Name: 【TED】Ben Saunders: To the South Pole and back — the hardest 105 days of my life (Ben Saunders: To the South Pole and back — the hardest 105 days of my life)
Uploaded: 2015-01-31T22:00:04.000Z
Duration: 17 min 9 s
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So in the oasis of  intelligentsia that is TED,

as an expert in dragging heavy stuff around cold places.

I've been leading polar expeditions  for most of my adult life,

and last month, my teammate  Tarka L'Herpiniere and I

finished the most ambitious  expedition I've ever attempted.

In fact, it feels like I've been transported straight here

from four months in the middle of nowhere,

mostly grunting and swearing,  straight to the TED stage.

So you can imagine that's a transition that hasn't been entirely seamless.

seems to be that my short-term memory is entirely shot.

to avoid too much grunting and swearing in the next 17 minutes.

This is the first talk I've given about this expedition,

and while we weren't sequencing genomes or building space telescopes,

this is a story about giving everything we had to achieve something

So I hope in that you might  find some food for thought.

It was a journey, an  expedition in Antarctica,

the coldest, windiest, driest and highest altitude continent on Earth.

It's a fascinating place. It's a huge place.

a continent that is the same size as China and India put together.

an interesting phenomenon in the last few days,

something that I expect Chris Hadfield may get at TED in a few years' time,

conversations that go something like this:

My husband and I did Antarctica with Lindblad for our anniversary."

Or, "Oh cool, did you go there for the marathon?"

Our journey was, in fact, 69 marathons back to back

in 105 days, an 1,800-mile round trip on foot from the coast of Antarctica

for the longest human-powered polar journey in history by more than 400 miles.

it was the same as walking from  here to San Francisco,

then turning around and walking back again.

So as camping trips go, it was a long one,

and one I've seen summarized  most succinctly here

on the hallowed pages  of Business Insider Malaysia.

about fear and about the odds of success, and indeed the odds of survival.

Of the nine people in history that had attempted this journey before us,

He led the last team to attempt this expedition.

Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton,

both led expeditions battling to become the first to reach the South Pole,

to chart and map the interior of Antarctica,

because we could see the moon through telescopes.

Antarctica was, for the most part, a century ago, uncharted.

Scott's last expedition, the  Terra Nova Expedition in 1910,

using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors,

dropping multiple, pre-positioned depots of food and fuel

through which Scott's final team of five would travel to the Pole,

where they would turn around and ski  back to the coast again on foot.

arrived at the South Pole  in January 1912

to find they had been beaten to it by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen,

And for more than a century this journey has remained unfinished.

Scott's team of five died  on the return journey.

How come this has remained  the high-water mark?

Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot.

So this is the high-water mark  of human endurance,

human endeavor,  human athletic achievement

in arguably the harshest climate on Earth.

And of course some strange and  predictable combination of curiosity,

led me to thinking I might be the man to try to finish the job.

Unlike Scott's expedition, there were just two of us,

and we set off from the coast of Antarctica in October last year,

When I say it was like walking from here to San Francisco and back,

I actually mean it was like dragging something that weighs a shade more

the same weights that the weakest of Scott's ponies pulled.

Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour.

Perhaps the reason no one had  attempted this journey until now,

【TED】Ben Saunders: To the South Pole and back — the hardest 105 days of my life (Ben Saunders: To the South Pole and back — the hardest 105 days of my life)

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【TED】Ben Saunders: To the South Pole and back — the hardest 105 days of my life (Ben Saunders: To the South Pole and back — the hardest 105 days of my life)

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