Sundogs and Haloes - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 169

aches and pains. Every single component of my body from
my toenails to the top of my head seemed to be complaining
loudly and uncomfortably. Even my thoughts hurt. It
seemed impossible that this mass of protesting muscle and
bone would be able to take another step but every day, with
the help of generous doses of ibuprofen and paracetamol
and a belief in the mechanical endurance of my body's
engineering, clipping into the skis seemed to bind everything
together. I'd move forward gently at first, allowing my
muscles to remember the too-familiar movements, feeling
uncoordinated, jerky and unsteady. But I'd notice with a
slight sense of pride that astonishingly quickly the stiffness
would evaporate and each halting movement flowed more
smoothly into the next until my body fell, without coercion,
into the usual rhythm. While skiing I didn't feel as if I was
pushing myself beyond reason and knowing the mileage I
was logging seemed to lift me. It made me feel invincible.
As a treat to celebrate my good mood and better progress, I
allowed myself to listen to the audio material I'd been saving
on my MP3 player. Until now I'd listened only to music. I'd
learnt from previous expeditions that deciding what music to
take on a journey is actually quite difficult to get right. Variety
is the key because no matter how much you love a particular
genre, album or band, over the course of six weeks or more
it begins to get tedious. (Preparing for this expedition I had
made the mistake of asking friends for contributions from
their music collections to bolster the variety in my own and
began to notice a theme in the tracks I received in response;
Cypress Hill - 'Insane in the Brain'; James Blunt - 'Out of My
Mind'; Garbage - 'Stupid Girl'; Green Day - 'Basket Case';
Eminem - 'Just Lose It'; The Eurythmics - 'Don't Ask Me