Getting Out of the Tent - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 223

expedition of my life I was already being drawn on to think of
new challenges and my heart sank a little with the weight of
it. I could see how easily the bid to find extremes of capability
could transform from a mode of motivation into a source of
torment. Filling the hole left by an expedition with the seeds
of a new adventure was a temptation I was wary of, knowing
as I did both its compelling addiction and the fact that it has
no end. But I couldn't avoid the question circling my brain.
If I had succeeded in crossing Antarctica alone, did it mean
that I was capable of more? After all, it is only when we have
tried our best and failed that we know we have reached our
absolute potential. Was what I had been searching for all this
time not success but, in fact, failure?
I shook the thoughts from my head. I had come to Antarctica
to explore my limits but I realised now that I had arrived with
a preconception of what that limit would look like. I had
envisaged falling to my knees in the snow with the conviction
that I couldn't go on. I imagined that I would be able to
describe my limit in terms of a number of miles and a number
of days. I had been wrong. The last two months had taught me
that a personal limit is not as defined as a line in the snow. No
matter how far we travel or how hard we push, our bodies will
keep moving forward and our minds will find ways to process.
But in exploring those extremes we pay a price. I may have
covered every mile in Antarctica from coast to coast but there
had been mornings on the ice when I had felt in real danger
of losing my mind, times when I had felt more desperate and
desolate than at any other time in my life and I never wanted to
experience that kind of despair again. There is a price I'm not
willing to pay in order to discover the absolute extent of my
personal limits. I have pushed far enough. Through the prism