After being the first person to cross Antarctica solo and unassisted, O’Brady shares his lessons learned so we, too, can discover our own limitless potential.
Photo Courtesy of Colin O'Brady
“It was definitely one of the darkest places that I've ever gone to in my mind, potentially the most dark place. The physical trauma was obviously immense being told this, but the emotional trauma was even greater. I'm in the midst of this darkness, about four or five days into this ordeal, and my mother, the wonderful woman she is, comes and finds me in the middle of this island in the middle of the Gulf of Thailand and shows up at the hospital.
And has he ever! His book primarily chronicles the “impossible” journey across Antarctica. O’Brady shares, “A lot of people have attempted this project over time. Some died trying and some ran out of food and had to be rescued. Because of that, people started saying, ‘This is impossible. It just can't be done. With a hundred years of polar history, no one's been able to pull off this solo and unassisted crossing.
I had to ask what Antarctica’s really like? O’Brady sympathizes, “It's an abstraction. It's almost like a different planet. The average temperature when I was there was about minus 25 or minus 30 degrees. It's an endless, expansive, white landscape. So once you're in the interior, which is where I was most of the time, there are no views of mountains. It's 24 hours of daylight. The sun is directly overhead, which is very disorienting.
He elaborates: “We are the stories that we tell ourselves. I get to choose what of that dialogue is actually coming into my brain. It's actually just me talking to myself and beating up on myself with all this negativity. That's only going to compound into more negativity, frustration, fear, and doubt. And so that first morning I wake up, my alarm goes off, and I say this out loud into the endless Antarctica landscape: ‘You are strong. You are capable.
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