“It’s a slurry of whole food—nuts, fruits and vegetables, plus our proprietary blend of plant-based supplements customized to give your body the exact phytonutrients it needs,” he said proudly, then stiffened a little as he heard his own words. “Sorry, that doesn’t sound very appetizing, does it?”
I laughed. “Regardless of your description, they actually taste really good. I’m impressed.” I was fascinated to be learning so much about the science of high performance and nutrition, but the trade-off for all that science was that I became part of the science project. Standard Process wanted results in the field. Eating the bars in volume, day after day through the expedition, made me a perfect candidate for their research, hence the request for blood samples. So I’d dutifully started stabbing myself, once a week starting on one of my first nights on the ice, as the good doctors had ordered.
What Dr. Troup and his team couldn’t test, or know, was what that huge load of fat, day after day, would do to my system when I wasn’t used to eating like that, or in those conditions. There was no timeline or stress test to show how my body, and my gut, would adapt to eating thousands of calories of super-high-fat Colin Bars day after day for weeks. Trying to crack the code on this solo Antarctica project was a step into the unknown; there was no playbook. I asked Dr. Troup if he thought the Colin Bars would work, and he simply replied, “The proof will be in the pudding.”
* * *
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, as I struggled to follow Jenna’s mileage plan, it often felt as if I was dragging an anchor behind me rather than a sled. Runners built to slide on the ice, weighed down by all I carried, seemed instead to be digging in with every step I took, trying to drag me back and pull me down. I also knew, because Jenna was tracking Rudd’s progress by monitoring his nightly blog posts, that he was still moving along steadily, which didn’t help my state of mind.
But it was only when I experienced my first real Antarctic whiteout that I began to realize how much my perception of physical things—aching shoulders and legs, cold that creeps in and jabs you like a knife—was tied up with what I could or couldn’t see.
Whiteouts aren’t just about the strange blank light. I was prepared for that. What startled me was how much the whiteness grabbed onto me, pulled me in, and closed up the world even tighter, down to the little bubble of me and my sled. The light flattened completely, erasing the horizon of every defining boundary and eliminating all the contrasts of light and subtle differences of ice.
Almost instinctively, I felt the need to bundle up even more, as though the cold could penetrate more deeply under such conditions. I pulled my hood up tighter, checked my mask for gaps, and grabbed my snow skirt, which extended down onto my thighs, adding an extra layer of protection to my legs.
And gradually my mind began to fill the empty space around me, too, not with visions or things that I knew weren’t real—though I’d prepared myself for that as well—but with memories. As I went deeper into the textureless landscape, it began to seem that the texture of memory was everywhere, and that I wasn’t merely recalling events and conversations but real and starkly observed scenes as if in a waking dream.
Then it went beyond even that, and I found that in the vacuum of sensory deprivation, I was able to recall with sharpness and detail a whole tapestry of my life that in the blur and distraction of the normal world I’d never had access to. It felt as if a file cabinet of memory had emerged, ready to be opened, begging to be opened.
And as I moved through the whiteout the world disappeared; the things I could see and feel became the keys to that memory cabinet. I glanced down at my knee and, in a flash, relived an entire afternoon at the playground when I was five, scraping a knee in a fall from the monkey bars, which caused Lucas to run over to make sure I was okay.
Then I glanced at my hands, which moved back and forth with the poles, and I was suddenly—with startling clarity—able to remember a specific morning when I was six, walking into my first day of grade school, holding my big sister’s hand. Caitlin’s hand was cool and dry while mine was sweaty with anxiety. She was wearing purple pants with cuffs. I’d insisted, with great passion, on wearing gray sweatpants and Velcro sandals. The school’s big blue metal doors had a little line of rust running down below the hinges.
I felt I could close the Caitlin-first-day file and open up another. The second-day file and third-day file were easily accessible. Reliving any school day and really any day of my life was just as powerful and vivid, just as available to fill the void in what I couldn’t see around me.
