The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  Mr. Boyle stopped and ran a hand across his jaw. For the first time, he seemed to be listening. This assertive twenty-seven-year-old woman had stepped up and impressed him.

  “Talk more about mission alignment, please,” he said, gesturing to the seats we’d just jumped up from. The meeting wasn’t over.

  The tables had turned, and Jenna eventually had him smiling, then laughing. I knew to keep quiet. Jenna was leading the way, making her play, and my role was to be the smiling, supportive partner—clean but rugged.

  “This is all about the idea that really difficult challenges and dreams can be at the edges of the globe and on mountaintops around the world but also right there in front of you, too, ready to be taken on,” Jenna said. “And the goal, in getting Colin’s story out into the world as much as possible, is to drive home that message—that whoever you are or wherever you’re from, audacious goals can be accomplished with grit, purpose, and a growth mindset. Maybe your goal isn’t Everest or the North Pole, we’re certainly not assuming that’s for everyone. But what’s your Everest? The main thing is, all of us can do more than we think because we all have reservoirs of untapped potential to achieve our dreams.”

  Mr. Boyle leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. It felt like time had stopped—that the fate of everything we’d been working on would be decided in the next few seconds.

  “I think we can do something here,” he said with a warm smile, standing up and glancing at his watch again. The meeting was now really, truly over, but we had our first sponsor, our anchor, the cornerstone on which all else might be built. I wanted to scream as I leaped up to shake Mr. Boyle’s hand, and as he turned back to Jenna, my mouth widened into a huge, silent expression of joy, which Jenna saw and acknowledged. I could see in her eyes that she was trying her best to contain her excitement. “Someone on the team will be back in touch,” he said as he left the room.

  The company didn’t grant us the full sponsorship we’d hoped for, but Mr. Boyle generously signed on to contribute the gear I’d use while shuttling around the world through the months of the project. The crucial thing, though, was that, because of Jenna’s charge, we’d landed our first sponsor, a respected, high-profile name that we planned to drop in every pitch yet to come. Jenna had picked up the pieces of a failure in free fall and turned it into a victory.

  * * *

  BUT AFTER MONTHS OF MEETINGS with the same optimism, and the clock ticking down to my departure date, we hadn’t made a lot more progress on the sponsorship front. Columbia’s highly respected tents, jackets, and gear—mostly from their Mountain Hardware subsidiary—had reduced our total cost by about $50,000, and we’d cobbled together another $50,000 from friends and family and a few other smaller sponsorships. That still left us woefully short of the $500,000 that it would take to make the project a reality.

  Despite the gap that had to be closed, just about every week we were going into local schools, talking to kids, and also to their teachers—about how they might incorporate the project into different curriculum subjects, from geography to history, global politics, and climate change, while at the same time instilling the health and fitness message in conjunction with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation.

  I was beginning to feel like a fraud, though—fearful that being unable to get the money together would make me look like the guy who’d told all his friends he’d jump into the ocean from the very highest cliff, only to chicken out at the last second. I’d forever be the guy who hadn’t done it.

  By October, two months before I was supposed to depart for the first expedition, the $400,000 shortfall was impossible to ignore. We sat on the couch looking at the number on the whiteboard. We wrote it on sticky notes that we put on the fridge just to remind us again. It filled our waking moments and our dreams.

  But one day at a coffee shop near our house, I ran into a friend named Angelo, who said there was somebody I should meet. Angelo, who knew the troubles Jenna and I were having launching our project, attended Sunday morning spin classes, and this person, he said, was also a regular.

  “She was a big-time runner in the past—a world-record holder. Might lift your spirits. Anyway, you should come and meet her,” he said.

  I almost didn’t.

  Even though I’d raced my last professional triathlon by then, Ironman Japan that summer, I was still a professional athlete. It was my identity. I was training to break a world record. Even worse, I still had a bit of the foolish and full-of-himself asshole inside me, the one who’d driven away from everything that was important in leaving Jenna in order to chase the dream of professional sports. Come on, I thought in my pompousness, a Sunday group fitness class at a local gym? It felt beneath me.

