A reflection on the INSPIRE South Pole research expedition into human hyper-endurance. What can we take from this into our businesses and lives and relationships?

Why's resilience so important? What exactly is it? Is it the same as Endurance? Just how powerful can it be? How do we harness it? How do we feel it? How do we make it grow? We need resilience every morning to not just face another day of seemingly endless stress and exhaustion, but to inspire us to make every day a step towards achieving your ultimate goals in business or life, or simply making the most out of time. Resilience is not just inside us - it surrounds us, in all those we work with, live with, and care for, and who want the best for us. It's a magical force. It does not, however, come easily or for free.

The Last Degree. Courtesy of Taavet Hinrikus.

The seemingly endless white disc of the polar plateau. 89.5 degrees South. -40 degrees below zero.

One year ago...

365 days back, almost to the minute we finally reached the South Pole. We had researched new areas of human physiology, and why women appear to outperform men in hyper-endurance. We had reached new understanding of our limits, of endurance and resilience. But most of all, exhausted, blistered, frost-nipped and humbled by nature, we had gratefully overcome seemingly impossible barriers, and what could be achieved when a diverse mosaic of individuals help one another as a team.

Looking back, I learned life lessons, some most unexpectedly. I would not, thereafter, have survived through the very tough year as a Founder, CEO, Partner and Father that followed without that experience, resilience and new-found power to endure.

Endurance and Hyper-endurance

What is Hyper-endurance? Being married to someone like me for 25 years is one definition. But in physical pursuits you'll have heard of an 'Ultra-': It's more than a marathon - normally >100km running. An Iron-man is an 'Ultra-endurance' challenge. So what's a 'Hyper-endurance' thing? Is it just a ludicrously long version of an Ultra? No-one's defined it (till now) but we've all heard of Hyper-space. If not, go watch some StarWars, Star Trek or Pigs in Space.

Hyper-space travel is by all accounts a daft thing to attempt. You go an impossibly long distance, in as short a time as (im)possible with an implausibly insufficient amount of energy. Sounds remarkably similar to Hyper-endurance: As opposed to an Ultra-, where, however long, there's support, water and food around, here's the Dr Jack Kreindler v.0.1 definition:

A hyper-endurance challenge is:

(1) a ludicrously long, self-supported physical activity that is, critically, where you must schlep all your food, shelter and fuel with an inevitably massive calorie deficit.

(2) Will, ordinarily, be in an extremely harsh environment, presenting a significant chance of not succeeding or not coming home in one piece.

(3) Typically involves a wildly aspirational end point, with a 'first' or a 'pole', or a 'circumnavigation or a 'peak', yet...

(4) Is nigh-on impossible to raise enough funding for especially for innovative scientific research components, and...

(5) Has potential for big headlines about folk getting hurt, lost forever or, if British, getting an MBE, maybe a book deal but at very least an extended brag on LinkedIn.

(6) Blisters. There are always blisters.

Sounds like a typical start up!

That triumphant moment - followed by then crushing moment when you realise you still have a rather long way to go. A test of endurance and resilience.

Endurance vs Resilience

A pet hate of mine is the misuse of words. Too many self-acclaimed health and performance experts out there talk about 'resilience', without any gritty experience, or proper physiological or neuro-phys' understanding. I am sure Prof Huberman would concur. Self-appointed self-help gurus mix up resilience with, coping, resistance, strength or steadfastness. To hold your own against negative forces is endurance ("to harden"). Yes, to succeed in hyper-endurance challenges you need extra-ordinary levels of endurance, obviously, but you also need hyper-resilience. Resilience is not the same as endurance. It is related but fundamentally different. The hard, and also misunderstood, part about resilience is that we're often too afraid to do what it takes to develop it. Resilience is not just about having task-lists and focus time and getting a good night's sleep and doing breath-work either. It actually needs excessive stress.

