Lewis Pugh swims the North Pole

151,438 views ・ 2009-09-09

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00:18
Today I want to talk to you about
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swimming across the North Pole,
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across the most northern place in the whole world.
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And perhaps the best place to start is with my late father.
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He was a great storyteller.
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He could tell a story about an event,
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and so you felt you were absolutely there at the moment.
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And one of the stories he told me so often when I was a young boy
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was of the first British atomic bomb test.
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He had been there and watched it go off.
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And he said that the explosion was so loud
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and the light was so intense,
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that he actually had to put his hands in front of his face to protect his eyes.
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And he said that he could actually see an x-ray
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of his fingers,
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because the light was so bright.
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And I know that watching that atomic bomb going off
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had a very, very big impact on my late father.
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Every holiday I had as a young boy
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was in a national park.
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What he was trying to do with me was to inspire me
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to protect the world,
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and show me just how fragile the world is.
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He also told me about the great explorers.
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He loved history. He would tell me about Captain Scott
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walking all the way to the South Pole
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and Sir Edmund Hillary climbing up Mount Everest.
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And so ever since I think I was just six years old,
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I dreamed of going to the polar regions.
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I really, really wanted to go to the Arctic.
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There was something about that place
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which drew me to it.
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And, well, sometimes it takes a long time
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for a dream to come true.
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But seven years ago, I went to the Arctic
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for the first time.
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And it was so beautiful that I've been back there
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ever since, for the last seven years.
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I love the place.
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But I have seen that place change
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beyond all description,
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just in that short period of time.
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I have seen polar bears walking across very, very thin ice
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in search of food.
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I have swum in front of glaciers
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which have retreated so much.
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And I have also, every year,
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seen less and less sea ice.
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And I wanted the world to know what was happening up there.
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In the two years before my swim,
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23 percent of the arctic sea ice cover
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just melted away.
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And I wanted to really shake the lapels of world leaders
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to get them to understand what is happening.
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So I decided to do this symbolic swim
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at the top of the world, in a place which should be frozen over,
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but which now is rapidly unfreezing.
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And the message was very clear:
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Climate change is for real,
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and we need to do something about it.
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And we need to do something about it right now.
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Well, swimming across the North Pole,
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it's not an ordinary thing to do.
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I mean, just to put it in perspective,
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27 degrees is the temperature of a normal indoor swimming pool.
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This morning, the temperature of the English Channel was 18 degrees.
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The passengers who fell off the Titanic
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fell into water of just five degrees centigrade.
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Fresh water freezes at zero.
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And the water at the North Pole is minus 1.7.
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It's fucking freezing.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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I'm sorry, but there is no other way to describe it.
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(Laughter)
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And so I had to assemble an incredible team around me
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to help me with this task.
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I assembled this team of 29 people from 10 nations.
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Some people think that swimming is a very solo sport,
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you just dive into the sea and off you go.
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It couldn't be further from the truth for me.
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And I then went and did a huge amount of training,
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swimming in icy water, backwards and forwards.
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But the most important thing was to train my mind
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to prepare myself for what was going to happen.
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And I had to visualize the swim.
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I had to see it from the beginning all the way to the end.
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I had to taste the salt water in my mouth.
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I had to see my coach screaming for me,
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"Come on Lewis! Come on! Go! Go! Go! Don't slow down!"
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And so I literally swam across the North Pole
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hundreds and hundreds of times in my mind.
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And then, after a year of training, I felt ready.
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I felt confident that I could actually
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do this swim.
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So myself and the five members of the team,
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we hitched a ride on an icebreaker
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which was going to the North Pole.
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And on day four, we decided to just do a quick
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five minute test swim.
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I had never swum in water of minus 1.7 degrees before,
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because it's just impossible to train
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in those types of conditions.
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So we stopped the ship, as you do.
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We all got down onto the ice,
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and I then got into my swimming costume
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and I dived into the sea.
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I have never in my life felt anything
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like that moment.
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I could barely breathe. I was gasping for air.
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I was hyperventilating so much,
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and within seconds my hands were numb.
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And it was -- the paradox is
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that you're in freezing cold water,
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but actually you're on fire.
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I swam as hard as I could for five minutes.
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I remember just trying to get out of the water.
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I climbed out of the ice.
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And I remember taking the goggles off my face
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and looking down at my hands in sheer shock,
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because my fingers
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had swollen so much that they were like sausages.
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And they were swollen so much, I couldn't even close them.
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What had happened is that we are made partially of water,
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and when water freezes it expands.
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And so what had actually happened is
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that the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded.
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And they had burst. And I was in so much agony.
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I immediately got rushed onto the ship and into a hot shower.
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And I remember standing underneath the hot shower
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and trying to defrost my fingers.
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And I thought, in two days' time, I was going to do this swim across the North Pole.
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I was going to try and do a 20-minute swim,
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for one kilometer across the North Pole.
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And this dream which I had had ever since I was a young boy
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with my father, was just going out the window.
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There is no possibility that this was going to happen.