Other parts of me, though, were disappearing. I’d had a shadow once, in the days before, which I could sometimes use to help me navigate when the sun was behind me. Shadow Colin moved on the ice ahead of me and felt sort of like a companion, moving as I moved, distorted and unrecognizable when the terrain under him changed with a snowdrift or sastruga. But the whiteout erased him, so it was just me again and my compass to guide me south.
And then, just after breaking camp on the morning of my sixth day, seventy-four miles from the start, still enveloped in the whiteout, I saw a ghostly image in the distance that quickly became real and clear as I approached: a red tent.
I’m pretty sure there isn’t anyone else out here, I said to myself as I stopped in my tracks, overwhelmed by the strange and almost comic oddness of bumping into someone, here of all places. It could only be Rudd. Of all the people in the universe it could only be him. Antarctica stretched out around us, as big as the United States and Mexico combined, and on a vast and remote swath of the continent at that moment he and I were the only humans for hundreds of miles in any direction.
I didn’t know what to do. Though I’d certainly fantasized about the moment I might catch up to Rudd, and gone through in my mind all sorts of imagined scenarios of what I’d say and do and how he might respond, I’d always pictured a gradual sort of thing—seeing him in the distance, pulling his sled as I slowly closed the distance.
Staring at his tent, I felt suddenly claustrophobic, as though in all the vastness of Antarctica, he and I were trapped all over again in a tiny, tight little world that I couldn’t escape, just as we’d been on the Ilyushin.
I immediately decided that I’d quietly sneak by, hoping that he wouldn’t wake up or notice.
But then I heard a cough, and I froze in place, unable to take my eyes off the tent as the front flap slowly unzipped and a head popped out, looking stark and round against the red fabric about fifty feet from where I stood. An arm wriggled out from the flap and Rudd began to wave.
In dead silence that made it feel all the more surreal, Rudd’s slow, deliberate wave—mostly in his hand, the way I’ve seen the Queen of England do on television, saying hello to her subjects from a royal balcony—looked formal and dignified, but in the middle of the Antarctic ice also extremely odd if not downright disturbing.
I was so stunned by the whole bizarre scene that I couldn’t think of anything to do but wave back.
After that, there seemed little else to do but keep going. Execute the plan.
I wasn’t thinking at that moment that I’d passed Rudd, only that I’d just been through one of the most bizarre experiences of my life, and was a little afraid that the image—the head, the wave—would get stuck in my memory like the photograph of his skeletal body at the Pole.
But executing the plan of pushing on south through a whiteout also took just about all the concentration I had, and pretty quickly I wasn’t thinking of Rudd at all. My compass, strapped to my chest, jutting out about eighteen inches from my face, became the central focus of everything as I tried to stay on course. The compass’s black-and-silver box, with the little mirror lid that stood up vertically facing me, black needle indicator pointing south, was the only guide I had. Because I had no other visual cues, I’d almost immediately veer off my heading if I glanced away. It was like walking down a pitch-black hallway and bonking into the wall after five steps—human beings, with our reliance on sight, just aren’
t built to walk in straight lines without visual cues to help us.
After about an hour of that, though, I happened to glance back and saw that Rudd was now exactly in my tracks, about a hundred yards behind me, just visible at the edge of the whiteout.
It felt just as dreamlike and strange as stumbling onto his tent. I’d been utterly alone, and now here we were together once more in the emptiest of places, seatmates all over again in a way, jammed together and jostling, and a part of me wanted to shout back to him, “Hey, get your own continent!”
But because it was Rudd, I decided pretty immediately that he knew what he was doing. There was strategy at work. Had to be. It was another grizzled veteran polar trick, I thought, similar to how bike racers tuck behind the rider directly in front to reduce wind resistance. Because he could see me, I was functioning as his navigational beacon, which meant he could relax a bit and not need his own compass so much. I slowed my pace and he eventually came up beside me.
“Good morning, mate,” he said immediately. “I’ve got a bit of a suggestion for you.”
That in itself was enough to stop me short, and I stood there staring at him for a few seconds. Middle of nowhere, middle of absolute emptiness, only two people for hundreds of miles, racing history both bundled up head to toe in subzero cold, and one guy steps up to the other to offer advice?