  But at this point I had nothing to lose, so I said yes and went to the class. Still, I had to sigh a little bit when I walked into the spin room and saw the neatly lined up rows of stationary bikes, all facing forward toward a wall of mirrors behind the instructor. I’d be going nowhere fast, and I’d see myself doing it.

  Angelo walked over as I was raising the seat on my bike, and pulled me toward the side of the room where a woman was already riding hard even though the class hadn’t started. She looked to be in her mid-fifties and was lean and amazingly fit. Sweat glistened on her arms and neck, and I had the sudden realization that spin classes had real athletes in them.

  “Colin, this is Kathy. Kathy, Colin.”

  Kathy paused from her workout and we shook hands.

  “Kathy broke the world record for the 5K in the 1970s,” Angelo said. “Kathy Mills then, collegiate legend.”

  “Million years ago,” Kathy immediately said, grabbing a towel and shaking her head as though it wasn’t that important. “So what’s this project Angelo has told me about?”

  I took a breath. I’d told the story hundreds of times by then in meetings, coffee shops, bars, schools, even in the street when I’d meet some old acquaintances, and though I knew I’d probably gotten better at it, the lack of success had started to nag at me. Maybe I wasn’t doing it right.

  But as I opened my mouth that morning, it all came together and flowed out, both the passion and the clarity. I already instantly admired Kathy, but I wasn’t pitching her, wasn’t asking anything of her, and that was probably the difference. I was just a guy in a Sunday morning spin class talking about his dreams and goals.

  And then for the next ninety minutes I spun. It was a fine workout, better than I’d expected, and when it was over, I wiped off my bike and walked over to say goodbye to Kathy. A guy was toweling off next to her.

  “This is my husband, Mark,” Kathy said. He was about her age, with salt-and-pepper hair, a lightly stubbled chin, and the look of a former athlete. “Tell Mark the thing you’re working on, Colin,” she said, as he and I shook hands.

  So the story poured out again, distilled down and simplified. Around us, people laughed and wiped off their bikes as they chatted and packed up their stuff. And it felt like the story—the dream that Jenna and I had crafted so carefully—had in a strange way become bigger than us. In all the other more formal meetings and presentations, I realized, even as I stood there talking, that I’d been trying to force it, make something happen. Now I just conveyed my passion with no expectations whatsoever.

  When I was done, Mark immediately nodded. “I like this,” he said. “And I think it fits in really well with some things we’ve been doing at the company I work for.”

  “Great,” I said, happy to hear any kind of welcome response, but expecting nothing to come of it. I’d heard too many people say similar things and then add “good luck, kid” at the end.

  “Here, let me get you a card,” Mark said, bending over and rustling through his gym bag. “Send me an email and a link to your website if you have one and we’ll talk.”

  I held it in my sweaty hand, staring down at it.

  “Mark Parker,” the card said. “Chief Executive Officer, Nike, Inc.”

  * * *

&
nbsp; ON ANOTHER GLOOMY PORTLAND SUNDAY, in mid-November, a month after I’d met Mr. Parker, and only a few weeks before I was scheduled to board a plane to Antarctica to begin the first step of the Explorers Grand Slam—crossing the last degree of latitude to reach the South Pole—no Nike money had come. We’d had meetings and conversations at the corporate headquarters, but the great shoe company giant of Oregon, an organization we’d dreamed of being involved with, looked like it would be another dead end. The $400,000 we still had to raise stared at me from the whiteboard, now underlined numerous times in emphatic, bleak black lines from our markers.

  Jenna was upstairs in the shower. I sat down at the computer. There was an email from my mom discussing plans for Thanksgiving, a save-the-date for my upcoming ten-year college reunion, and a note from my dad, who said it had been too long since we’d come to see him in Hawaii. I sighed.

