/PREVIOUSPAGES:^ TAMARA^MERINObit of a suggestion for you.”
O’Brady cut him off. “We both know the
score out here,” he said. “I’m wishing you
well, but let this be the last time we speak.”
Rudd removed his glasses and stared into
the American’s cool blue eyes.
“OK,” Rudd said. “Suit yourself.”
WHAT WAS RUDD going to say over the
screaming wind? Was he trying to get in
O’Brady’s head? Hoping to offer advice as
a more experienced explorer? To this day,
O’Brady doesn’t know. What’s certain is
that both men were feeling the tension of
their contest, as Will Ferrell once put it, all
the way down to their plums.
And yet their race across Antarctica
wasn’t intentional—not initially, at least.
When they started planning their expedi-
tions, neither knew that the other was pre-
paring to go. Rudd announced his bid in April
- O’Brady, wondering who else might
be going for it, strategically waited another
six months. He went public on October 18,
just a few weeks before both men would be
dropped on the ice.
“Lou was a little short with me when I
reached out over e-mail,” O’Brady recalls.
Rudd no longer wants to talk about it, but
Wendy Searle, his expedition manager—
who will be attempting a South Pole speed
record in November—says that “Lou was
never going to do anything but his own
thing. It was all terribly British.”
The battle between an upstart Yank and
a hardened Brit caused an international
media storm. Here was a rivalry reminiscent
of the classic 1911 race to the South Pole be-
tween Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon
Scott—this time chronicled online. O’Brady
and Rudd sat next to each other on the small
plane that delivered them to their starting
points, which were roughly a mile apart.
They began their crossings almost at the
same moment. O’Brady knew he couldn’t
match the captain’s experience and that
Rudd had a lighter sled, so he decided he had
to go longer. If Rudd traveled for 12 hours,
O’Brady would go for 13. By day 11, he’d built
up a ten-mile lead.
In the UK, reporters filed dispatches for
the BBC, the Independent, and the Guardian.
The New York Times published ten stories,
including a study guide for young readers
and a slick web page tracking the explorers’
progress. O’Brady posted a photo on Insta-
gram almost every day.
All the hype had many veterans in the
polar community raising their bushy eye-
brows. As critics pointed out, O’Brady and
Rudd were following shortened routes that
crossed only the landmass of Antarctica
and none of the ice that extends over the
surrounding seas. They weren’t the first
to do this. Both Ben Saunders and Henry
Worsley had also followed shorter routes,
though both included at least some of the
ice shelves. O’Brady and Rudd, some argued,
were looking for the easier way. “It’s a pretty
simple equation: the longer the distance,
the harder the trip,” says Eric Larsen, 48,
who has led guided expeditions to the polar
regions for two decades.
Larsen and others point to Norwegian
Borge Ousland, who crossed Antarctica—
and its ice sheets—alone and without re-
supply in 1997. That 1,768-mile sea-to-sea
endeavor, which he completed in 65 days,
was nearly twice as long as O’Brady’s. But
because Ousland had at times used a small
sail to scoot himself along when the wind
was right, he left the door open for someone
to claim a truly unaided trek.
As news of O’Brady’s victory made its way
around the world, ExplorersWeb, an online
hub for expedition news that “makes sure
credit is given where credit is due,” pushed
back and noted what many in the media hadfailed to mention—that for the last 300-plus
miles of the crossing, O’Brady (and Rudd)
had followed a man-made “snow road,” the
South Pole Overland Traverse. Used to ferry
supplies between McMurdo Station and the
pole, it’s routed around crevasses and some-
times graded and marked with flags. In 2013,
a British woman named Maria Leijerstam
had ridden the road to the South Pole on a
three-wheeled recumbent fat bike.
“Expeditions aren’t just about doing
the best thing anymore,” Larsen laments.
O’Brady largely ignored the criticisms, fo-
cusing instead on his messaging to a much
wider, mainstream audience. He had barely
changed out of the underwear he wore for
the entire crossing when he flew to New
York to meet with 20 publishers competing
for the rights to his memoir, The Impossible
First, which will be released in February- He did the TV circuit and later got a
hug from Julia Roberts in the NBC Univer-
sal greenroom before giving a speech to the
broadcaster’s executive team. He filmed a
segment of HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant
Gumbel. He talked music with Paul Simon.
He started charging tens of thousands of
dollars for keynote addresses. His message:
we all have a reservoir of untapped potential
within us, and only our own minds can pre-
vent us from accessing it.
Matt Sharkey, global sports marketing
director at the North Face, says that put-
ting this kind of spin on an extreme adven-
ture triumph is the natural evolution of the
21st-century expedition narrative. The feat
or record still matters, but it’s the backstory
that people crave.
“Now we say to our athletes, Hey look,
we don’t want to pressure you for the fastest
known time,” Sharkey says. “But we want to
know, what are you struggling with?”ON A RAINY MAY afternoon in Bend,
Oregon, O’Brady is sitting comfortably in a
windowless room at the Riverhouse on the
Deschutes, a hotel and conference center.
He’s wearing a tight T-shirt stretched across
a model’s torso, dark jeans, and a borrowed
Rolex. His dirty-blond hair is closely cropped.
Earlier in the day, during a break in the
weather, O’Brady had been outside with Or-
egon governor Kate Brown,
the two of them chatting
about vipassana medita-
tion while the governor’s
staff filmed the moment for
Brown’s social-media chan-
nels. Soon he’ll head down-
stairs to deliver a version of
his well-practiced keynote
address—he’s already deliv-
ered it some 30 times this
year—to a couple of hundred attendees at an
outdoor-recreation conference. Right now,
though, O’Brady and Blake Brinker, 35, a
former tech entrepreneur turned brand con-
sultant with a Zach Galifianakis beard, are
brainstorming approaches to his upcoming
commencement address at Pace Academy,
a private K-12 school in Atlanta. The bar is
set high: Robert Downey Jr. gave the 2015
address after arriving by helicopter.
“From a storytelling perspective, the way
I’d like to do this would be...” O’Brady trails
off. Brinker jumps in, and they circle around
a metaphor about O’Brady being on the ice,
alone and afraid, with no traditional path
to follow. “Yeah, yeah,” O’Brady says. “It
feels a little bit like, What’s your Everest?
Not what’s hers or your mom’s or what the
school thinks or the guidance counselor, but
what is your answer to that question?”
This idea—mustering the courage to set
a big goal and then embracing the fear that
comes with going for it—is nothing new on
the motivational-speaker tour, but O’Brady
has credibility that few can match. He was
born on a commune in Olympia, Washing-
ton, to natural grocers Tim O’Connor andHERE WAS A RIVALRY REMINISCENT
OF THE CLASSIC RACE TO
THE SOUTH POLE—THIS TIME
CHRONICLED ONLINE.