I couldn’t see anything of his face at that point, behind goggles and mask, so there were no further clues about what he was talking about. My skiing form? My sled? My food supplies? My personality?
He was trying to undermine my confidence. That seemed unquestionably true to me at that moment. Something in his eyes implied I was committing some error. I decided I’d had enough.
“We’ve both announced to the world that we’re each trying to be the first,” I started, then paused, wanting to say something more, something deeper. This might well be the last conversation I’d have for the next two months with a living, breathing person in front of me. Rudd deserved more.
“I know that your dear friend Henry Worsley died attempting this. We both know the stakes out here,” I said. “Worsley was a hero and an inspiration.” I was almost about to go on, and say how much Worsley had inspired me personally, but I stopped myself. Worsley’s memory and honor were Rudd’s to carry as his friend, not mine. “Look, I hope we both make a safe crossing,” I finally said. “But we’re doing this solo, so let this be the last time that we speak until this is over.”
I stopped, feeling like I’d thrown down a challenge. I hadn’t intended to pick a fight or antagonize, but simply to establish a dividing line, to say we should each go our own ways, down our own roads, come what may. Rudd said nothing more, but simply reached up and lifted the bottom of his mask, revealing his face. He then gave me a silent look that was as mysterious as his wave. There was something of a scowl in it—I got that much. “Fine, suit yourself” is how I read it. But there was also almost a kind of deep, knowing smile, as though he’d just looked into the bottom of my soul or I’d been tested. As always with Rudd, I wasn’t sure that in his eyes I’d passed the examination.
It was also extremely difficult after that, and through much of the day, making my own words a reality. To say, “Okay, we’re parting ways now, Lou, this is it, we’re splitting up,” sounded good, but with two guys slowly dragging heavy sleds across the ice, really splitting up quickly wasn’t just hard to do, it was nearly impossible. It was the world’s slowest race; the tortoise versus the tortoise.
He trudged, I trudged, always in sight of each other because neither of us could go faster. We were each also clearly pushing much harder than we would have without the other, hovering out there in the white, and by mid-afternoon I felt close to falling apart from the effort. My back and shoulders ached from the jerking pull of the harness, and I could feel, down in my right boot, a blister beginning to form on my big toe, which could be problematic if it started to get worse.
But something had changed. I needed to keep going in a way I hadn’t before. Rudd had awed and intimidated me through those days at the beginning, and I’d come up with no defense against it. Now, in knowing he was watching me, it almost felt as if it was my turn to shine, not to intimidate him—I knew I could never do that and I’m not sure anybody could—but for him to just understand me a little better, and maybe even respect what he saw. I vowed to myself, even as the hours wore on in what came to feel like a race within a race, that I’d go on as long as he did, and then an hour longer. If he went nine hours, I’d go ten. If he went ten, I’d go eleven.
Rudd seemed unstoppable. Eight hours passed, then nine, and then ten, and still he pushed on, about a hundred yards or so to my left. Had there been even a single witness on the planet watching us that day, from above or from the ice, I’m sure it would’ve seemed strange beyond description: two lumbering southbound figures, bundled head to toe against the cold, traveling almost side by side, each ignoring the other and yet abjectly focused on the other at the same time. And as our strange grinding, utterly silent slow-motion standoff continued through the flat white afternoon, I found myself more and more thinking beyond the blustery, hard-edged Rudd that I’d seen back at the start.
I saw for the first time his dogged determination, his vulnerability, his humanity—the Rudd of the eleven steps, of lost friends and old wounds.
For years, when he talked about his various Antarctic expeditions, Rudd had described the moment at the end of every day when he was about to stop to make camp, but took an eleven extra steps beyond that.
However tired he was, the eleven steps were sacrosanct, an homage to the Scott expedition. Scott and his men, heading back from the South Pole in early 1912, Rudd said—citing a Scott biography from years ago—might’ve survived to their famous last cache of food and fuel, called “One Ton Depot,” if they’d taken just eleven more steps each night before camp in their brutal, months-long effort. So Rudd, in their memory, had committed himself to the margin they didn’t or couldn’t make—a small salute to their spirit of sacrifice and honor.
