The Impossible First: From Fire to Ice―Crossing Antarctica Alone - Hardcover

O'Brady, Colin

 
9781982133115: The Impossible First: From Fire to Ice―Crossing Antarctica Alone
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1982133112 ISBN 13: 9781982133115
Verlag: Scribner, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Colin O’Brady’s awe-inspiring memoir spans his triumphant recovery from a tragic accident to his gripping 932-mile solo crossing of Antarctica.

Prior to December 2018, no individual had ever crossed the landmass of Antarctica alone, without support and completely human powered. Yet, Colin O’Brady was determined to do just that, even if, ten years earlier, there was doubt that he’d ever walk again normally. From the depths of a tragic accident, he fought his way back. In a quest to unlock his potential and discover what was possible, he went on to set three mountaineering world records before turning to this historic Antarctic challenge.

O’Brady’s pursuit of a goal that had eluded many others was made even more intense by a head-to-head battle that emerged with British polar explorer Captain Louis Rudd—also striving to be “the first.” Enduring Antarctica’s sub-zero temperatures and pulling a sled that initially weighed 375 pounds—in complete isolation and through a succession of whiteouts, storms, and a series of near disasters—O’Brady persevered.

Alone with his thoughts for nearly two months in the vastness of the frozen continent—gripped by fear and doubt—he reflected on his past, seeking courage and inspiration in the relationships and experiences that had shaped his life.

Honest, deeply moving, filled with moments of vulnerability—and set against the backdrop of some of the most extreme environments on earth, from Mt. Everest to Antarctica—The Impossible First reveals how anyone can reject limits, overcome immense obstacles, and discover what matters most.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Colin O’Brady is a ten-time world record breaking explorer, New York Times bestselling author of The Impossible First, speaker, entrepreneur, and expert on mindset. His mission: sharing his hard-earned wisdom to empower others to conquer their minds and unlock their best lives. Colin’s highly publicized expeditions have been followed by millions and his work has been featured in the The New York Times and Forbes and on The Tonight Show, the BBC, The Joe Rogan Experience, and NBC’s Today. His feats include the world’s first solo, unsupported, and fully human-powered crossing of Antarctica, speed records for the Explorers Grand Slam and the Seven Summits, and the first human-powered ocean row across Drake Passage. He regularly speaks on mindset and high performance at Fortune 100 companies such as Nike, Google, and Amazon and at top universities including Harvard, Yale, and UPenn. His TEDx talk has nearly 3 million views. He’s also the cofounder of 29029 Everesting. Native to the Pacific Northwest, he now lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with his wife, Jenna Besaw, and their dog, Jack. Engage with Colin and his work @ColinOBrady or at ColinOBrady.com. Visit 12HourWalk.com and Instagram @12HourWalk, and download the 12HourWalk app to join the movement!

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Chapter One: The Captain CHAPTER ONE The Captain
PRE-EXPEDITION

The Russian-built Ilyushin cargo plane that rumbled and rolled over Drake Passage toward the Antarctic ice had all the comforts you’d expect from its hard and pragmatic Russian design, which meant essentially no comforts at all. It was built to withstand the worst weather you could throw at it, land and take off on runways of pure ice or war-zone rubble, and deliver cargo where few other planes could go. It smelled like damp canvas, machine oil, and old sweat, perhaps with a hint of spilled vodka for good measure, and it was utterly beloved, or so said our pilot, a weathered, wiry Russian in his fifties who’d wrestled with the Ilyushin’s cockpit controls over the ice for thousands of hours. This plane was a tank that would save you when other planes would fail and falter, he told us as we boarded, giving the fuselage a loving pat. That it was the only way to get to Union Glacier’s windswept ice runway and base camp—and the starting point for just about anybody heading into the continent’s interior—was also totally in keeping with the plane’s lack of frills. “Take it or leave it” might as well have been written on the side.

On this morning in late October 2018, there were only a handful of paying passengers amid the jammed-together jumble of boxes, tents, generators, and mysterious crates being shipped south for the start of the summer expedition season. I was one of them, strapped onto an ancient, rock-hard Ilyushin bench seat, with the plane’s big steel ribs arcing overhead. Strapped in next to me and sharing the same bench for this four-hour flight was perhaps the most intimidating man I’d ever met: Captain Louis Rudd.