  But then, as I sat there, another email dropped. Nike was in the subject line. I held my breath, afraid for a long time to open it. I looked out the window at the gray day and listened for a few seconds to the sound of Jenna up in the shower. Finally, I clicked the mouse.

  “We’re in for $150k,” the message said. “What you’re doing is inspiring and has the potential to shift people’s minds on what’s possible. This is a perfect alignment with our global community impact initiative to help our nation’s youth lead more active and healthy lives.”

  I leaped up, knocking over the whiteboard easel. Our math problem was solved—$150,000 plus the other $100,000 we’d cobbled together, and the Gelber Match, would get us over the threshold.

  I ran up the stairs screaming. Jenna pulled back the shower curtain as I burst into the bathroom, her eyes wide.

  Then I stopped. Time stopped. I wanted to scream it again, but I also wanted to wait just another beat, to stretch the moment out for both of us. Then as calmly as I could, I said the words: “Nike committed.”

  Jenna screamed. And with all my clothes on I climbed into the shower with her and we jumped up and down over and over, crying and holding each other as the hot water steamed up the bathroom.

  CHAPTER TWELVE Farthest South

  DAY 39

  Civilization was out there, just in front of me—people working, living their lives through a season on the ice. I knew that, but I couldn’t see it. A deep whiteout had gripped the sky and folded itself around me during my thirty-ninth day on the ice. My GPS, after twelve hours in the harness, told me that the buildings of the Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole were there just ahead of me, somewhere in the blankness. But, for all I could tell, they could’ve been a million miles away.

  I’d been here before, on my sixty-nine-mile trek across the last degree of latitude when the South Pole was my finish line for the first expedition of the Explorers Grand Slam in 2016. I remembered visiting the station. I could smell the pine-scented clean of the tiled hallways and could hear in my memory how the station’s foot-thick insulated metal front door clanked and squealed as it closed. And I knew that I could, with only a few more hours of pulling the sled, perhaps even less, actually get there. I could pitch my tent in a place where the smells of coffee and bacon wafted out from the cook tent that A.L.E. maintained at the base for its tours and expeditions, and be in human company for the first time in more than a month since the day I’d passed Rudd.

  But all those same things—the warm buildings, hot food, wonderful smells, and people who might with the best of intentions try to assist me in some way—were also red lines of danger because under the rules of an unsupported, unassisted crossing, I could accept no help, as the Pole wasn’t my finish line this time. Even stepping into a heated building for five minutes would negate everything I was trying to do, and I’d have to quit, surrendering the race to Rudd.

  The strict environmental rules governing Antarctica itself had gotten more complicated, too, in the three days since I’d crossed over the 89th degree of latitude. I’d been required to start bagging and carrying my human waste with me on the sled instead of burying it in the ice as was allowed before that point. Though I was happy to comply, it also meant my sled hadn’t been getting any lighter, and wouldn’t until I got all the way across to the far side of the last degree, sixty-nine miles past the Pole.

  In my most rational place, I knew I wouldn’t be seduced into an error at the Pole. My resolve was firm. And yet, even with all of that resolve I still couldn’t face the idea of going the last three miles to the Pole that night. I wanted to be fresh and fed when I walked up there, not hungry and tired as I was at that moment after a full day of work. And I wanted to be ready to keep going past the Pole to make my next camp. Treating the Pole as just another waypoint—important and symbolic, but also a place to check off and pass by quickly—would minimize the risks of getting tempted.

  I stood there for a long time, still in my skis, hitched to the sled, staring south. It felt strange to be so close to a place that generations of explorers had sacrificed so much to reach and not want to go the rest of the way. As I retrieved the tent and started to make camp, I found myself stopping over and over and turning back to look. I desperately wanted to see a hint, a shape, a shadow—something, anything signifying human presence—but the thick, cold white sky was impenetrable, and sealed me out.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, as I pushed through those last three miles, still in the thick of the whiteout, a phrase came to me that I’d first encountered in reading about the early efforts to get nearer and nearer to the Pole, before any human being had actually ever set foot there.