Resilience: The etymology of "resilience" is "re-" meaning "back" or "again," and "salire" means "to jump" or "to leap." "Resilire" can be translated as "to jump back" or "to rebound." Resilience is not directly our ability to endure, it is our ability to adapt and bounce back from breaking point. Resilience in physics is the ability for a substance not so much to sustain its form, but to return to its original state when deformed by torsion or force. In biology resilience it is a living system's allostatic capacity for it's physiology to restore and even improve function after excess stress. In psychology it's the power to recover positivity and passion after being crushed.

-50 C. Some days are not as good as others.

To build true resilience you first need true passion. The root of the word "passion" is in fact "pain" or "to suffer", commonly for the love of something, the desire to have or achieve something or someone. Extraordinary passions, create extraordinary demand, excessive stress, and, yes, pain. Without being hyper-passionate, without the consequent suffering, we cannot develop true, deep resilience. I would argue that we cannot become the best versions of ourselves without such passion, pain and adaptive resilience. The era of the great trans-Antarctic explorers has long passed, ill-equipped, entering the unknown and before technology could have us beam SOS's across satellite networks with our live GPS location. And with that, thankfully, we do not need to die quite as often pursuing certain polar passions. But in today's presumption of comfort and wellbeing being an automatic right, we are, I fear, losing the innate optimism that to become hyper-resilient, we also need to be hyper-passionate, and embrace suffering and failure. It is only this optimism and courage that enables us to adapt to our fullest and to bounce back, not just as strong as where we were, but stronger. Not back up to the same level, but higher. This optimism, and knowing we can only become our best selves through great passions and potential for great failures, is true moral courage.

Shackleton was famous for saying:

"The quality I look for most is optimism: especially optimism in the face of reverses and apparent defeat. Optimism is true moral courage."

Optimism is the faith that one can triumph over adversity, and that the breaking is a gift by which we grow and evolve.

"[We] are not made from easy victories but based on great defeats."

Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.

Why INSPIRE?

We recorded Continuous Glucose measures, Heart rate, HRV, Activity, Sleep, Emotions, Symptoms using consumer biosensors throughout.

IN - Interdisciplinary

SP - South Pole

I - Innovation &

R - Research

E - Expedition(s)

Interdisciplinary teams: Two notable Antarctic research expeditions SPEAR-17 (all men 5 in 2019) and ICE MAIDENS-19 (all women, 6 in 2019) looked at military personnel skiing from Coast-to-Pole over 50-60 days. In these hyper endurance settings we saw the all-female group outperform men in terms of success, speed and preservation of weight and muscle mass. But the research was not head-to-head. The lead for Ice Maidens, Dr Major Natalie Taylor teamed up with frostbite god and famous vascular surgeon Professor Chris Imray to study this directly in the 2022 study, INSPIRE-22. We teamed up to fund and expand the expedition and research, where I was given the privilege of leading the INSPIRE Last Degree team.

INSPIRE was not just military but an interdisciplinary mix of soldiers, doctors, scientists, and everyday civilians (a group of investors, entrepreneurs and founders, so we had some not-so-everyday Tony Starkiness genes in the civi' crew). INSPIRE-22 was the first head to head hyper-endurance study into what physiology and which genes might be responsible for those with female-physiology having advantages in such environments. This would have implications for training and survival in settings including intensive care, long term recovery from debilitating illness, how to preserve muscle mass as we age as well as for military performance. In parallel with the 50 day Coast to Pole team, we undertook a 10 day Last Degree expedition measuring similar things, as volunteer data donators, unacclimatised, dropped off at 89 South, 3000m equivalent altitude vs the 50 day group who had a month of acclimatisation at that point to compare. 19 participants in all!

A nice round number - spinning around at the very axis of the Earth

The South Pole: This was our wildly aspirational end point. Despite, among the sponsors and participants personally acquiring a large amounts of forest and marsh land, we dumped a massive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere from the flights for all of us. Not cool. But when asked why did we not do this in Iceland or Norway or a fridge in Norwich University, the answer always comes back to the same thing: People need wildly aspirational goals, missions, end points and so on, for the headlines, for the personal gratification, for all sorts of motivational reasons and without it you just can't raise the profile nor the funding. The impact on the planet remains a point of concern for us and all future Antarctic research expeditions despite the benefits and learnings for at least on of the species on the planet.

