Worsley had already passed the Pole. He’d come and gone only a few days earlier, crossing north toward the other side of the continent, and I stood at the Pole, gazing in the direction he’d gone and cursing my bad luck in arriving too late.
Only a few weeks later did I get the news. I’d moved on by then to the next continent in my sprint around the world that year, South America, where I was climbing Aconcagua in the Andes, near the border of Argentina and Chile. Worsley had run into trouble after the Pole when he’d fallen ill and had called for emergency evacuation. But it was too late. After seventy-one days alone on the ice, and just one hundred miles from becoming the first man to complete a solo, unsupported, and unassisted effort, he died in a hospital in Punta Arenas, Chile. I’d climbed for a long time in silence after that, mourning a man I never met but might have, thinking for some reason of his great missing front tooth and wondering about the story behind it.
* * *
THE HOURS OF THAT STRANGE, tense race with Rudd dragged on and on—just him and me and our sleds, each of us, I knew, groaning inside as we pulled through the cold, blank light. Finally, after eleven hours, I glanced back and saw that he’d stopped. He was putting up his tent.
I felt certain he was still watching me. He had to be. He was a competitor, a man who wanted to win this race across the continent as much as I did, and so I knew he would be studying me and guessing where my body and mind were at, even as he seemed to be nonchalantly going about the business of making camp.
In truth, I was utterly wrecked. But I refused to let it show. I dug in and tried to find the reserves of energy I might still have left. As long as Rudd could see me, I decided, I’d be strong, and I wouldn’t let up, or look back.
The weirdest thing of all about that deep internal dialogue was that somehow it pulled me deeper inside myself to the zone where the reality of my race with Rudd could be stilled. Trying to quiet the voices of fatigue, doubt, and craziness somehow led to quieting all the voices entirely, and I found that for long stretches, I surrendered, hearing only the shuffling of skis and sled runners on powder. Effort and breathing and the forward-and-back swing of my ski poles all swirled into a place that was deeply silent, too, muffled under a layer of stillness, synchronized and natural, mind and body moving together.
My borrowed Rolex beamed back up at me as an extra ten minutes became twenty and then thirty, until finally the sixty minutes I’d demanded of myself was completed and I unharnessed and fell to my knees, as exhausted as I’d ever been. I’d completed twenty miles, the longest and hardest day by far. The extra hour, I calculated, had put me about two miles past Rudd’s camp.
More than that, as I crawled into the tent, lit my stove, and tried to stay awake for the evening tasks and check-ins, I felt I’d turned a corner. I realized that the day had been far more than just surreal. I’d been changed by it in some way. Before, through the days leading up to the start, from the Ilyushin cargo plane ride through the anxious days at Union Glacier, I’d been measuring myself against Rudd. It had felt inevitable, and to one degree or another, I think he’d also encouraged it. The stark contrasts between us were mostly to his advantage.
But that first chapter of our shared adventure, as I now thought of it, was over. Going forward from this moment, now leading this historic race for the first time, I’d have a new standard of measure for comparison: myself. Rudd was still out there, literally just beyond view. I pictured him in his tent, thinking about me and our neck-and-neck day—he’d posted to his blog that night a powerful declaration in describing it. “The race is on,” he said. But I had strengths, too, and I could kindle them into a flame that would propel me forward. If I could push once through a twelve-hour day, longer than I’d ever thought possible, I could do it again, and maybe again after that.
I wasn’t Rudd, and that was okay. I was me.
CHAPTER FIVE Commit to the Break
DAY 6
Chewing and swallowing when you’re famished is the most natural and basic of things. Food is the focus and down it goes. Babies do it long before they walk or talk.
But in passing Rudd that day, the hour-after-hour of slow, straining grind, had left me so exhausted that even lifting the spoon to my mouth seemed like work. I needed the freeze-dried chili that was there in my mug, steaming up from the boiling water I’d just poured into it. I wanted it. It smelled wonderful and its aroma filled the tent as I sat, legs thrust down inside the sleeping bag, back wedged into my little roll-up chair, beanie on my head.
