“My wife thinks I’ll die on Mount Everest but I'm going anyway”

No, this is not my quote, but from Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the world famous adventurer whose book “Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know” is inspiring me for a new challenge once the Seven and Seven goal (Seven Continents Marathons and Seven Summits Mountains) are accomplished.

As I write this, he is going for Camp Three on Everest and is attempting his first ascent.  He is world famous for the following:

Since the 1960s Fiennes has been an adventurer. He led expeditions up the White Nile on a hovercraft in 1969 and on Norway’s Jostedalsbreen Glacier in 1970. Perhaps his most famous trek was the Transglobe Expedition he undertook from 1979 until 1982. Fiennes, Oliver Shepard and Charles Burton journeyed around the world on its polar axis using surface transport only, covering 52,000 miles and becoming the first people to have visited both poles by land. [1]

In 1992 Fiennes led an expedition that discovered the lost city of Ubar in Oman. The following year he joined nutrition specialist Mike Stroud in an attempt to become the first to cross Antarctica unaided. Having crossed the continent in 90 days, they were forced to call for a pick-up on the Ross Ice Shelf, frostbitten and starving, on day 95.

In 2000, he attempted to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole. The expedition failed when his sleds fell through weak ice and Fiennes was forced to pull them out by hand. He sustained severe frostbite to the tips of all the fingers on his left hand, forcing him to abandon the attempt. On returning home, his surgeon insisted the necrotic fingertips be retained for several months (to allow regrowth of the remaining healthy tissue) before amputation. Impatient at the pain the dying fingertips caused, Fiennes removed them himself (in his garden shed) with a fretsaw.^[1]

Despite suffering from a heart attack and undergoing a double heart bypass operation just four months before, Fiennes joined Stroud again in 2003 to carry out the extraordinary feat of completing seven marathons in seven days on seven continents in the Land Rover 7×7x7 Challenge for the British Heart Foundation. Their route:

26th October – Race 1: Patagonia, South America

27th October – Race 2: Falkland Islands, “Antarctica“

28th October – Race 3: Sydney, Australia

29th October – Race 4: Singapore, Asia

30th October – Race 5: London, Europe

31st October – Race 6: Cairo, Africa

1st November – Race 7: New York, North America

Originally Fiennes had planned to run the first marathon on King George Island, Antarctica. The second marathon would then have taken place in Santiago, Chile. However, bad weather and aeroplane engine trouble caused him to change his plans, running the South American segment in southern Patagonia first and then hopping to the Falklands as a substitute for the Antarctic leg.

Speaking after the event, Fiennes said the Singapore marathon had been by far the most difficult because of high humidity and pollution. He also said his cardiac surgeon had approved the marathons, providing his heart-rate did not exceed a 130 beats per minute; Fiennes later confessed to having forgotten to pack his heart-rate monitor, and as such does not know how fast his heart was beating.

NOTE: That he technically did not do a Marathon on Antarctica, but instead the Falkland Islands …

He’s still my hero and I wish him good luck and godspeed on his Summit Attempt!  Go Ran!!