The extraordinary blue ice runway at Union Glacier. Lots of CO2 to get there.

Scientific Research: If you're gonna do something extraordinary, study it. Even if it goes belly up, share the data and learnings. Many papers have been published in peer reviewed journals already since the 2017 and 2019 expeditions and our goal for INSPIRE is, again, to publish our findings. Logistics of getting samples back from Antarctica and Chile and trawling through the sheer mass of data from 17 million strides worth of data measuring every heart beat, our HRV, breaths, activity, emotions and calories is a mammoth undertaking. 2024 is likely to see the first conference presentations and possible publications but already we have already measured the that female physiology appears to be advantageous in surviving and thriving in hyper-endurance challenges. Some will say everyone knew that already. We aim to under uncover the physiology, and maybe some of the psychology, of that for the first time.

The Empatica research grade (but still consumer purchasable) biosensor and the Oura Ring.

Health Tech Innovation: We also, for the first time, took consumer wearables into such environments to collect data on sleep, recovery, stress, temperature and usability of such devices in sub-optimal conditions. Like when you might be cold, tired, hungry, have no idea what time zone you're in, scared or stressed. And can't feel your fingers any more. We pushed the devices to their very limit too.

Human Factors on Expeditions: Psychologically, we measured mental state, emotion, stress, bodily pain and the cumulative effect of exhaustion and injuries, against self care, team work and communication to determine the human factors for not just surviving, but thriving in extreme challenges. Expeditions are a wonderful way of getting people to willingly volunteer to do quite challenging things it turns out.

Some of the lessons and learnings

The science we'll publish later. Here are a few first thoughts personally:-

It was quite cold: Equip and train well. And always dress well.

-40 C is also -40 Fahrenheit. This is officially the starting point of COLD. -40 Makes your 3 degree ice bath seem like a sauna. -40 is when you start saying "I don't want to be here any more." There is no warm pub and balmy fireplace round the corner. Temperatures ranged from -30 to -50 on our trip but your fingers are always dangerously cold, and when they're not, that's probably a bad sign because you can't feel them. And that is not good. Any over exposure for a few seconds can cause cold injury - fingers, face, toes are most vulnerable. Good equipment is critical to safety and success.

The clock is always ticking, just as is it is in everything else in life from business to ageing. Knowing what tools you'll need to protect you is vital to buy you time. Time is what we need. Ask deeply experienced folk who have done this before, not fancy theorists. Ask those who've got the T-Shirt. The longer it takes for something to go wrong the better you can manage it.

Learn how to use your equipment and tools in advance: Play, try stuff out, learn how things work, do training trips days, role play. And most of all if you are relying on others, get using your kit with your team as much and as often as you can. Same goes for tools and technology to buy you time in your company, or start-up or managing your home life. It buys you time.

Dressing well is something I never quite realised the full importance of. My Wolverine Ruff from North Dakota also looked cool while keeping me remarkably cosy at -40.

The right tools and training with your kit is the difference between between potential to thrive and and total failure.

It was lonely: Learn to be comfortable with just yourself.

Even with people around you it could be very lonely at times. When you were having an unpredictable slump during one of the legs or a whole day of not feeling the Force, you would not have the breath to chat. All you wanted is for the day to end. You could listen to podcasts or audio-books or motivational music. But it's still hard at those times. You feel alone. I chose zero-audio for the whole expedition. I wanted to hear my own thoughts and learn, like meditators, to become an observer of my own subconscious noodling and learn to quiet it. I made progress but in that space you crave for conversation and to digest your self-unravellings and realisations with others. There were times I did not much care the company or conversations, though I was talking to myself, that over the course of the expedition I learned what were the signs of negative loops forming in thoughts and to just be more comfortable with my Self. Work in progress.

It was long: Stop rushing. Stretch out each moment.

Each day of polar travel has precise structure. Up at 7, finish everything by 8, eat, hydrate, excrete (and freeze pack that all in sled) and decamp by 9. Start at 9 on the dot. 50 mins on, 10 mins recovery, a couple of hundred semi-frozen calories and personal admin, repeat for 8-9 hours. Then camp, eat, sleep. Repeat.