The need for sleep, though, was just as intense and insistent as hunger. I’d take a mouthful, slowly start to chew and realize I’d halfway dozed off, my head drooping toward my chest.
A sudden, ferocious blast of wind, slamming the tent and warping it around me, brought me back to instant attention. Instinctively, my mouth still full, I reached up to check my solar panel as the winds rattled and shook the tent’s fabric. The solar charger, a flat panel of cells about the size of a hardcover book, was as crucial to my safety as food, water, and shelter because it powered my satellite phone, which was my means of rescue should I need it. Every night, in one of my first tasks on getting into the tent, I slid the panel into the little sliver of space between the roof and the wind shell that I cinched down over the tent’s top. The shell was thin enough that sunlight could penetrate through while I slept, and the battery inside the panel would be charged by morning, at least on a sunny night. In a whiteout like today, I wasn’t sure how much light would get through.
The solar panel, and the uncertainty of how much juice I’d have tomorrow to charge my devices with the sun so shielded by clouds and blowing ice, made me think I’d better check my other tools, too. Another little task would also take my mind off the hard work of eating dinner with exhausted jaws. The sat phone, most essential of all with its mandatory required nightly communication back to A.L.E., was fine. My iPhone, which was virtually useless down here other than as a camera, was good, too. But as I held it there in my hand, my eye was drawn to the icon for my music catalog, and I had to click on it.
It was all but empty. Thousands of songs and albums that had been a hugely important part of my life back home were gone.
Spoon in one hand, phone in the other, the rattling wind outside—I thought of the afternoon, back in the little Airbnb apartment in Punta Arenas, Chile, when I’d deleted almost everything.
I was on the couch, and Jenna was leaning against my shoulder. We were both tired after a day of packing, repacking, and questioning ourselves about what I’d need on the ice or would not. Two cups of tea were growing cold on the coffee table in front of us.
“I’m doing it,” I said, giving her head a little nudge with my shoulder.
She sat up and looked at the phone, then at me. “Yeah? You ready for that?” She gave me a poke back on the arm to tease me. “Sure you can live without Bob Marley, or whatever the forty-year-old reggae is that you listen to?” she said.
“I’m actually taking a Marley, one of the few things I’m keeping,” I said. “But that’s mostly in honor of Mom. Just about everything else? Going, going, gone.” I began to delete, and delete, and in a few seconds, it was done.
“Empty,” I said, putting down the phone and grabbing my lukewarm tea.
Jenna knew what I was doing and why, and she reached up and kissed me.
“Empty,” she repeated. “This is going to be interesting.”
* * *
WHEN I WOKE UP the next morning, the tent was still rattling hard. There was something different going on outside for sure. But in my little red-fabric-tinted world, the rhythm clicked in—the sequence of steps and moments that were coming to define everything, and shape my every waking moment, all repeated in more or less the same order. I’d wake up, say my morning mantra, You are strong. You are capable. I’d light my white-gas-fueled stove, then put on my socks—always the right before the left. I’d crawl over and unzip the door to the vestibule at the foot-end of the tent—a kin
d of porch space, covered by the tent’s wind flap—dig a hole in the snow, and take care of my morning business. Then I’d come back and squeeze into my little chair with my legs stretched back into my sleeping bag. I’d reach over to my stove, which sat in the snow in the tent’s other vestibule—at the opposite end from the bathroom—and pour boiling water into my oatmeal. I’d put a hand in my left pocket to get the ChapStick that was always in that exact place, and put it on my lips. I’d get out of my tent and pack my sled, and then I’d resume my push south exactly as I had the day before and as I would tomorrow and all the tomorrows I could glimpse in the distance.
