one's friends must pay when struggling to gain a little real information in these reams of paper.
- E.H. Shackleton, diary, 14 July 1902
A return to the Arctic Ocean is on the cards for March this year; a second chance for me to pull off the North Pole speed record that I tried to set last spring. It's a slim chance, but a chance nonetheless, and I have a vast amount to pull off in the next month in order to make this expedition happen, not least conjuring a significant chunk of the expedition's budget from thin air (at a time when cash isn't easy to come by, and I'm still repaying debts from the last expedition).
But in grappling with the big things, it's easy to forget that it was the smallest of things that derailed my plans last year: a slim steel plate in one of my ski bindings that broke in two. For the best part of a year I've been trying to figure out how to prevent it happening again. Salomon weren't all that helpful, and perhaps understandably; this was the first time they'd heard of anyone breaking one of these bindings -they're designed for backcountry skiing, not dragging a sled through the smashed-up surface of a frozen ocean- and they'd be daft to guarantee them for the abuse I put them through. For a while I considered swallowing my pride, mollifying my stubborn streak and switching to an older boot and binding, but I'm happy to report that I now have some fearsomely vast intellects focusing on preventing it happening again. Penso call themselves 'a product development consultancy that thinks differently'. Andy and I now call them 'legends'. We visited earlier this month to discuss the binding conundrum, half-expecting a bloke in a flat cap to knock us up a new one by hand from an offcut kicking around the workshop floor.
Instead we witnessed, grinning at each other in disbelief, a team of experts (including at least one Professor) spending hours on the problem, producing complex stress-testing computer simulations and wheeling in composites experts that helped make everything from supercars to Olympic track bikes. I've always been a geek when it comes to my equipment, so you can imagine my glee when this email attachment turned up yesterday.
I'll keep you posted as it all comes together. Right now, it seems like the binding isn't the only thing that's being stress-tested, but I have a sneaky feeling I can make this expedition happen. More soon.
I was stunned to hear on the news a few minutes ago that the 21-years-old British adventurer Rob Gauntlett has been killed in an avalanche in the Alps. Rob was the youngest Briton to climb Everest (at 19), and he and James Hooper pulled off a huge expedition between the Magnetic Poles that finished a year ago. There's more on the BBC News.
I met Rob at a charity event in London late last year and was struck by how personable and self-effacing he was. His passing has come as a huge shock.
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.
'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.'
And it's not just Falcon. Everyone says much the same thing. Including me, up until a week ago. It's a no-brainer, surely: in Scott's era you sailed to Antarctica in a leaky wooden ship and got scurvy en route, nowadays my buddy Patrick Woodhead will fly you and your friends there in a Gulfstream private jet, and you'll be met by a private chef when you land.
