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my routines in order to get to sleep just a few minutes earlier.
Each night I was asleep as early as I could manage. When I
wasn't asleep, I wanted to be on my skis covering as many of
the remaining miles as I could.
The combination of good weather, glassy surfaces and
occasional downhill sections began to make a difference to my
daily mileages so that I was regularly covering fifteen, then
eighteen, nautical miles in a day.
On 2 January, my thirty-ninth day, I sat cross-legged in the
tent staring open-mouthed at the figures on the GPS unit in
my hand. I had covered exactly twenty nautical miles. In my
pre-expedition planning it would have seemed ridiculously
audacious to propose this kind of mileage as a daily target. On
my way across the 'wrong side' of Antarctica to the South Pole
my best day had seen me cover sixteen nautical miles and that
was on a near-ice surface with a practically empty sledge. I had
not expected to do any better than that on the second leg of my
journey and yet, in the days that followed I consistently skied
more than twenty nautical miles - again and again.
I marvelled at the distances I recorded but worried what
this spurt of mileage might be taking out of me. Polar travel
had always struck me as a war of attrition. Each day of
exposure to the extremes of Antarctica made me a little
weaker - the constant physical exertion having the same
negative effects as overtraining. Every evening I felt weighed
down by physical tiredness, crawling around my tent on
hands and knees as I pitched it because standing was too
much effort. Sleep came like a computer monitor blinking
to lifeless black and waking felt like a fight against gravity
to rise to the surface of a peat bog. One morning I lay in my
sleeping bag, eyes closed, trying to isolate all the different
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