Transcriber: Amanda Zhu Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
Well, I'd like to start by asking a question.
I'd like to ask you to think about the last time you were alone.
And by alone, I don't mean by yourself.
I mean alone in terms of not being able to see another living human being
and not really being able to find one
if you suddenly decide you need to see one right now.
Maybe you went walking in the hills and didn't see anyone all day.
Perhaps you spent a weekend
in a remote cottage in an isolated part of the country.
But when you actually stop and think about it,
it's actually very rare
that we ever find ourselves truly, absolutely alone.
I found myself alone three months ago on the Ross Ice Shelf
just after this little plane in this picture had dropped me off.
And the pilot, when he landed the plane, he didn't even turn off the engines.
As he helped me out the back of the aircraft
with two sledges loaded with lots of food, fuel, and equipment for my expedition.
And I remember absolutely clearly the moment that I took this photograph,
standing in the snow on the Ross Ice Shelf with a sledge either side of me,
watching this plane become a tiny little black blob in the sky,
and then disappearing,
and then standing and listening to the sound of its engines
until I couldn't hear that anymore either.
And as I stood there, I knew what I had to do.
I had to get my tent out of my sledge.
I had to get my camp ready for the night
and get ready to start skiing the next morning,
but I was all at sixes and sevens.
I was going round in circles.
So I was getting the wrong things out of my sledge.
I noticed that my hands were shaking and my heart was thumping,
and I thought, you know, 'What is going on with me? What is wrong?'
And then it struck me:
This is what it feels like to be petrified.
I was absolutely scared right to my core.
And when I realised that,
when I realised that my ten years of experience
of leading expeditions in the Arctic and the Antarctic
at that moment counted for absolutely nothing.
When I realised that,
I did what I think probably 99% of people would do.
I sat down in the snow, and I cried,
and I cried, and I cried,
and I thought, 'What have I done?
I'm the stupidest person on the planet.
I've made a terrible mistake.'
But after maybe a minute or so, when I stopped crying,
and I felt even more stupid
because I realised that that hadn't solved anything.
I was still just as scared, and my tent still wasn't out of my sledge.
When I stopped crying,
I realised that the reason I felt so scared
was because I felt utterly vulnerable.
To one side,
I had the Transantarctic Mountains;
to the other side,
I had the flat white horizon of the Ross Ice Shelf.
And in that entire landscape, I was the only speck of life,
and that was truly terrifying.
But what was I doing there?
Why was I putting myself through this?
Well, this was the starting point of my expedition to cross Antarctica.
This little red blob is where I stood on the Ross Ice Shelf,
and the Transantarctic Mountains
form an arc around the top of the Ross Ice Shelf.
So my route was going to take me through those mountains
up onto the Polar Plateau,
which is in the centre of Antarctica,
to the South Pole.
And from there, I was going to carry on to the far coast of Antarctica
on the Ronne Ice Shelf,
at a place called Hercules Inlet.
That route is about 1,700 kilometres,
and I thought that journey was going to take me about 70 days.
Along the way, I was going to have two resupplies:
one at South Pole
and one about 500 kilometres further in.
And apart from at the South Pole,
where I knew there'd be people
living and working on the research station there,
I wasn't expecting to see anybody else for that entire journey.
So that was going to be an awful long time on my own.
So apart from getting used to being by myself,
the first challenge of my expedition
was to get through the Transantarctic Mountains
and up onto that Polar Plateau.
And the Polar Plateau sits at about 3,500 metres,
at its highest point, along my route,
and in mountaineering terms, that's not really very much.
But up here, the air is really dry, it's very thin anyway,
and so the effects of altitude are amplified a bit.
So this is already a very surreal landscape to find yourself in.
There isn't a rock.
There isn't a spot of lichen anywhere.
There isn't a bird. There isn't a bug.
There's absolutely nothing.
Even bacteria have a hard time surviving up here.
And because it's so high and it's so dry, it's really very cold.
I was regularly sort of hitting temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius.
And at those kind of temperatures -
that's without adding wind on top of that -
and at those kind of temperatures, you can't really have your skin exposed,
because your skin would just freeze,
so you need to have all your skin covered all the time.
That's great, but the humidity in your breath freezes.
So when you step out of your tent first thing in the morning,
the first thing that happens
is that your breath starts to freeze and you get covered in ice,
and this material that you have covering your face
freezes into a hard solid mask.
And so the whole day that you're out skiing,
you feel as if you're trapped inside this horrible soggy mess
of slightly wet material,
and it's a real relief when you get into the tent in the evening
that you can break out of it.
It's like suddenly getting freedom again.
But I'm telling you all these horrible things
about how miserable it is to be traveling in Antarctica,
so why on earth was I there? what was I doing?
And well,
apart from this kind of environment giving human beings a hard time,
it also gives equipment a really hard time.
So when I reached the highest point of my journey,
not only was I starting to feel the strain of all this,
but my equipment was starting to fail as well.
For no apparent reason,
my stoves would suddenly start belching fumes,
and my watch started running about an hour slow.
But perhaps the most worrying thing that happened,
a little failure,
was that the three cigarette lighters I had to light my stove
all failed, all on the same day.
You think, 'Well, okay, so you didn't have a lighter.'
Well, that meant that I couldn't light my stove,
and without my stove, I couldn't melt snow to make water,
so I couldn't make up my food,
and so it was quite a serious situation.