Rudd was forty-nine and British, wrapped in a cloak of vaguely scruffy steeliness and BBC English. He sat firmly erect on his half of the bench and looked across at me with piercing hazel eyes. He spoke like a commander, in the crisp declarative sentences of the British military that had shaped and sharpened him for more than three decades. We were each headed to base camp to await further air transport out onto the Antarctic ice for the formal beginning of a historic race to try to become the first to cross the continent alone, unsupported, and unassisted. In planning our course, each of us had chosen different routes. But our paths, though neither of us could fully see it then, would become intertwined.

“Henry Worsley and I were on one team, doing Amundsen’s route. The other team started from Scott’s hut at McMurdo,” Rudd said, leaning toward me as he described his astonishing Antarctic expedition in 2011, which replicated the great race to the South Pole in 1911 between Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. Just the names of such giants, and Rudd’s connection to them, took my breath away: Amundsen. Scott. Worsley. Frank Worsley had captained what was probably the most famous Antarctic ship in history, carrying Ernest Shackleton off into legend on the Endurance in 1914. Henry Worsley, a distant relative, had continued the family Antarctic legacy, with tragic consequences. Rudd had walked in the company of gods.

“It was a brutal expedition, sixty-seven days to the Pole,” Rudd continued, his eyes boring into me. “Severe storms. Henry and I each lost more than four stone. That’s something like sixty pounds to you Yanks. Anyway, we beat the Scott team by nine days, so I guess history repeats itself and the Amundsen route was better,” he said. He finished with a wry smile that looked like he appreciated the irony: The 1911 race had been a national contest between Norway and England, and Amundsen’s Norwegians had won, beating Captain Scott of the British Royal Navy to the South Pole. Scott and his men all perished trying to get home.

I mumbled something like “wow, that’s amazing,” but in truth I couldn’t stop thinking about sixty pounds and sixty-seven days. My mind was suddenly back on Chile’s southernmost windblown tip, in a tiny Airbnb apartment in Punta Arenas, preparing for my transport flight to the ice. Equipment and food bags were spread across every surface, from kitchen countertops to the bed and the floor between. The featured fare: oatmeal and protein powder, crunchy dried ramen and freeze-dried dinners. Deserving special attention, though, were wallet-sized protein bars that were piled high like decks of cards. They’d been made by a Wisconsin nutritional supplement company that had taken me into their food science lab and produced a one-of-a-kind calorie bomb they’d dubbed the “Colin Bar.”

The checklists prepared by my wife and business partner, Jenna—the logistical road maps for the expedition—were laid out on a table, and she and I were scurrying from pile to pile, organizing, sorting, and weighing all the things I planned to drag across Antarctica in a sled, so absorbed that we nearly collided once in coming around a corner. In the eleven years of our relationship, she and I had been in more than a few exotic and challenging places, but at that moment the stakes had never felt higher, and we both stopped after our near collision, standing there in front of the refrigerator, arms full, leaning forward for a quick kiss.

We were redistributing everything so that I’d have less.

I’d planned on carrying seventy days of food and fuel, which put the sled well over four hundred pounds, a weight I’d realized I couldn’t pull. So on a tight deadline before the flight south, we’d been stripping out what felt like surplus, reducing my margins. Seventy days of food became sixty-five. Now, on the plane, that number sounded suddenly and frighteningly a lot like sixty-seven, Rudd’s number of days to the Pole on his previous expedition, losing around sixty pounds along the way. I started doing the math in my head. Sixty pounds was almost a third of my weight.

I didn’t know what to say. My stomach was suddenly churning as though the whale-like Ilyushin had hit turbulence. Rudd had replicated Amundsen’s route. He’d known Henry Worsley, whose amazing life and tragic death had so moved and inspired me. Worsley had died in 2016 attempting the very goal that Rudd and I were aiming for—the first ever solo, unsupported, unassisted crossing in history, something that many people after Worsley’s passing had come to call “impossible.” And the thought echoed through my head: Rudd is already ahead of me. He knows everything.

“Want to see a picture of me at the end?” he suddenly asked.

“Sure. Of course,” I said, shrugging.

Rudd fingered through the photos on his phone until he found the one he wanted, and handed it over. I immediately wished I hadn’t seen it. He looked almost skeletal—cheekbones bulging like baseballs from an emaciated face; dark, cold-weather wounds across forehead and nose. Rudd smiled broadly as he took the phone back, and I finally understood what he was really saying: “You don’t know what you’re in for, mate.”

It was true. I admitted to myself that what I didn’t know about Antarctica and polar survival could probably fill a book. I was far less experienced than Rudd, so much so that I probably looked like an imposter in his eyes.

He’d fought and been decorated in combat, and through various expeditions over the years had spent more time man-hauling a sled across the Antarctic ice than just...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982133112
ISBN 13 
9781982133115
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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