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.'
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."
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.
"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."
My brother's currently competing in the Surrey League Revolutions five-day stage race ("Around 100 of Britain's top riders will be taking part in the gruelling 5 day long race. Each day they will cover around 100 miles - as well as climbing some of the steepest hills in South East England.") He's been giving me a blow-by-blow account over the phone every evening, and he's posting daily update's on his cycling team's website.
"The strong riders wouldn't let things go clear, until the second lap of a big circuit… where Rob Hayles slipped away and opened the gas up… I looked at the moves and thought "If I don't get across to that, it will be even more GC time and the stage over" so I took a deep breath, shifted up and went for it. Steve Golla (Sigma) and one of the Irish Team Ras Mumhan racing came with me, and gradually we worked together for a hard five minutes get across. The last 200 metres to the break was pure pain, but it was worth the effort as this now large group (including the earlier move by Hayles) of about 20 worked to put some time into the bunch."
To give you an idea of the standard of racing, many of these guys are pros, and Rob Hayles narrowly missed selection for the GB team pursuit squad (that I've just watch win Olympic Gold, setting a new world record in the process). I couldn't be prouder of my little brother, even if it does mean admitting he can officially kick my arse on a bike.
T.S. Eliot's Geneen Marie Haugen's (whoops) The Return (thank you Jerry) and a sublime advertisement from Mercedes…
Some day, if you are lucky,
you'll return from a thunderous journey trailing snake scales, wing fragments and the musk of Earth and moon.
Eyes will examine you for signs of damage, or change and you, too, will wonder if your skin shows traces
of fur, or leaves, if thrushes have built a nest of your hair, if Andromeda burns from your eyes.
Do not be surprised by prickly questions from those who barely inhabit
their own fleeting lives, who barely taste their own possibility, who barely dream.
If your hands are empty, treasureless, if your toes have not grown claws, if your obedient voice has not
become a wild cry, a howl,
you will reassure them.
We warned you, they might declare, there is nothing else, no point, no meaning, no mystery at all, just this frantic waiting to die.
And yet, they tremble, mute, afraid you've returned without sweet elixir for unspeakable thirst, without a fluent dance or holy language
to teach them, without a compass bearing to a forgotten border where no one crosses without weeping for the terrible beauty of galaxies
and granite and bone.
They tremble, hoping your lips hold a secret, that the song your body now sings will redeem them, yet they fear
your secret is dangerous, shattering, and once it flies from your astonished mouth, they—like you—must disintegrate before unfolding tremulous wings.
Challenging times right now, as they often seem to be, and I'm going to break with a self-imposed rule I set a while ago and start talking (or indeed writing) a bit more openly about the ups and downs of getting an expedition like SOUTH off the ground. I've never seen anyone do this before, and probably for a good reason - the small clique of people like me who make a good living from expeditions tend to be pretty cagey about what they're doing next, and exactly how they're funding it. It's not the easiest time to be raising money right now, but I'm going to play my cards a little further from my chest, as it were.
I make no bones about the fact that my expeditions are paid for by corporate sponsorship. I started out with no money of my own, and my first North Pole expedition, in 2001, landed me in £35k ($69k) of personal debt that took years to pay off, so it's been a steep learning curve, and one I'm still grappling with. Last year was an interesting milestone - I did more speaking than ever before, and made more money than ever before. I felt secure and safe; grown-up. I started reading about investments and mortgages and bought a big flat shiny TV. Thought about getting a dog. Yet for the first time since 2001, there was no big expedition that year.
This year things feel different - edgy again. There's been one huge expedition already. Life is hurtling along, deadlines are towering over a horizon that races ever closer and debtors are looming large in the rear-view mirror. It all feels rather out of control, which I've come to learn is probably a good thing. A sign that I'm stretching and not cruising as Ridgway would put it.
There's a lot going on in the sponsorship department right now, and an important phone call with Ernst & Young's global head of marketing at 8am tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes…
Cinematic Orchestra 'To Build a Home' - Live At The Barbican
…to go training on a Sunday afternoon: Graham Watson's fabulous photo of this seven-man break climbing the Passo Vivione in yesterday's stage of the Giro d'Italia. At this point they were twenty minutes ahead of the peloton. Grr.
Your about to be published autobiography stops in 1982. What have the readers missed?
Nothing! People who reach their goals are very uninteresting. What could I have written about the last 20 years? I met a lot of awfully boring Hollywood bimbos. I earned a lot of money. I fly only first class.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 Fawcett joined the Polish army but had been in barracks for only a week before escaping from the advancing Nazis and hitchhiking back to Paris. In Paris Fawcett took part in the rescue of a group of British prisoners-of-war who had been placed under French guard in a hospital ward by the Germans. By impersonating a German ambulance crew, Fawcett and a comrade marched in at 4am and ordered the French nurses to usher the PoWs out into the yard. "Gentlemen," he announced as he drove them away, "consider yourself liberated."
"You're a Yank," said a British voice.
"Never," came Fawcett's lilting southern burr, "confuse a Virginian with a Yankee."
In 1942 he joined the RAF and trained as a Hurricane pilot. For six months in 1945 he fought with the French Foreign Legion in the forests of Alsace, and took part in the liberation of Colmar. In three months at the end of the war, Fawcett married six Jewish women who had been trapped in concentration camps, a procedure that entitled them to leave France with an automatic American visa.
By 1948 Fawcett was back in action, this time against the Communists in the Greek civil war, fighting in a lounge suit in the guise of a journalist, since no foreigners were supposed to be involved. The following year, he returned to Paris and began his career as an actor, working in the theatre, radio and films. During the next 25 years he appeared in two films with Sophia Loren, knew Orson Welles and William Holden, and in Rome - between two of her six husbands - became the lover of Hedy Lamarr.
In 1956 he spent three months helping to rescue refugees from the Hungarian uprising and, following riots in the Belgian Congo in 1959, joined a friend with a private plane in missions to rescue people who had become trapped and unable to escape the fighting.
2007 was a huge year of challenge, and of growth for me. Perhaps rather tellingly, it was also the first year since 2003 that I haven't been on an Arctic expedition, and all that time in London (and in executive lounges, business class flights and swanky hotels) seems to have skewed my thinking a bit; my first stab at a list of goals for this year looked more like a to-buy list than a to-do list.
Luckily a brief New Year's blast of fresh air and suffering from a training trip spent hammering over the Brecon Beacons in Wales seems to have fixed things, along with a pertinent quotation from one of my favourite books of 2007, Feet in the Clouds by Richard Askwith (Amazon UK, Amazon US) that reminded me of one the joys of expedition life:
"We are richer now, but more overworked, more deeply in thrall to the addictions of getting and spending. We have more possessions, and they tyrannise us. Each new mod con must be shopped for, maintained, insured, upgraded; each new thing must be stored, kept track of, kept secure, tidied; and the whole package is paid for in overwork, time-poverty, round-the-clock availability and round-the-clock insecurity.
We have more, and we have less. In such a world, freedom is both more precious and more elusive than ever. And one of the few surefire ways of liberating ourselves from the tyranny of the consumer society is to put ourselves beyond its reach."
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.