Transcriber: Rachael Williams Reviewer: Denise RQ
Well, you've pretty much done my talk for me, so, I'll just head off,
but thanks very much for having me here today.
What an incredible line-up of speakers you've had so far already.
It's really good to see the diversity.
Hopefully, some of the things I'll talk about here
will be brought together, actually, in real life experiences.
So yeah, as Neil mentioned,
in 2013, I cycled to the South Pole as one does.
And it wasn't actually something that I just stumbled across.
It took an awful lot of time to plan and organize.
The title of my talk will be explained very shortly.
It was actually over ten years ago that my love of adventure began.
I signed up, as Neil mentioned, to run across the Sahara Desert.
I took part in the Marathon des Sables, I don't know if anyone's heard of it.
It's six marathons in seven days across the Sahara.
It was very hot as you can imagine.
I realised I really don't like heat at all.
There was just endless running
over sand dunes like this, and across salt plains.
And I learnt about personal management.
The most important thing with this expedition
was to look after my feet and don't get dehydrated.
The other thing, which I just gave away, the one thing I really did learn
was I've got to expect some really bad hair days.
If I'm going to become an adventurer,
this is a combination of seven days of sweat, salt, and sand.
It's really not a good look.
And that's my boyfriend just lying next to me there looking at me,
wondering what on earth he's going out with.
Need I say, he's now an ex-boyfriend!
(Laughter)
Anyway, so as soon as I left the desert,
I actually started adventure racing.
I'm not sure if anyone's heard of it.
It's multi-day, multi-discipline, across countries.
And this is an incredible photograph
that was taken in a Patagonian adventure race.
You can just about make out the four of us there, crossing a glacier.
All of the events we take part in teams of four.
There's three guys and one girl,
and we're known as the compulsory baggage in the business,
and I like to argue that point the whole way through a race.
Again, this is a picture from Patagonia,
and I just absolutely fell in love with adventure racing
because you just get to cross some of the most incredible terrain
that's untouched by humans and sometimes untouched by animals.
So yeah, in 2010, I decided to actually give up my career.
I'd been working in the corporate world for ten years.
And I actually decided to set off on a bit of a journey across New Zealand
to cycle the length of the country.
I do all of my best thinking from the seat of my bike
and I set off on this journey to cycle the length of the country
to - number one - develop my business plan for setting up my new business,
but also, it was on this journey that I found out
that nobody had ever cycled to the South Pole before.
I love to do things first so I thought, "This is a very good goal to set myself."
However, this expedition was very much surrounded by doubt
because it had never been done before.
I had no idea whether it was possible
and I didn't really have any experience at all.
And I recall, when I was at school, I was not a very intelligent person at all
I really struggled with education, but I absolutely adored mathematics.
And my teacher said to me,
"You know, you must, just after GCSE, give up on maths and do something else."
And I absolutely persisted, and I got my A level,
I went on to university, and I got a degree in maths,
and then I actually applied my mathematics in my first career in rocket science,
as Neil mentioned.
So, you know, it was one of those things, and I think, as John's mentioned before,
sometimes you can be your very own monster and that was the case.
I had to control the doubt that I had in myself
to make sure that I wasn't going to get in the way of my end goal.
So I left New Zealand with a big plan: I'm going to cycle to the South Pole.
And, like I said, I didn't have any experience at all
and so I thought, I need to find some really challenging expedition,
I'm really going to put myself through the motions of what it could be like.
So I signed up for a race called the Siberian Black Ice Race.
And this is a picture, on the left hand side, of Lake Baikal,
and the idea was to cycle from the south all the way to the north.
And the ice was literally cracking underneath my tires
and the wolves were howling in the surrounding mountains.
It was the most incredible and perfect practice training run for the South Pole,
and I was taking part as a "solo", as well, so I was on my own.
It was the most horrendously dangerous thing I've ever done in my life.
It ran once, and it's never run again,
and out of 30 people who started the race, only eight of us finished.
People fell through the ice, had hypothermia, frostbite, all sorts,
it was a complete disaster, but it was brilliant!
(Laughter)
And I also learnt about winter cycling.
In some areas, it was very good smooth ice to cycle on.
In other areas, it was very broken ice.
Also, in some areas, it was deep soft snow
so I learnt about the dynamics of cycling a normal two wheeled bike
across this kind of terrain.
And, basically, it doesn't work, as you can imagine.
Trying to cycle across that is virtually impossible.
