In 2015, when he was 55-years-old, Henry Worsley set off to try and complete what his hero, Ernest Shackleton had failed to do a century earlier: to trek on foot from one side of Antartica to the other. The journey was more than 1,000 miles long and would cross what most consider the most brutal environment in the world. Shackleton had been a part of a large expedition. But Worsley was completely alone and unsupported: he would have no food drops, he had to haul all his provisions on a sled, he had no dogs to assist him. Nobody had ever tried this feat before. His sled weighed 325 pounds at the outset and was attached to his waist. He had to drag it across the ice as he wore cross country skies and pushed forward with poles in each hand. Sometimes, when it got too steep, he had to take the skis off and trudge by foot. Worsley, a retired British Army officer who had served in the Special Air Service, a renowned commando unit, was a boxer, sculptor, photographer, horticulturalist, historian and was a leading authority on Shackleton. Throughout his journey, he mentally painted pictures of the landscape for hours on end, and he thought about his wife Joanna, his 21-year-old son, Max, and his 19-year-old daughter Alicia. They had written inspiring messages on his skis, such as, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
The journey was a physical one, but a mental one too. Though Worsley was raising money for the Endeavour Fund, a charity for wounded soldiers, the journey also appeared to the ultimate test of character.
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