When I finally crawled out—immediately scanning for any sign of Rudd, though he could’ve been a hundred feet away and invisible in those whiteout conditions—the wind hit me directly in the face. I hadn’t been able to tell the wind’s direction during the night—the tent’s rattle seemed to come from every side—but I now saw what kind of day it would be. The wind felt like it was coming directly from the South Pole, as though it were anchored to a compass point, and I’d have to push into it. My thermometer said it was twenty-five below, and the windchill would drag it down far below that. Bare skin could be frostbitten in minutes.
Drifts had all but covered the sled by then, too. It was simply a mound that looked like any other drift, but for a smudgy glimpse of its yellow cover. And instead of the grainy ice crystals that had been blowing around in the last few days, the coating was powdery and light and felt freshly fallen. As I took down the tent and rolled it up, the drifts were soft and deep, and I thought again of the puzzled, head-shaking workers back at Union Glacier, shoveling out the camp and talking about climate change. Fresh snow blown here could only mean that a storm had struck somewhere ahead of me to the south, where this wind had originated.
And what that meant was that the real test had probably not even begun. Whatever was ahead, on the other side of those winds, would likely be worse.
But a few things were certain. I was ahead of Rudd. I’d have to go out into this fierce headwind, into cold that required great caution. And most important of all, I’d commit to the break.
“Committing to the break” was a phrase I’d loved as long as I could remember, since I first became an Olympics freak as a child. If you pull away from the pack in a race, don’t squander it. Dig in. Push. That’s the definition. When staying longer in the tent could’ve been so appealing, I went out into the whiteout that day fueled by that thought.
Galen Rupp and Mo Farah had defined the commitment personally for me, amazingly and brilliantly, in the 10K final on the track at the London Olympics in 2012.
Jenna and I were in a noisy London bar that evening, just outside the stadium at Olympic Park where the race was to be held—unable to afford tickets to get in and feeling bitterly disappointed. It was one of the events we’d come to the Olympics most eager to see because I knew Rupp, who was from the US—he’d grown up just a few blocks from me in southeast Portland—and because he and Farah, a Brit, trained together in Portland, both Nike athletes. I’d seen them running together.
So we’d settled for a TV in a pub as close as we could get, jammed with enthusiastically drunken Brits at our elbows and British flags on every wall. It turned out to be one of the greatest races I’d ever seen—a ferocious, jostling crowd of runners dominated by the East Africans, shoulder-to-shoulder lap after lap. Rupp and Farah hung back through the race, just two men in the pack, then with a breathtaking surge, they moved forward together in the final lap, Farah winning the gold and Rupp the silver.
The bar went absolutely crazy as the live TV coverage melded with the screaming roar of the stadium crowd outside, which spilled into the bar’s front door at the same moment.
I saw now that passing Rudd in the first day of the whiteout had been my breakaway moment. I hadn’t deliberately surged or tried to catch him. That had seemed, in fact, unlikely, as strong and powerful as he’d looked that first day, striding off into the glare, marching in his soldier’s rhythm.
I just kept going, and it happened. There he was. Seeing his tent suddenly in front of me had been more shocking than triumphant. And surviving yesterday—the two of us lumbering forward, anchored down by heavy loads—had been more a matter of gutting it out and getting through.
Now I was committed to holding that lead, if only to live up to the example of the heroes from that amazing 10K final. I wasn’t sure I could actually stay ahead of Rudd for the hundreds of miles ahead of us. He was astonishingly experienced and resourceful. Bad or good luck could happen to either one of us at any time.
But the commitment, and the effort to follow through on that commitment with whatever was in me, felt crucial.
And it wasn’t just competition and wanting to beat Rudd that drove it. The hundreds of miles ahead would be challenging beyond anything I’d ever done and would require a measuring out of physical and mental energy for the long road. I feared, based on the day before, that having him nearby—or seeing him at all—would be distracting, draining, and emotionally exhausting. It might even push me to a level of effort that would cause something to snap. But that didn’t matter, I had to give it everything now. I was all in, fully committing to the break.