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And I remember then getting out of the shower
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and realizing I couldn't even feel my hands.
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And for a swimmer, you need to feel your hands
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because you need to be able to grab the water
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and pull it through with you.
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The next morning, I woke up
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and I was in such a state of depression,
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and all I could think about was Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
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For those of you who don't know him, he's the great British explorer.
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A number of years ago, he tried to ski all the way to the North Pole.
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He accidentally fell through the ice into the sea.
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And after just three minutes in that water,
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he was able
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to get himself out.
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And his hands were so badly frostbitten
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that he had to return to England.
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He went to a local hospital and there they said,
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"Ran, there is no possibility
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of us being able to save these fingers.
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We are going to actually have to take them off."
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And Ran decided to go into his tool shed
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and take out a saw
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and do it himself.
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And all I could think of was, if that happened to Ran after three minutes,
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and I can't feel my hands after five minutes,
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what on earth is going to happen if I try 20 minutes?
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At the very best, I'm going to end up losing some fingers.
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And at worst, I didn't even want to think about it.
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We carried on sailing through the ice packs towards the North Pole.
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And my close friend David, he saw the way I was thinking,
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and he came up to me and he said, "Lewis,
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I've known you since you were 18 years old.
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I've known you, and I know, Lewis,
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deep down, right deep down here,
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that you are going to make this swim.
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I so believe in you Lewis. I've seen the way you've been training.
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And I realize the reason why you're going to do this.
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This is such an important swim.
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We stand at a very, very important moment in this history,
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and you're going to make a symbolic swim here
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to try to shake the lapels of world leaders.
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Lewis, have the courage to go in there,
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because we are going to look after you every moment of it."
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And I just, I got so much confidence from him saying that,
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because he knew me so well.
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So we carried on sailing and we arrived at the North Pole.
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And we stopped the ship,
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and it was just as the scientists had predicted.
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There were open patches of sea everywhere.
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And I went down into my cabin
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and I put on my swimming costume.
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And then the doctor strapped on a chest monitor,
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which measures my core body temperature
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and my heart rate.
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And then we walked out onto the ice.
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And I remember looking into the ice,
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and there were big chunks of white ice in there,
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and the water was completely black.
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I had never seen black water before.
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And it is 4,200 meters deep.
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And I said to myself, "Lewis, don't look left, don't look right.
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Just scuttle forward and go for it."
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And so I now want to show you a short video
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of what happened there on the ice.
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Narrator (Video): We're just sailing out of harbor now, and it's at this stage
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when one can have a bit of a wobble mentally.
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Everything just looks so gray around here,
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and looks so cold.
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We've just seen our first polar bears.
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It was absolutely magical.
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A mother and a cub, such a beautiful sight.
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And to think that in 30, 40 years
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they could become extinct.
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It's a very frightening, very, very frightening thought.
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We're finally at the North Pole. This is
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months and months and months of dreaming to get here,
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years of training and planning and preparation.
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Ooh. In a couple of hours' time I'm going to get in here and do my swim.
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It's all a little bit frightening,
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and emotional.
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Amundson, you ready? Amudson: Ready.
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Lewis Pugh: Ten seconds to swim. Ten seconds to swim.
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Take the goggles off. Take the goggles off!
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Man: Take the shoes. Take the shoes.
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Well done lad! You did it! You did it Lewis!
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You did it! You did it man!
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LP: How on earth did we do that?
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Man: Against the current! You did it against the current!
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(Applause)
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LP: Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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Thank you so much.
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Audience: Encore!
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(Laughter)
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LP: I'd just like to end off by just saying this:
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It took me four months again to feel my hands.
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But was it worth it? Yes, absolutely it was.
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There are very, very few people who don't know now
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about what is happening in the Arctic.
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And people ask me, "Lewis, what can we do about climate change?"
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And I say to them,
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I think we need to do three things.
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The first thing we need to do is we need to break this problem down
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into manageable chunks.
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You saw during that video all those flags.
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Those flags represented the countries
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from which my team came from.
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And equally, when it comes to climate change,
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every single country is going to have to make cuts.
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Britain, America, Japan,
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South Africa, the Congo.
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All of us together, we're all on the same ship together.
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The second thing we need to do is
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we need to just look back
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at how far we have come
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in such a short period of time.
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I remember, just a few years ago, speaking about climate change,
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and people heckling me in the back
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and saying it doesn't even exist.
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I've just come back from giving a series of speeches
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in some of the poorest townships in South Africa
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to young children as young as 10 years old.
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Four or five children sitting behind a desk,
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and even in those poorest conditions,
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they all have a very, very good grasp
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of climate change.
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We need to believe in ourselves.
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Now is the time to believe.
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We've come a long way. We're doing good.
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But the most important thing we must do
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is, I think, we must all walk to the end of our lives
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and turn around, and ask ourselves a most fundamental question.
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And that is, "What type of world do we want to live in,
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and what decision are we going to make today
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to ensure that we all live
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in a sustainable world?"
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Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very, very much.
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(Applause)
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