Ben & Tarka Break World Record in 1,795-Mile Antarctic Polar Trek
Ben and his teammate, Tarka L’Herpiniere, trekked 1,795 miles across the inhospitable landscape of Antarctica, a journey to the South Pole and back, and in doing so set the world record for the longest ever polar journey on foot. The journey, which took a total of 105 days, pushed the limits of physical and mental fortitude and reset the bar for polar expeditions of the future.
Having followed the expedition avidly for the duration of the journey via its regular blog updates, I was keen to chat to Ben about the mental and physical preparation, the logistical issues and settling back into a normal routine after a completing a project that took 10 years to get off the ground.
John: It’s great to finally meet you Ben. Firstly, could you tell us a bit about your background and how the Scott Expedition came about?
Ben: I first spent time in the polar regions in 2001, on what turned out to be a failed North Pole attempt with Pen Hadow. Since then I’ve had a fascination for polar extremes and pushing my own limits within these frozen environments.
I became fascinated by historic polar expeditions and the first expedition to the South Pole. In January 1912, Captain Scott and his companions arrived at the Pole to find that the Norwegians, led by Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it, leaving a letter to the king in a biscuit tin proclaiming the victory of reaching the Pole first. Utterly dejected, Scott and his team began the return journey back to the shores of Ross Island. The team of five all perished on this return journey after travelling a total of 1,600 miles. They were just 11 miles short of their next food supply depot.
It became an obsession for me that no one had ever completed this journey. How had no one been able to go further than these guys in over a century? We now live in the age of technology and these explorers didn’t even have zips (they hadn’t been invented yet) let alone fleeces, sat-nav technology, solar panels, freeze-dried food, ski planes etc. I wanted to finish this journey.
The sheer enormity of the expedition is hard to grasp. How did you overcome some of the obstacles surrounding the logistics, planning and preparation for the expedition?
In hindsight I didn’t think it would take as long as it did to organise. I found very quickly that the costs were escalating and we were trying to raise large amounts of money during a period of recession in the UK. Everything took time – more time than expected. Permits took time, we had to arrange flights, contingency plans and we even had to arrange for aviation fuel for a ski plane to be in Antarctica a year before we arrived. Everything seemed against us and it was a huge psychological effort to overcome these constant bureaucratic and logistical obstacles. But the longer I spent working on this, the more committed I became to make sure this expedition happened. It became all-consuming.
And how about the physical training?
We were going to be pulling heavily loaded sledges so we had to balance ultra-endurance training with, essentially, strong-man training. So in the same training regime, I was running sub-3hr marathons and lifting huge weights in the gym. We went on training expeditions to Greenland and Scotland to get a taste of what we were going to endure. In the final preparation months, we had to pile on the pounds as we knew we’d not be able to sustain our calorie intake during the expedition.