Luckily, I had a little pot of matches,
and so I found myself in a slightly worrying position
of sitting in my tent
counting how many matches I had in my little emergency pot.
And I had enough for two matches every day
until I reached the South Pole where my resupply was,
with just three matches spare in all that time.
So I realised I was going to have to be very careful every time I struck a match
so that I didn't waste one
and end up not being able to light my stove.
And little things like that pile on the mental strain,
and that brings me back to the point of why I was there.
When I read about other people doing extraordinary things,
I don't know about you, but my first thought is,
'Could I do that?
Would I be reacting the same way?
Would I be capable of doing that?
Would I be capable of achieving what they've achieved?'
And so this comes the heart of why I went to Antarctica.
For me, I was there out of a sense of curiosity -
to find out what it would feel like to be in Antarctica on my own,
to be dealing with that environment,
and to be dealing with the pressures,
the mental pressures as well as the physical ones,
that that environment brings with it.
I wanted to know
whether I would reach my own personal mental and physical limits.
Because although I've taken part in lots of polar expeditions,
which have been really hard and really desperate at times,
I'd never once felt that I'd come up against that wall
of ‘Oh my goodness, I can't go any further.
This is it. This is my limit.'
And so I think that's what I was doing in Antarctica.
I was exploring where my personal limit was.
And boy, did I find them! -
pretty much instantly.
Every single morning,
without fail,
no matter how positive a frame of mind I'd gone to sleep in,
the first thought that entered my head when I opened my eyes
was ‘I can't do this.’
And that wasn't a flippant belief; that was absolute certainty
that there was no way that today, I could step outside of that tent
and ski for 10 hours
and deal with the environment that was outside.
I knew that.
And all I could think about
was I had to find a way to get myself out of this,
that I've made a terrible mistake and today was going to be the last day.
But every single morning,
I would have to find a way to get myself beyond that,
find a way to stop myself thinking emotionally
and start thinking logically again.
And sometimes that wasn't pretty.
Sometimes that involved lots of crying,
lots of getting angry with myself,
having temper tantrums,
telling myself not to be so pathetic.
Sometimes it involved cajoling myself,
giving myself an extra cup of coffee,
allowing myself an extra five minutes in my sleeping bag
to encourage me to get out of that tent.
But it became clear that the key to the success or failure of my expedition
was simply getting out of the tent,
and yet that simple action became incredibly difficult.
After 26 days, I reached the South Pole.
And leaving the South Pole was probably one of the hardest days of the trip.
I'd reached this little oasis of safety and didn't want to leave again.
And if there hadn't been a group of people standing there to wave me off,
I potentially would never have left the South Pole.
But everyone promised me,
‘Oh, Felicity, it gets a lot easier once you leave the South Pole.
It's all downhill.
You'll have the wind at your back’,
and those words rang in my head
as I sloped uphill into a headwind for the first two days
and thought this wasn't the deal.
But after 56 days,
I was slogging through some bad weather like this
when the clouds parted
and I saw some tiny little black dots on the horizon.
And when I saw those tiny little black dots,
I stopped in my ski tracks and burst into tears -
because it meant that I had made the far coast.
What I was looking at
was the coastal mountains that marked the end of my journey.
And three days later, when I arrived at the end of my route,
when I arrived at the far coast of Antarctica,
I sort of sat down on my sledge and took a pause.
And I knew that that meant
I was the first woman to have skied across Antarctica alone,
I was the first person to have skied alone across Antarctica
without kites and parasails.
But what did that actually mean to me?
Well, when I sat down on my sledge, having finished my journey,
what that meant to me in that moment was huge amounts of relief -
the relief that all that stress, all that pressure was over -
also sadness that my adventure was done,
that I wouldn't be alone in Antarctica anymore.
But I also noticed something else,
and it was a slight hint of disappointment.
And I think that's because I've gone there looking for my limits,
and yes, I had reached, come up against all sorts of limits.
I had had desperate, desperate times,
but the thought occurred to me
if ultimately I've achieved my goal,
does that mean that I hadn't reached my limit?
Does that mean that my search for my own limits isn't over yet?
Was what I was searching for this time not necessarily success but failure?
And it's an interesting thought -
that perhaps it's only when we fail
that we know we've tried our best and come up against those limits.
I haven't quite worked that out yet.
So I only finished my expedition a month ago tomorrow,
so it's still something that is going through in my head,
and I'm not quite sure where that thought is going to lead.
But one thing I did come back from this expedition absolutely certain about
was that I'm not brave and I'm not courageous,
but the one thing I do have is a stubborn tenacity to keep going.
And I don't think I'm special in that.
I think every single one of us has that ability to keep going.
It's something about the human spirit that won't let us give up.
But not everybody gets a chance
to demonstrate it by skiing across Antarctica.
Perhaps that's a bit extreme.
But I guess the point that I want to leave you with today
is that no matter what challenge it is that you face,
be it a physical one, a mental one, a financial one,
if you can just find a way to keep going,
that's the really important bit.
It doesn't matter if you have failures along the way.
Success or failure, it’s to a large extent
completely outside the question.
What's really important is that you stay focused on that goal
and keep finding a way to put one foot in front of the other,
metaphorically or physically.
And if you can keep doing that,
I absolutely promise you that one day you're going to look back
and just be astounded
at what you've achieved and how far you've come.
Thanks very much.
(Applause)