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left by the trauma of the morning. The coast was now only 200
nautical miles away which, if I continued at my current pace,
could be as little as ten days of skiing. Ten days. It seemed so
manageable and yet the reality was that each moment passed
with such effort that ten days could have been a hundred years.
Ten days was brief in the scheme of things but when I thought
of repeating the day that had just passed ten times over, my
confidence wavered.
The mental paranoia of the last two days had left me bruised.
I was confused as to why I should be going through such
emotional torment now, when I was so close to the end. But
as I thought it over I realised that sensing the end was part of
the problem. I had let my mental guard down and allowed
my mind to rush ahead of my body. The disconnection was
disastrous, just as it had been in the final kilometres before the
Pole. I needed to refocus my attention on the present and revert
to the guarded, clamped-down self that I had cultivated since
my first day. I needed a mental reset, like pressing ctrl+alt+del
on a computer to start again, and rebuild my defences. I had to
be resilient against Antarctica and the alone-ness until the very
end and not a moment sooner. There could be no short-cuts.
Sitting in the tent that evening I made a conscious effort to
re-order my approach to the rest of the journey. I told myself
that I was setting out on a ten-day expedition, starting the next
morning. Sacrificing a whole blank page of my diminishing
notebook I divided the remaining distance into ten daily
mileage targets. Then I went through each bag of equipment in
the tent, sorting, tidying and reorganising as I went. Finally I
tackled my remaining rations. I amalgamated everything I had
left into thirteen full bags to allow for ten days of skiing and
three days of emergency overspill.
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