The Impossible First

by Colin O'Brady

  We were both silent, thinking.

  “Weird though,” I said.

  “Definitely weird,” she said. “But don’t let this spook you—you’ve got this.” And I heard in her words an echo of that night when I’d been preparing to join the chain gang of climbers. “Listen to what’s inside you, Colin,” she said. “Trust that voice.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Infinite Love

  DAY 53

  As a son of the Pacific Northwest, I’ve always thought of Christmas as a day with a split personality. The region’s famous gloom burrows down to its deepest place—not just in the darkness of short winter days, but in the damp, gray chill that rolls in off the Pacific Ocean and seeps into every undefended corner. And yet at the exact same moment, the power of family, community, and holiday cheer is at its most radiant. So the day, it seemed to me, celebrated opposite forces equally, and I always loved that about it—darkness and light, chill and warmth, solitude and solidarity—both sides of the equation so rich and powerful, and neither one understandable without the other.

  I’d set my alarm for 4:30 a.m. that Christmas Day—my fifty-third morning on the ice—following my head-scratching conversation the night before with Jenna about Rudd’s tracker. The sun glinted its red rays through the roof, and all the worn, patched, frozen, and frayed pieces of my life gently swayed around me and over my head, and when I checked the inReach there was a text from my dad. His words underlined everything I’d just been thinking about choices and darkness and light.

  “Merry Christmas,” he wrote. “Remember the most important thing.”

  I read the line over and over. I could hear those words echoing from my earliest childhood memories through every major athletic event of my life. He always spoke them the same way, whether we were heading to a swim meet or a soccer match, looking deeply into my eyes when he did, and he’d repeated the phrase often enough that he no longer even needed to say the two words that would complete the thought: “Have fun.” They now came from inside me. Enjoy the journey, my dad was saying. The pursuit of victory and the finish line isn’t the only thing in the world.

  I’d already made one choice prior to going to sleep. The weather forecast I’d received from A.L.E. before turning in had said that Christmas, and perhaps the day after as well, was likely to feature clear weather. After so many days of storms, I wanted to get an early start.

  Dad’s message resonated in my head as I pulled down my hanging line of gloves and neck warmers and put on my boots, bringing back a flood of memories. And the unspoken part, the words he didn’t need to write, seemed most powerful of all—filling emptiness with memory and love and producing an energy that I could draw strength from.

  But then I reached down to grab my orange duffel bag to exit the tent—and staggered back in shock. The bag felt like it had been loaded with rocks, twice as heavy as it had been in days past. My body had been changed, gradually but profoundly, by my weeks on the ice, and the unexpected effort of lifting the bag was the signal flare.

  I unzipped my jacket and reached inside, feeling the bony row of ribs, then to my protruding hip bones. I ran a hand down the snow skirt I wore around my waist, across the clumsy stitch repair I’d made two weeks ago, taking it in by three inches to keep it from falling off. The hand kept going, down to my thighs, thin as arms, and the calves like deflated bike tires, all the muscle definition I’d built up in training eroded to nothing. I felt as though I’d become the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, a paltry man stuffed with straw, ready to spill out and blow away with the wind.

  From earliest childhood, I’ve wanted to know what my body and mind are capable of. It sounds like a simple question, but it never really is, because none of us knows. Too often, answers or assumptions are thrust on us by others who say what our limits are, what our frontiers and boundaries should be, what we can accomplish or not. And then we come to believe those limits and boundaries to be true, and the more we believe them the truer they become.

  That morning—as I contemplated my weakened body—everything was up for grabs all over again, reducing down to a single question: What have I got left? I knew that much of what I’d started out carrying across the ice, however heavy it had felt, was gone—eaten or burned up as fuel to keep me alive. And maybe that had happened to me, too, I thought. I was a reduced man, stripped to his essence. Burned clean was a thought that came to me.

