My third book was "South with the Sun." And it's about polar exploration and Amundsen, who was the first man to reach the South Pole . And I wrote about him because I was so inspired by him.But I think that as athletes and as people who read and people who have traveled, we're adventures and we're exploring our limits and we're exploring the
And for him to say that was a very poignant moment, as you can imagine, being the first madman to ski to the North and South Pole . He's a pretty persistent, insane man. And for him to ski up and tell us that was, yeah, very humbling but I think a good thing for him because I think he needed that push back,
That's the beauty of travel. The South Pole is-- this is 90 degrees south right here. It's where the Earth squeaks on its axis.
And in 1932, 1933, Lincoln Ellsworth, the famous Arctic explorer, approaches Josephine to say that he's going back to the South Pole , and he'd like to go and somehow honor his hero, Wyatt Earp. And he comes up with the idea of naming his ship after Wyatt Earp.
It's literally over sand dunes, isn't it? the South Pole . So some day, if you were feeling good, you'd take more.
call the Permian period of Earth history. And this was the time where there was the supercontinent, Pangea. All of the land was gathered together as this one enormous land mass stretching from the North Pole to the South Pole . And it was a land mass that was ruled by a lot of early relatives and cousins and ancestors of us distant mammal ancestors. But then, in what is now Siberia, these enormous volcanoes started to erupt about 250 million years ago. And these are not volcanoes like those that we know today. It's hard to even envision what these were like.
the point of showing you that video and explaining this is it's not really about arriving at the South Pole , and just to tell you why I think that's the case. I needed to raise 150,000 Euro to do the event, and I had all sorts of ideas on how I might get the sponsorship, or get a documentary made,
--what's happened in the last several years is an absolute game-changer. This is the south pole and the north pole. Overlaying that is what we believe is, in color, in blue, the percentage of water
where the cotton fiber was turned using the machines into the textiles, which were then taken back down to Africa. compared to the South Pole of the Earth.
It's incredible. So just to fast forward a little bit about early exploration because you know, 82 years after the first team of men reached the South Pole , we did our expedition. In our life, that's not a long time really.
And as you saw from the last photo, I actually have all my gear behind me and I'm dragging in a sled day by day till I reached the South Pole . On many of these journeys.
This is an actual picture of Enceladus taken by the Cassini mission. And in the south pole of the moon, you can see here a picture center at the South Pole , there are these features here, features on the surface. These are called tiger stripes.
at Johns Hopkins University, we proposed a mission to do precisely that, to return to Enceladus and search for evidence of life in the plume materials coming out of the South Pole Now, if that mission gets selected by NASA, it's going to make it there somewhere, sometime in the mid-2030s. I expect to be there, quit smoking, started running.
what's going to happen if anything goes wrong, right? So on our South Pole expedition, the one I was just talking about, Eric was brilliant, because he had everybody sort of trade off in different leadership roles every day.
But maybe that'll fade from memory soon enough that I can take him on. He led an incredible South Pole expedition in the very early 20th century or late 19th century. There's a lot of roles like that.
Because that allows this to not just be a spatial map, but also a map in time. Our spacecraft flies from south pole to north pole on the day side. And so these are other things about what the spacecraft is doing, what its roll angle is, other things.
Now you tell me. But the South Pole , it's generally a deserted environment. It's your decision in the environment.
Yes. Yeah. So you did the rowing across the Atlantic thing. You did the South Pole expedition. I think quite a few people have seen that on the TV, the documentary that you made there which, again, looked like very, very tough conditions.
It's literally over sand dunes, isn't it? And I was at South Pole and feeling really not very good.
It was a very beautiful moment indeed. And we skied down to the South Pole together. And Captain Scott, who inspired him to ski to the South Pole in the '80s-- unfortunately, they're a bit sad face that the Norwegians had beaten them, and all of them
died on their return journey, so not the best portrait. But that was them reaching the South Pole . That was my dad reaching the South Pole .
