Since returning from the ice, I’ve been chipping away at reading Cold by Ranulph Fiennes. Cold was loaned to me by one of the other traverse folks before we left, in exchange for one of my favourite Antarctic books: Shackleton’s Forgotten Men by Lennard Bickel. I’m finding Cold to be slow going indeed; so far the main value I’m getting out of the experience is a half-baked rumination that I’ll try to convey in this post.

While I haven’t finished Cold yet, the back nicely summarises what I have read so far. For example:

Sir Ranulph’s own extraordinary feats … attempt to cross the Antarctic during winter, where temperatures regularly plummet to minus 92°C.

At South Pole, which is about the coldest area that an attempt to “cross the Antarctic” could go, some years it never gets cold enough for people to join the 300 club: -73.3C (or -100F, the sauna can be coerced to 200F). The lowest recorded natural temperature on Earth ever recorded is -89.2C, at Vostok Station (just a few degrees colder than South Pole’s record of -82.8C). Aside from the obviously inflated claim, I’m left wondering why would someone want to read about such an extraordinary “attempt”, and why someone would embark on such a miserable sounding project. For over a half century, people have continuously kept stations ticking over at these coldest places on Earth, yet clearly Sir Ranulph has found an audience.

To draw a parallel, imagine Alice and Bob are typical middle aged people, who for whatever reason decide to attempt the Smalltown marathon. Months before the race, Alice buys a book on marathon training and starts a training regimen informed by it - regularly going for walks, then runs of increasing length and speed. Bob finds out about the race a day or two before, buys some fancy running shorts and shoes, spends the evening at the pub talking about how arduous the marathon will be - he completed one in his uni days over a much tougher course! On race day, Bob has terrible blisters halfway through, but perseveres and finishes wearing bloody shoes, his legs take weeks to recover. Alice finishes with a perfectly respectable pace and is back to life as usual within a couple days. Another competitor, Cynthia, is the first amputee finisher in the Smalltown marathon’s history. Which competitor had the more challenging run? Who was more noteworthy? Does it matter that Smalltown also hosts a well-attended 100-mile race?

There’s a broad category of choices that I think of as finding balance between directly starting work, and preparing for the work. A big part of my engineering career has been about this type of choice; in the software industry they usually manifest as decisions between getting a program out the door sooner, and having a program that is more performant in some way. Of course, the problem is as old as humanity; at one end of the spectrum we’ve got Sisyphus forever pushing a boulder up the hill, and at the other we’ve got the “architecture astronaut” who overprepares and never delivers a working program. Workable approaches exist in some range between the extremes, which approach is objectively best depends on the metric, and people have different ideas about which approach is the most elegant.

My tendency is to spend a little more time to achieve a reasonably performant outcome - I relate a lot more to the Alices of the world. But, like anyone, I enjoy a good story; if Alice, Bob, and Cynthia each published a book, I’d probably read Cynthia’s first due to the obvious complications she faced. The most interesting book to me would be about a runner of that 100-mile race, because it shows a higher level of human performance. On the surface, neither story seems particularly remarkable; marathons are well understood to be within what most people can do with preparation, even organised 100-mile races are common enough. Bob’s story is quite unappealing to me though; why do it in a way that guaranteed such discomfort, and that was less likely to succeed, just due to errors in preparation?

Of course, it’s possible to go too far either way, but I’d argue that any value in suffering like Bob is to him as an individual, and the value in planning like Alice generalises pretty well. Bob didn’t have to invest much and is reasonably likely to find an upper limit of his endurance on race day - maybe what he was looking for. On the other hand, Alice’s methodical approach is more of an exercise in turning the crank, and she will finish knowing only that her limit is somewhere beyond 26.2 miles. Most of us haven’t run a marathon before and couldn’t if we tried tomorrow, so Bob’s condition is more relatable and his perseverance is even admirable. So, Bob has easier story material than Alice, and I think this is key in understanding Sir Ranulph’s popularity.

One way people might fall in to Bob’s approach is to be spend too much time working as an expert in a particular area. Too much time thinking “in the box” makes a habit of just getting stuck directly in to the work, and not thinking much about how, when, or why to do that work. When a job comes up where an “out of the box” approach would be better, it takes extra effort to stop and consider behaving a bit more like Alice. Organisational cultures seem to struggle with this, often landing too near an extreme on the planning-acting scale. Move fast and break things like Bob, or have an updated SOP for every contingency like Dan, who’s still planning to run his first marathon.

Prepare reasonably then get on with it like Alice or Cynthia; a guide to how to do things well would be much longer than a catchy slogan.

Cold seems to describe an extreme Bob going on a series of rather contrived adventures, and being a memoir it unsurprisingly doesn’t provide much contemporary context around Bob’s often-myopic choices. Local guides are hired but almost completely ignored. The adventurers rely on skis but have virtually no idea how to use them effectively. People with no mountaineering nor glacier travel experience are not only travelling but leading through sketchy terrain. Bizarre transport choices are made and yield few surprises… The challenges encountered may be real, but they’re presented as if they are inherent to the place or mission, versus being mostly self-inflicted. A reader who didn’t know any better might think that it’s nearly impossible to live in the high latitudes, much less get useful things done, without needing to saw frostbitten dangly bits from one’s own body; polar work might seem a bit frivolous in general. So far, Cold is less martini and more hand hand sanitiser popsicle.