  And so, feeling both filled to the brim and yet at the same time emptied completely, I stepped out onto the ice, certain of only one thing, that the path I’d started on nearly two months ago was about to go to its deepest, most powerful place—and the most vulnerable one of all—inside my mind.

  * * *

  THE MOUNTAINS AND THE LEVERETT glacier beckoned to me like sirens in some ancient Greek myth as I climbed into the harness. Their presence in the distance, after so many days of flat and featureless ice, made everything feel different and, it seemed, smell different—something in the air of rock and earth. But my arms and hands were the first signals to me that I’d found it, that I was at the banks of a truly deep flow state that morning as I pushed north.

  My arms swung as usual. My hands gripped the poles as usual. What was new was that I felt I could see beyond those simple functions, down into the muscles and tendons. From the arms the wave of awareness moved up through my shoulders, and then through the muscles of my neck and then up through the back of my head and down my back. Every physical place that the wave touched was weakened, I knew, but it was almost as though the awareness itself was becoming a strength—that knowing what I had inside was the source of power.

  And all of it was tied together with the muscle that felt most focused of all, and the true key to the flow state, the muscle six inches between my ears. My body might be more exhausted than ever, but my mind could override that weakness, making me stronger than ever. My thoughts were anchored in place, moving across the ice, seeing and feeling every aspect of that movement, and yet at the same time roving out far beyond me, unbound and uncontained.

  After about an hour of pulling my sled, and realizing with every breath and stride the depth of what I’d tapped into, I was moving differently, and thinking differently, and I started calculating: I had seventy-seven miles to go to the finish, and I’d gone an average of sixteen and a half miles a day through the course of the expedition, doing twelve-hour days. The fact that I could even think of the hours remaining to the finish—and the solitary wooden post that I knew marked the edge of the continent—was itself astonishing. Weeks had become days, had become hours, almost before my eyes, though it felt like a lifetime.

  And from that new sense of time and the strength I felt as I waded deeper and deeper into the flow state, a curious question began to grow in my mind: What if I didn’t stop? What if I just kept going all the way to the end in one last push? What other frontiers might be out there that I’d find and cross along the way? And so my math game continued. If I’d averaged sixteen and a half miles over twelve hours—and more than that in recent days with my now lighter sled—a final push to the end might be doable in forty hours or so in a continuous run.

  Forty hours. The number rolled through my head. I had ultramarathoner friends who’d done hundred-mile races in less than that. People worked forty hours in their jobs every week, and slept even more. It started to seem like a number I could get my head around.

  And then I began to add up my food. I had about twenty thousand calories remaining of the Colin Bars if I stacked them all in a pile. After all these weeks I still craved them with their perfect balance of nutrition and flavor designed specifically for my body. The bars required no cooking, so I could carry them and eat as needed—though that would certainly also be a risk. If I pushed hard, ate through my food supplies, and then had an accident or didn’t get to the end, I’d have a serious food crisis.

  Rudd’s wily ruse with his GPS tracker was part of my thinking. That he was still out there, playing another card, added a wrinkle of uncertai
nty, if only because I’d gotten used to knowing exactly where he was. I’d seen how quickly things can change with a single bad day.

  But a bigger, deeper part of me was hungry to push because I’d reached a place on the ice where all the old boundaries of Antarctic math—miles, calories, hours, days—seemed up for renegotiation. It was time for me to explore the furthest boundaries of my potential.

  I knew, even without the flow I felt in my strides toward the mountains—looming closer every minute—that I could function in a place of deep fatigue. I’d seen that the summer before coming to Antarctica, when I set out to break the world record for reaching the high point of every state in the US in the shortest time.