So, as soon as I got home, I decided,
right, I need to set up a team of experts who can help me develop a cycle
that's going to get me to the South Pole.
So we sat down, and we came up with this superb looking contraption.
It's three wheels for stability, because in deep soft snow
being on two wheels is very difficult, and you end up falling off.
Recumbent position for the aerodynamics
and also, I needed to have some kind of weight bearing capability
because I was going to be carrying about 50 kilograms worth of kit.
So this is a picture taken from Iceland on the Langjokull glacier.
Again, the training was great,
but there were also times when it became very, very challenging
so that whole control of doubt was something I really needed to focus on.
So the time came, and I was ready.
What I've summarized there in about five minutes
took four years of planning, training, a lot of tears, a lot of panic,
a lot of everything going on.
I finally set off.
I actually left from the Ross Ice Shelf
which is just on the bottom of the southern part there.
I had the Transantarctic Mountain Range to climb up through
to get to the South Pole.
So yeah, I mean Antarctica's an incredible place
and it was something that I'd been looking at for many years,
so the route I decided to go
was the same side of Antarctica that Scott and Amundsen set off from,
gosh, over 100 years ago now.
I was really privileged to have had the opportunity
to see what they had seen as well.
I set off on my own, on my polar cycle, with 20 days worth of rations.
I had about 55 kilograms worth of kit strapped on the back of that polar cycle,
and I knew that I had to climb up this mountain range.
Believe it or not, the South Pole sits at 3,000 metres.
It's a mountain.
I had to climb up through that
in order to get onto the Polar Plateau to get there.
On some days, actually
- in this picture you can make out the Transantarctic Mountain Range -
it would creep up on my right hand side,
and when the weather changed, which it did within hours,
all of a sudden the visibility would disappear.
It was actually a real relief not to be able to see those mountains
because I was panicking.
It was going to be a real challenge,
and this was the thing that was the big crux of the expedition.
This was the Leverett Glacier which I'd chosen to climb up.
It was one of the glaciers that pour off the Polar Plateau,
and in areas it was about 20% gradient,
so if you can imagine that on just a road, that's quite a steep climb.
It took me three days, a lot of hard work to climb up that glacier,
and I'd actually had, for the six months leading up to this expedition,
I'd had a reoccurring nightmare
that I'd cycle all the way to the top, I'd fall off the polar cycle,
the polar cycle would roll down to the bottom,
I'd run down, I'd get back on, and cycle it back up again.
That was reoccurring about 7 or 8 times every night for six months
so, as you can imagine, I was in a right state
trying to cycle up this thing, but I managed it.
It was very slow, 0.1 - 0.2 of a kilometer at times.
It was painfully slow.
I did manage to get to the top, luckily.
This is how I spent my evenings.
I'd cycle up to about 17 hours every single day,
and then I'd have a few hours in my tent at night.
I loved my tent, this was my home, it was the most incredible place to be.
And I loved the routine as well.
In Antarctica you have to be so strict with yourself.
You really have to focus
on the time that you've got when you're in the tent.
I loved getting to grips with the water-making process.
So I had limited fuel, and I needed to make water
out of the snow and ice to rehydrate my food at night.
It was just a real challenge
to use minimum fuel, maximum water, each time.
It was actually quite luxurious, I had a three-course dinner every night.
You know, I don't skip on food, I like my food.
But the mushroom soup, as a starter, every day got quite boring.
Main course was a sort of chicken korma or a spaghetti bolognese, or something,
and then a really luxurious chocolate dessert.
But disaster absolutely struck on day two when I broke my spoon,
and I had to then eat my three-course meal with my hands.
So it became quite messy.
As you can see, I've tied the tent to the polar cycle there
because winds would just pick up incredibly out of nowhere,
and the one thing I couldn't afford to lose
was the polar cycle.
So once up onto the Polar Plateau things actually got very tough
because there was a lot of snow that had blown around
and caused quite deep snow drift in places
and you can see the three tracks that I'm creating here.
At this stage, I was wishing I had just a normal bike
because then that would just be one track I'd be making.
And also, because of the exertions I'd had cycling up the Leverett Glacier,
I was really suffering from knee pain at this stage.
It was something that I'd started in Siberia, believe it or not,
but I thought, painkillers will do the job.
But yeah, it started to get quite bad and was very challenging.
The other thing about the Polar Plateau
was it's the most incredible amount of nothingness
you've ever seen or experienced.