But that was them reaching the South Pole . That was my dad reaching the South Pole . He also had his fair share of, yeah, just chaos when he arrived.
So unlike the Apollo Program, where we were really clueless about the moon, we were all over the place, but only on the near side. Now we're going to the south pole . And we'll have all kinds of capability to really use the resources that are there.
Now, of course, what the current administration wants us to do is they want boots on the moon, the first woman and the next man on the south pole by 2024. We want that, too.
The third round was the dance round. When I first walked the South Pole and then came back to my native country, England, the very first question that people asked me
So we have to stay awake, you know, for our ride and be open to the very different ways things get presented to us. So here we are at the South Pole , minus 76 degrees, and we pay tribute to Amundsen, who reached the South Pole first. He was a Norwegian, and he was very efficient in his logistics and planning, very successful with sled dogs.
because of Amundsen getting there before. So they made the trek from the South Pole back to their base, past McMurdo where the Ross Sea is, the other side of Antarctica.
I'm not here to talk about that because that didn't happen. We made it to the South Pole . The reason for that is losing two weeks in the beginning to bad weather, and also, I got very, very sick.
If you wanted to go down to Antarctica and photograph the emperor penguins or climb Mt. Vinson or ski to the South Pole , you would go to Patriot Hills. It's 80 degrees south.
It has a north pole and a south pole , so electron actually works like a magnet.
We ended up taking it to the South Pole , because the South Pole is one of the highest and driest continents on Earth, the Antarctica is.
And he got to the South Pole carrying scientific equipment, meteorites that he had collected along the way, parts of Dead Sea lions that he had found along the way.
had a big feast at the South Pole , put a flag in the snow, and went back home, down 10,000 feet of ice
And when I was at the South Pole , though, there was this thing-- this great thing-- that I observed happening.
Another month here at the South Pole , and the sun would be gone.
In our wintertime see it over the South Pole .
But I never really planned on completing the seven summits, you know, the highest peak on each continent, or completing the Adventure Grand Slam by skiing to the North and South Pole in addition to seven summits, but it just kind of happened over time. And I would go on these adventures and I would meet people climbing that would invite me on other adventures.
It's chapter six. And it seems to be everyone's favorite chapter, I think, because it's a very honest chapter about a difficult situation where I really struggled. But I showed up for the South Pole expedition. And I always train as hard as I can before an expedition, because that's just who I am.
If you get to the South Pole , the first thing you do is you make an Iridium phone call.
England had missed out on reaching the south pole and the north pole, and this was the golden age of exploration.
We'd gotten to the South Pole and the North Pole the beginning of the century, and then we had Mount Everest in 1953, and it was great and fitting
His team unfortunately got beaten to the South Pole by 28 days.
Because if it was a north to south pole , they'd be attracted to each other.
So I was there to race. I wasn't there just to do an expedition to the South Pole . But perhaps to give everyone watching a bit of a sense of what it was like down there, I might play that short video.
And frankly, I thought that arriving at the South Pole should have been the end of the story. But a year after getting back from the South Pole , when I felt like I was unstoppable, when I'd rebuilt my identity as a competitor, it was at that point that I was in England at a rowing regatta.
And so I also ended up at the South Pole station in Antarctica, and that's where I met my husband.
And he really wanted to do justice of what they put themselves through. He went and did a 900-mile journey to the South Pole , a 700-mile journey to the North Pole without radio communication, without a safety net that we can experience today.
And then just as the summer was starting, start their 70-day journey to the South Pole . And as he-- the day he got to the South Pole , his ship sunk that was meant to come and pick them up from the coast.
Trash-- I'm kind of shocked, to be honest. It's a five-minute story of skiing to the South Pole coming back, talking about effectively the story that I've just yakked on about in five minutes,
Trash-- I'm kind of shocked, to be honest. And I'm going to be skiing back to the South Pole with my father.