Rudd’s nightly tribute of the eleven steps had given me chills from the first time I’d heard about it. And maybe, I thought, he was taking those eleven extra steps right now in a way, in vowing to stay on my heels. But the idea that one bit more is always possible and can make a difference was now perhaps ironically fueling me, too, inspiring me to push further and harder. It felt like my own little tribute, to Scott and those long ago days on the ice, and to Rudd himself.
And as I kept glancing back, I also thought I began to understand a bit more of the enduring mystery of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Worsley of the British Army.
My first exposure to Worsley, long before I’d ever met Rudd or heard about their friendship and adventures together, came through a stunning black-and-white photo I saw taped up on a whiteboard inside the food tent at Union Glacier on my first visit to Antarctica in 2015. Worsley grinned into the camera, mouth clamped on a giant cigar, wearing a wool neck warmer and a set of round snow goggles that looked straight out of 1912. He looked like a time traveler, a proud Antarctic survivor from the heroic age of Shackleton, with a proud and perfectly square missing front tooth to complete the picture.
It was my first morning ever in Antarctica in late 2015. I’d thought, until walking in for breakfast and encountering a room of people obsessed with Worsley and wanting to talk of little else, that what I was trying to do there was a pretty big deal. I thought of myself as primarily a mountaineer in those days and was just then beginning a world-record attempt on something called the “Explorers Grand Slam,” a challenge in the global climbing community to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents, “the Seven Summits,” and trek to both the North and South Poles from at least the 89th degree of latitude, a distance of about sixty-nine miles each. At the time fewer than fifty people in history had ever completed the Explorers Grand Slam, most knocking off the separate challenges over five or ten years, climbing a peak, then going home
to rest and plan for the next one. I was trying to become the fastest person to ever complete the Grand Slam, by finishing all nine expeditions in one continuous four-month push, no breaks between mountains other than a plane ride to the next trailhead. Antarctica was my starting point—the only continent with two items to be checked off, having both the Pole and a highest peak, Mount Vinson.
So as I always am at the start of things, I was pumped with energy that morning, surging with adrenaline, barely able to sit still with my eagerness. But as I walked by the whiteboard with Worsley’s picture, and a scrawled line of numbers below it about his location out on the ice, I found myself completely swallowed up by the grandeur and audacity of what he was trying. I hadn’t even heard of the idea of a solo, unsupported, and unassisted crossing until that moment—and the decades-long, never completed dream of it—and my own goal suddenly felt smaller in comparison. I was going for speed, but Worsley was attempting what had never before been done: climbing a “mountain” that people said couldn’t be climbed at all.
“I think the son of a bitch might actually make it—it’s unbelievable,” barked one of my breakfast mates, a ruddy Scot with red curls who was also heading for Vinson.
“I met him in 2011, in the Amundsen trek,” a Russian woman offered up between deep swills of strong camp coffee.
“Who is he?” I asked the table I ended up at, which was lined by a United Nations array of faces from around the world—A.L.E. staffers and guides, climbers, adventurers, and wealthy birders bent on ticking off an emperor from the penguin list.
Heads swiveled as one toward the ignorant new guy.
“Henry Worsley is the best there is,” a Brit to my left said simply. There were shrugs around the table as though such a sweeping generalization couldn’t be topped or improved upon. I looked back at the whiteboard, at Worsley’s face, hoping our paths might cross.
A week later, I arrived at the South Pole after my relatively short sixty-nine-mile ski traverse across the Last Degree. The Pole was a bustling place of expedition travelers and scientists, with about 150 men and women there full-time through the Antarctic summer, many working and living in a long, low building, that—like my tent every night—was aligned to take the least force from the prevailing winds. But I was still thinking of Worsley and the vast and amazing goal he’d set for himself in attempting to cross one thousand miles alone.
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