We spend a lot of life wanting the next good thing come fast. We look for the next dopamine hit. We sit in long meetings wanting them to end. We can't wait for the weekend. What I pondered on the ice was how quickly the last 48 years of my life had sped by and how spookily it was accelerating. Every hour of pushing on at first I just prayed for the time to fly, for us to get to the break. At every break I wondered how on earth we could manage another 7 or 8 legs. I so hoped to time travel to the 5pm when it would end. But I changed my mind.

I began to cherish each step, each breath, each minute. I tried to stretch out time. To fill in hours with memories. I practiced the piano in my head. I thought about stuff I had left gathering dust in my hippocampus. I 'spoke' to loved ones, here and past. Each day seemed felt like some of the longest days of my life, at least of late. But in the best way. Those days on the ice were each like a week.

It was weird - you can't predict the future. Be brave but not cocky.

The Antarctic plateau is the coldest, dryest, highest desert on Earth. It’s an endless, endless white disc of 5km thick ice. 2km below sea level. Not melted for 100 million years. There is just nothing else. Absolutely nothing that moves, makes sound, makes smells but for two things, the team, and the god-like orb of light, the Sun, that circles low on the horizon. There is no night and day. Only your shadow moves around you as a sign of anything changing. No matter how hard you work, in our case two marathons of calorie burn a day, it's always the same. It was weird. But actually real life is just as weird.

You'd have thought that in this never changing landscape, with all the planning, and simply needing to travel in a straight line, that life would be predictable. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was no way of telling if you'd feel great that day or from one moment to the next. Would that blister turn into an expedition-ending lesion? Why did my hand suddenly become exquisitely painful from cold? Why can I suddenly not see with my googles misting up? Why are we suddenly in a giant cryrogenic ping-pong ball where you can't see up from down? Anything can happen even in the most predictable and consistent environments. Life and business are the same.

You can't go into the wild without believing you can get to your goal. An irrational amount of self-belief is essential. Confidence is indeed an essential ingredient to success but go forth knowing you'll always face the unexpected, you'll have to beat the temptation to stop, tapping into your endurance, and you'll have to overcome the anxiety to get up again when down. That's resilience.

If you're over-confident the stress of failure will send you into shock or the last lesson of failure will not be learned. Both can be fatal.

It was humbling: Life is short however long it is. Spend it well.

Personally it was a humbling fulfilment of a 40 year ambition after my ten year old self heard the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 'Endurance'. For our team it was the successful completion nearly 2 years of fundraising, training, research design, civilian-military-academic-corporate-charity inter-collaboration rarely seen.

When standing at the pole and seeing your shadow cast long out onto the ice by the low set sun circling around you, and seeing your shadow move over the ripples as time passes, you suddenly realise that its not the sun that's turning. It's you that's rotating.

On that very spot, you and only you are the extension of the axis of earth. That made me feel very small on the cosmic scale of things. And fleetingly transient.

Some moments are ones you'll unlikely forget and that define your life. That was one of them. There is a tradeoff between living as long as possible making sure you keep safe and warm and medically checked and close to hospitals and all those good healthcare essentials, versus living your life to the very fullest while you have the energy and mobility to do so.

Even more than before I now prioritise spending my time well while buying just enough of it. Not saving it all for an eternity of lifelessness.

It was up to me but down to us: Team & friendship rule above all.

Our nineteen polar explorers in INSPIRE-22 + INSPIRE Last Degree (AKA Team Extreme) became the biggest expedition to ski to the South Pole in Antarctic history (so I’m informed). Big teams are not best for guaranteeing 100% success, yet the team building and team cohesion for those less familiar with one another was remarkable. The coast to pole team spent a lot more time training and having meet ups and conf-calls before they set off. Our Last Degree team had less time together. I was lucky in who I thought would be a good fit. Really, there was not a lot of deep psychological profiling going on. This is perhaps 'founders intuition' that you just know who's likely to be the right fit for the project and company. It turned out to work quite magically.