And in today's day and age, we are stimulated all the time,
24-seven by things,
and it was such a unique experience
to be out there, and hear nothing, and see nothing.
And I was able to completely switch off
and spend 5, 10, 15 minutes at a time thinking about nothing.
If you try and do that in this society, it's just not possible, you know.
You can maybe do a couple of seconds,
but out there, it was just the most incredible experience.
At times though, I did come across things like this.
This is what I call Antarctica art.
It's sastrugi, it's wind blown snow that's just frozen.
As it's blown, it's so cold, it just freezes in situ.
And it sort of lulled me into this false sense of security
because that looks absolutely beautiful,
but it reminded me of how vicious, yet how beautiful, Antarctica is.
It really is a place where you have to be quiet
you know, be quite wary of.
So just skipping back to food again, because that's obviously really important,
this is a picture from inside my bumbag on my front.
And it sounds repulsive, but there's a combination
of salted liquorice, beef fat, chocolate, pretzels, jelly beans, bulltong,
all sorts of things like that,
and it was the best part of the day,
putting my hand in that bag and seeing what I was going to pull out;
these are the things that kept me entertained.
Like I've mentioned before, it was freezing.
Up on the Polar Plateau, with the wind chill,
it was, you know, below minus 40 degrees
so I had to be completely head to toe covered.
You can see the condensation from my breath there
that's formed on the face mask.
And one night,
because I made the point of taking a photograph of my face each day
just to check that, you know, everything was still there,
and one day some frostbite had started to develop on my cheek,
so luckily I caught it in time
plus a bit of makeup hopefully does the job.
So on the 27th of December I did finally arrive at the South Pole
having become the first person in the world to cycle to the South Pole
which was just the most incredible feeling.
I do have a quick show reel
which hopefully, will just summarize a little bit of my ramble.
Hopefully, this will work.
(Video) (Music)
[1 WOMAN]
[3 WHEELS]
[ -40 CELSIUS]
[100 MPH WINDS]
[10 DAYS]
I can't believe I'm here.
[THE WHITE ICE CYCLE]
I'd had the idea of cycling to the South Pole
for quite a long time;
I knew that nobody had ever done it.
Man: Well, we're used to going to bed and thinking,
"I wonder where Maria is now."
Maria Leijerstam: I'm in Antarctica! This is so cool!
Show me what you've got, I can't wait to see it.
Oh my goodness, look at this!
Man 2: If this machine fails, she fails, so it has to survive.
ML: It's been one hell of an expedition just to get to the start line.
In the last 24 hours, I've had altitude sickness,
I've met Prince Harry,
I've traveled for 19 hours over land
across a crevasse-ridden glacier, an ice cap.
Having seen part of the route today
this is going to be one hell of a challenge.
Man 3: How are you? Good to see you. Things well?
ML: Yeah, very well, thank you.
[BODY FAT: 23.2%. AVERAGE]
[HITS TO MISSES ACCURACY: 92%. ABOUT AVERAGE]
[PEAK POWER: 785 W. ELITE]
Man 2: Maria is a good athlete to work with
because all of these elements really weigh in, in some way,
to ultra-endurance challenges.
Up on the Polar Plateau, it's minus 30, minus 40 with a wind chill.
Sometimes, when I was working hard and my feet would sweat,
it would then, very, very quickly turn to ice.
I can't believe I'm here.
I've just got to, over the next two days, I've just got to get up it.
God, I hope I can get up it.
My right knee has absolutely just gone,
and every pedal stroke is so painful.
It's just-- this is excruciating and, I mean, I almost got to the point
where I was just like, "I can't do it anymore."
But I'm now less than 200 miles...
Sorry, I can't breathe because I'm almost at 3,000 meters
so there's not a lot of oxygen in the air up here.
I am about three kilometers away
from the South Pole.
There's the South Pole!
I just couldn't quite believe it.
Not only was I the first to cycle to the South Pole
but I'd also managed to cycle every single meter of the way.
Man 3: Well done, you've just cycled into the history books.
(Emotional cheering and screaming)
Bit of excitement at the end there!
(Applause)
So, very quickly,
the four years of planning just came to a perfect end,
I got my South Pole stamp in my passport, I met a prince, as you saw, Prince Harry,
and I achieved a double world record
for the first, and also the fastest human-powered journey to the South Pole.
And, of course, the four years of doubt, fear, and of course, terrible hair
was absolutely worth it.
That was at Union Glacier, just about to fly out after a month of Antarctica.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheering)
Thank you.