  The Fifty High Points challenge tested my strength and stamina in preparing for the biggest goal of my life, the Antarctic crossing. I wanted to see how my body and mind worked through day after day of constant, intense effort, so I climbed forty-two of the high points in a whirlwind two weeks, from Alaska to Hawaii, and all the smaller peaks on the east coast. But the eight mountains that were left were the biggest ones in the lower forty-eight states—including Mount Whitney in California and Mount Rainier in Washington—and the seven-day push to the finish included more than 150 miles of trail running and more than 60,000 feet of elevation gain, the equivalent of climbing Everest twice from sea level. I was utterly exhausted and sleep-deprived—resting between mountains as my dear friend and collaborator Blake drove our rented RV to the next trailhead. But I found something inside me, in getting through it in a record twenty-one days. It was an ultramarathon that convinced me I could keep going in Antarctica.

  And almost without deciding it consciously, I realized I’d made a Christmas choice, and I wanted to tell someone. So I pulled out Cam, pushed record, and watched the GoPro come to life. I’d sobbed into my little lens. I’d jumped around dancing on the ice to Graceland. I’d been ready to collapse over and over in talking at night, recording sometimes bleak and exhausted thoughts.

  Now I heard a different voice coming out of me.

  “I’m going for it,” I said quietly, pulling the eye in closer to my face. “I’m going to try to finish this thing in a final push, all the way. The Antarctica ultramarathon.” I looked around the ice, feeling a confidence and serenity that was, strangely, connected to the deep weakness I felt in my body. Everything was connected. I’d been altered by my journey in both mind and spirit, and that new person stood there with his face in Cam’s lens. “I need to see what I’ve got inside,” I said.

  * * *

  THE LEVERETT GLACIER had sat on a corner of my mental map from the beginning, but through those long weeks on the ice, I’d mostly tried to avoid thinking about it, because it seemed too far away. My journey across Antarctica had been, until that morning, about waypoints and days and hours, about the exactitude of calories and hours in the harness, about improvising when crisis hit and adapting when improvisation failed. I thought in incremental goals—making it to the South Pole, getting through with enough food, surviving the constant cold.

  After six hours in the harness that morning, still locked in the flow, I arrived. I stood at the top, staring down at the great glacier that had so filled my imagination. I felt ready. That 4:30 a.m. sense of curiosity and clarity had deepened, and my body, for all the weight loss and weakness I felt, had responded with a cadence of muscle memory. I felt a resolve, a firmness, and a calm deeper than at any moment since I’d arrived on the ice. The Leverett would mark a downhill run toward the Ross Ice Shelf and the finish. It would be my passage through the Transantarctic Mountains. It was the passageway to the end.

  I wanted to begin the descent immediately, but also to stand there and take it in. The jagged skyline itself was staggering, with mountains that seemed to grip the great glacier—only three or four miles wide through most of its length—like fingers around a giant icicle. And those massive peaks, some higher than fourteen thousand feet, glowed in their majestic tapestry of shadows, rock, snow, and brilliantly reflected light.

  From studying the maps of my route, I knew that the top of the Leverett had a brief stretch—perhaps a mile or so—that was relatively steep downhill. I’d fantasized about that, after weeks of pulling a heavy sled, and as I stood there looking down, I thought of Dad. I’d go faster than I ever had on any past stretch of ice. I’d have fun. I’d honor him with my Christmas choice.

  But as I started picking up speed on my skis, I also quickly realized that the physics, in this part of my ultramarathon at least, would be different, too. The sled, no longer really being pulled by me at that point, but proceeding downhill from its own weight, slammed me from behind and almost immediately knocked me down with a hard fall onto the ice.

  I got up and looked back, almost wanting to have an argument with the sled. It had been like a vast dead weight behind me at the start, and never had it gone easily anywhere, even as it got lighter over the weeks. And this felt almost like payback, as though the sled had had enough of being pulled and now had a mind of its own.

  And no matter what I did, it happened again and again. I’d start down, only to feel the sled smashing against my legs—gently at first, just a touch—then often with a jolt and a shove that sent me sprawling.