  Farthest south.

  Captain James Cook, the great Pacific Ocean explorer, had established a farthest south in sailing past the Antarctic Circle in 1773. Captain Scott, years before his famed polar expedition, got three hundred miles closer to the South Pole than anyone before him. An expedition led by Shackleton then got even closer, reaching a point just ninety-seven miles from the Pole, a new farthest south.

  Achieving a farthest south meant you’d inched closer to the great prize of the Pole itself, but also that you’d surpassed a previous farthest south achieved by yourself or someone else. Every farthest south was a tiptoe to the edge of the map, the edge of the possible, a challenge for others to follow, and it echoed everything about the world of sports that I loved and had steeped myself in for so many years, since childhood. All records were pieces of a farthest south. The pole vault bar could always be notched a millimeter higher, the marathon run a fraction of a second faster, and there was wonderful drama and humility in that.

  As the South Pole station buildings began to emerge, looking like ghosts in the white, blank light, I realized that this approach to the station was far harder earned than the last time I was here. Every step now marked my own personal farthest south. Only twenty-seven people before me had ever completed a solo coast-to-Pole crossing, unsupported and unassisted—only two on the route that Rudd and I were following. I would keep going after that, of course, and if I could become the first person ever to cross the continent alone without assistance or support, well, that, too, would be a farthest south in its own way. And the great drama would surely continue from there as future explorers aimed to surpass me in their ambition or the difficulty of their goals, which is exactly how it should be. Records are meant to be broken.

  Finally, the hard, straight lines of actual architecture began to emerge—something I hadn’t seen since boarding the Ilyushin in Chile to fly to the continent. I’d certainly felt a human imprint in the supply tents and hangars at the Union Glacier base, and at the Thiels fuel depot, but the polar station, in its cluster of structures and their obvious importance, felt like a giant, teeming city. It had corners and walls, even real buildings with doors and roofs, and it felt stunning and strangely shocking after so many days of seeing nothing but emptiness and white, or the scruffy and cramped little world inside my tent.

  I also knew as I drew closer that South Pole station managers were precise and picky about how people on ex
peditions were expected to enter the area, so that scientific study zones on the ice wouldn’t be disturbed. And that roundabout route took me right past the A.L.E. camp, where a short, burley, and bearded Canadian named Devon, the camp manager, stepped out to greet me. He’d known from my nightly calls to the Comms Box that I was due at the Pole that morning, and knew that under the rules of an unassisted, unsupported crossing he could offer me nothing except congratulations in making it this far.

  “Well done, Colin,” Devon said simply. He saw me looking at the rows of small tents that had been set up in the camp and what was obviously a kind of heating system running into each one from what looked like a central propane burner. My mouth fell open. Heated tents.

  “Rich tourists,” Devon said with a smile and shrug. “Fly in to the Pole but want it toasty in the sack as well—and I totally get it. A warm tent is…” He looked back at me sharply. “Sorry, didn’t mean to rub it in—warm isn’t something you’ve had much of, I know.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, still shaking my head at the sight and feeling, as Devon had known I would, a pang of envy at even the idea of heat.

  We could see the actual South Pole marker from there, surrounded by the twelve flags of the original Antarctic Treaty–signing nations, all fluttering together in the same direction, which felt somehow powerful itself as a symbol of unity and purpose. But as Devon and I walked closer, I could see no other people, which I was very happy about. Fewer people meant fewer potential complications and risks.

  When I actually stepped up to the marker—a silver orb about the size of a basketball, perched atop a candy-cane pole—the unquestionable power of the place hit me again. The Pole was far more than a waypoint. It resonated and shimmered. The station science building suddenly seemed more astonishing and beautiful, too, stacked on its pylons driven down into the ice, all aligned lengthwise to the wind’s prevailing direction, just like my tent every night—as streamlined as possible in a place where the winds rarely stop.