We had a diverse set of individuals from different cultures, ages and places on earth. They are all somehow connected to the world of startup either as founders or founding team or investors. These minds seems to thrive better in highly uncertain environments. That was fortunate. Though incredibly successful people often seek detail and control and that were lacking, understandably to an extent, with the nature of such expeditions.

What we found to be the strongest factor to thriving and feeling great, gleaned in our daily and end of expedition surveys, was talking to one another en route. It was too hard at times and lots of us just could not find the breath to converse always, expending two marathon's worth of energy a day dragging a 70kg sled uphill at 3000m equivalent altitude for 8-9 hours at -30 to -50. And yet, somehow, as soon as we could find the pace and headspace to talk to whoever was beside you everything seemed to become so much easier. The legs and the days seemed to wizz past than drag on. It was almost miraculous. Feeling supported and sharing load (physical too) was critical to the 100% success of the expedition.

Back home both in our new WellFounded venture and our longstanding practice in health-span and human performance medicine, we have taken to far more care as to who we hire with more talking time, while zone 2 walking too, and team-building time together. It is reaping benefits with tangibly better team cohesion, patient satisfaction, taking the initiative and creative thinking through every level in the company.

Watch Fabrice Grinda's video till the end - it sums up brilliantly a lot of what we took home from INSPIRE

There's much more...

... but it will have to wait. INSPIRE was the fulfilment of a dream and a purposeful, passion project the learnings from which got me through one of the toughest years in my 25 year professional life facing extremes of the human condition that most would deem unjust, but I can now count as lessons and fuel for new-found resilience.

I have a long list of those to whom I will forever be grateful: The eight great, and generous folk and their companies who funded this project. They were also were passionate, enduring, resilient, triumphant and inspiring fellow companions on the ice: Taavet Hinrikus (of Plural Platform, formerly of Skype and Wise, with the driest sense of humour on all 7 continents and who took the best drone footage of that far south in history, or perhaps he was the first), Kevin Ryan (of AlleyCorp and formerly MongoDB, Double Click, who always brimmed with energy and intriguing insights and questions to keep us thinking differently), Ivan Cenci (of Empatica who with the brilliant Matteo Lai donated their time and devices for clinical grade physiological monitoring and was the exemplar of organisation, willingness to share load and steadfastness), Jena Daniels (thanks to Michelle Longmire of Medable that are making the world a better place for clinical research, who was our rock getting us to reflect on ourselves and stay smiling and sane), Arnis Ozols (of OzCo and Httpool, who defines calling it as it is which gave spurned a renewed sense of bravery in being true to oneself and speaking ones mind), James Berdigans (of Printify, who was enduring throughout, always up front, inspiring us to keep going even if we were not feeling so well and who created the most magnificent printed memories of us), and Fabrice Grinda (of FJLabs, who is a must have on such trips for his grit and tenacity and encyclopaedia of knowledge and opinions).

My deepest gratitude also to Dr Natalie Taylor, Prof Chris Imray, for roping me in and all the hard analysis work they're now leading on; to the other team members on the Last Degree, Nico Ryan, my co-lead and co-conspirator on all things mountainous or extreme on skis, Dr Ryan Jackson; Darius and Lauren and team for the incredible work they did on the Vitality voice recording app for our emotional response research; all the senior officials at the UK MOD for supporting us, and of course all the other INSPIRE-22 Coast to Pole participants, on the PR side the logistics teams, medics, chefs, pilots, academics, guides and everyone else who made this possible and the opportunity to learn so much about being human and our incredible 7th continent, Antarctica.

Fire up your passions. Build and cherish your team. Plan, equip and train. Share load. Talk to one another. Know it will get very dark at times even in 24 hours sunlight. Be optimistic. Maintain your smile. Endure, and don't be afraid to fall. Resilience comes. You will bounce back and inspire yourself for the next challenge. And inspire others to do the same.

"Only when you're exhausted, at the very, very bottom, where there's nowhere left to go, is when every step you take is your North."

Be well.

Exhausted but INSPIRED