  When the glacier finally flattened, I let out a sigh of relief, which surprised me because of how much I’d looked forward to that downhill mile. But almost immediately I began to hit patches of exposed blue ice, which became its own trial. I wasn’t being thrown down at that point by an out-of-control sled, but my skis could barely make traction on the intensely slick surface, and so the falls continued and felt even harder with no cushioning of snow on the rock-hard ice. But I was also so deep in the flow state, aware of everything around and inside me, that the falls became simply an aspect of the experience, one I could observe as much as be a part of.

  After one particular fall, I realized that at almost every other moment of my journey across the continent, a day like this would’ve seemed hard, painful and frightening. A hundred miles back, or five hundred miles back, I would almost certainly have gone into a fear loop, my mind racing with the potentials and implications of a bad fall, a broken bone. I knew too well that place of obsessive what-if fears.

  But now, though I knew I was bruised all over from my tumbles that day, those fears seemed entirely burned away. Climbing up onto my knees, still in the harness, the sled askew behind me, I lifted my face up toward the sky and felt a wave of energy breaking over me and through me.

  And more than just energy. Clarity. The stark emptiness of Antarctica that had drawn me and captivated me, the silence from deleting my music, and the stillness that can come from meditation had all combined to create a moment when it felt like everything unnecessary in the universe was gone. What was left was crucial and shimmering and perfect.

  I’d never felt anything like it—as though something ancient, but instant and brand-new at the same time, had come down out of the Antarctic sky, or up through the millions of years of ice.

  I opened up my arms and arched my back, face thrust up toward the sun, to absorb and accept the gift. My arms and chest felt as if they were forming a kind of mirror, or a satellite dish, that was collecting the positive energy so many people out in the world were sending toward me, in wishing me safe passage. I was a mere speck on the ice, invisible to all the world, no one to see me or hear me, as isolated and alone as a person can be on a crowded planet where crowds are often the loneliest places of all. People right then, at that moment, were riding in elevators avoiding eye contact or burying themselves in their phones on the subway—I knew that place myself, feeling utterly alone in the middle of a big city.

  But it struck me as both powerful and strange that I’d gone so far and so deep to the edge of emptiness and solitude only to find myself feeling more connected than ever, and the phrase that came to me had to be said aloud.

  “Infinite love,” I said quietly, then repeated it, louder. “Infinite love!” And a third time, louder
still, shouting now. “Infinite love!”

  In that moment, I felt compelled to send some of that positive energy to the great Captain Louis Rudd.

  “You’re out there somewhere, Lou, and I’d like to express my gratitude,” I said, out into the endless white. “You’ve pushed me, and made me better for it. I hope your passage is safe.”

  Then I grabbed Cam and pushed the button, the little red eye peering back at me. I stopped and looked around. “But right now it’s just you and me, Cam, here in the middle of a huge glacier, in the middle of nowhere,” I said, holding up my hand to touch the lens with my mitten. “Yet, somehow I don’t feel alone. I think the world is reaching right back.” I pulled the lens closer to my face. “I’m not alone. None of us are.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME I LOOKED at my watch and realized that it was almost time for my 8:50 p.m. call to the A.L.E. Comms Box, I’d been going for nearly fifteen hours, my longest day by far, and I’d probably eaten at least ten thousand calories of the Colin Bars. I’d been eating as I’d been moving, with a flow of awareness that said my body would tell me exactly when it needed to be fed, just as it was showing me how to move. And though I’d always been in my tent for the 8:50 p.m. check-in, that night the boundaries were gone.

  I had no intention of stopping, still brimming with the curiosity of what could happen out there at the edge of performance and possibility, and I called the Comms Box from the ice.

  Tim answered and I saw him in my thoughts, sitting there in front of his keyboard, and felt a sudden deep affection for him. If I could somehow keep going, I realized, this might be my last ever conversation with him.

  I gave him my coordinates and mileage so far that day—nearly forty miles, my best day ever on the ice by far. He began asking how I was doing, issues to report, conditions of where I’d camped, the usual Tim line of questioning.