Effortless by Mckeown Greg

Author:Mckeown, Greg [Mckeown, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

PACE

Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast

In the midst of the great age of exploration, in the early years of the twentieth century, the most sought-after goal in the world was to reach the South Pole. It had never been done before in all of recorded human history: not by Pytheas, the first polar explorer circa 320 b.c.e. , not by the Vikings a thousand years later, not by the Royal Navy in all its prowess during the years of the great British Empire.

In November 1911 two “rivals for the pole” aimed to be the first to achieve this elusive goal: Captain Robert Falcon Scott from Great Britain, and Roald Amundsen from Norway, otherwise known as “the Last Viking.”

They began within days of each other a 1,500-mile race against time, a race of life and death. One team would return victorious; the other would not return.

To read their journals, however, you would never guess that the two teams made the exact same journey, under the exact same conditions. On the good weather days, Scott would drive his team to exhaustion. On bad weather days he would hunker down in his tent and lodge his complaints in his journal. On one such day he wrote, “Our luck in weather is preposterous. It makes me feel a little bitter to contrast such weather with that experienced by our predecessors.” On another, he wrote, “I doubt if any party could travel in such weather.”

But one party could. On a day of a similar blizzard, Amundsen recorded in his journal, “It has been an unpleasant day—storm, drift, and frostbite, but we have advanced 13 miles closer to our goal.”

On December 12, 1911, the plot thickened: Amundsen and his team got within forty-five miles of the South Pole, closer than anyone who had ever tried before. They had traveled some 650 grueling miles and were on the verge of winning the race of their lives. And the icing on the cake: the weather that day was working in their favor. Amundsen wrote, “Going and surface as good as ever. Weather splendid—calm with sunshine.” There on the Polar Plateau, they had the ideal conditions to ski and sled their way to the South Pole. With one big push, they could be there in a single day.

Instead, it took three days. Why?

From the very start of their journey, Amundsen had insisted that his party advance exactly fifteen miles each day—no more, and no less. The final leg would be no different. Rain or shine, Amundsen “would not allow the daily 15 miles to be exceeded.” While Scott allowed his team to rest only on the days “when it froze” and pushed his team to the point of “inhuman exertion” on the days “when it thawed,” Amundsen “insisted on plenty of rest” and kept a steady pace for the duration of the trip to the South Pole.

This one simple difference between their approaches can explain why Amundsen’s team made it to the top while Scott’s team perished. Setting

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