* * *
THE WIND AND THE WHITEOUT got worse through that morning. My wind-streamer flags zipped and snapped back toward me on my ski poles, and the compass, strapped to my chest, became the center of my focus, the center of everything. Everything about it started to seem even more concrete and real because it was the only thing I had to look at, and because it was the most important thing—taking my eyes off it even for a minute could mean veering off in the wrong direction.
And I trudged forward in silence, the snow muffling my steps.
Deleting my music catalog had been a choice, a deliberate commitment of its own. I’d decided, in working through the details of the project with Jenna, that the profound silence of the world’s emptiest place was a gift that I shouldn’t run from or fill up with sound. Music can be a great distraction on a long run or a drive, but Antarctica was the world’s biggest sensory deprivation tank, a whiteboard waiting to be filled with scrawled thoughts, and maybe inspirations, and I’d decided I wanted to embrace the blank canvas and see where it led. I wanted nothing that could block, or even dull, what seemed like Antarctica’s most distinctive gift.
Silence doesn’t come naturally to me. I can talk. And I like to talk, sometimes too much. My stepfather, Brian, knows that all too well. The day he drove me to my first ten-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat, in late 2011, he wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass for some teasing.
I’d told him the basics of how the retreat would work, on the drive north from Portland on I-5, toward the rural, wooded Northwest Vipassana Center in the little town of Onalaska, Washington, in the shadow of Mount St. Helens.
“No talking, no reading, no writing, no eye contact,” I said. “They wake you up at four a.m. with a gong, and you get two simple vegetarian meals per day, with twelve-plus hours spent in meditation.”
Brian laughed for a long time, wiping his eyes, then laughed again. He’s had a hugely positive influence on my life, always supporting and encouraging me, but this time he was skeptical.
“If I made a list of all the people in the world I know who couldn’t possibly shut up for ten days, you’d be right at the top, Colin,” he said. “Seriously, though,” he added, turning to look at me across the cab of his truck, “you’ve never meditated for even a minute in your life, and you’re going straight to ten days?”
“Yep… I guess I’m diving into the deep end again. Hopefully I’ll figure it out,” I said.
I’d been encouraged by a friend to try Vipassana for the mental discipline and focus that she’d said could boost athletic performance. But I was curious, too, and nervous as well that the spartan diet of the retreat would leave me famished, and that ten days without conversation of any kind would be difficult or impossible. I made Brian sto
p at a Subway off the highway where I ran in and bought a giant sandwich so I wouldn’t arrive already hungry.
“Vipassana means to see things as they really are,” I said, wolfing down the sandwich, halfway fearful that his teasing was on the mark, and I’d have a hard time. “So I guess we’ll see.”
As we pulled into the parking lot, I grabbed my bag and hopped out of the truck, and Brian rolled down the window.
“I’ll keep the motor running! My guess is that you’ll only last ten minutes,” he said with a wink.
At the center’s door I turned back for a look and saw him wave to me as he sped out of the lot. For all the ribbing, he clearly believed in me, and hadn’t even waited for me to get inside.
But that day on the ice, from the force of the whiteout and the wind, my sensory deprivation felt complete. As I pushed south, the crunch and squeak of my skis, which I could barely hear over the roar of the wind earlier in the day, seemed to grow louder in volume. My breathing, in and out through the mask, fell into sync with the motions of my legs, moving the skis. Up, back, breathe. Up, back, breathe. My arms, swinging the poles, melted into the flow of movement, and even my wind flags—ribbons attached to the handles of my ski poles to indicate the wind’s direction—fluttering straight back toward me in the headwind, seemed to be part of the dance.
And then the rhythm swallowed me. The cumulative force of repetition, from those first socks-on, stove-on moments of the morning through all the hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute tasks of movement and survival, became a kind of song that carried me and lifted me.
The Impossible First Page 8