Todd Carmichael just claimed the world speed record for transit across Antarctica to the South Pole, alone and unassisted—and he’s ready for more

On Nov. 12, Todd Carmichael set out to do something no American had ever done before: to travel 700 miles, alone and unassisted, from Hercules Inlet—a drop point at the northern tip of Antarctica—to the South Pole. Thirty-nine days later, the Gladwyne resident and co-owner of La Colombe not only reached his destination, but achieved a world speed record for the trek. Along the way, almost every piece of equipment failed him: his ski bindings snapped, his tent ripped nearly in half, his satellite phones and GPS broke down, the tape he used to protect his face came loose exposing his skin to frostbite, and his last few days’ food supply was spoiled by a leaking fuel bottle. Yet Carmichael succeeded against all odds, along the way raising $120,000 for his pet cause, Borneo’s endangered orangutans. He also filmed around 50 hours of video footage for a forthcoming documentary with Nancy Glass Productions and Mark Burnett and gathered plenty of fodder for a forthcoming autobiography he’ll co-author with Glass. And Carmichael, a lifelong adventurer, isn’t stopping there. He and his wife, songstress Lauren Hart, are in the process of adopting a six-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Next, he’ll travel to Namibia to attempt the longest unsupported dune trek of all time. He took a break to speak with MAINLINE about Antarctica, the environment and his compulsion to go to extremes.

Why take on such extreme challenges?
They’re only extreme because other people don’t do them. I don’t do them because they’re extreme. I just feel I have to. It’s something that was born inside me; and I just listened to it. Even now, my toes are black, I’m way underweight, I’m just weak and destroyed and my face is burned. But I miss Antarctica; I miss being out there. I just really enjoy having one big goal, and giving my entire self to it—for 40 straight days it’s all I think about. That’s something you can’t do in normal life; it’s something that only happens in expeditions. The rudimentary challenge of moving from A to B is one that just captures me.

And why this particular expedition?
This expedition is something I’ve been working on for a number of years. Last year I attempted a team expedition. But the assent out of Hercules Inlet is very difficult, and on last year’s expedition by the time we got out of Hercules Inlet my team had fallen apart and I was the last guy on the ice. I went forward anyway, and I traveled 27 days solo across a big part of Antarctica. However, you pick a year, you don’t get to pick the weather. And last year we saw one of the biggest blizzards in the history of Antarctica, and it destroyed all the expeditions on the ice, including my own. So I came back, gained all the weight back, and prepared for this expedition and my attempt to break the world record.

What was most difficult about this trek?
The expedition started out OK, and then eight miles into the 700-mile trek I broke my skis. The skis are probably the most important piece of equipment you have, because Antarctica is just littered with covered crevasses and areas that have extremely soft snow. So it’s really not possible—or so they thought—to do it on foot. But I was faced with either abandoning the expedition for another year or saying, “Screw it—I’ll go without the skis.” I took the latter. Typically on skis you move about 10 hours a day. Moving without skis is very frustrating because you feel like you’re walking in knee-deep water all the time. And realizing that I had this huge disadvantage, where I was just crashing through the snow, I moved my workday out to 16 hours a day and was able to break the world record. I was only able to sleep three hours a night, and for the last three days I didn’t sleep at all. On top of that, moving 16 hours means that you need to eat way more food, so I looked at it and realized I would have to break the world record or I wouldn’t make it at all—I would run out of food.

What other challenges did you face?
Toward the end, my telephone systems went down, including my GPS and my tracker, and I lost contact with the rest of the world. All these systems had basically just given up the ghost because of the temperatures. So the world had lost me, I’d gone off the grid for the last few days. Which, for me, was only unsettling because I just thought how my wife was going to worry. But I told her before the last phone went down, “Just look for me at the Pole on Dec. 21. Don’t worry. I’ll make it.” That and the last 48 hours I had run out of food. So when I came into the Pole, no one knew where I was. I came in just delirious, just upside down. Without the GPS I had to do dead reckoning, and I could have easily missed the Pole. That’s a pretty maddening thing when you think about it. But when you want to break a world record you have to adjust. I knew this wasn’t the best year for me, but I simply needed to come home with a world record.

Sounds terrifying. Were there any moments when you were really afraid?
When my skis were no longer usable, I put them in the sled and moved forward. As I was just coming out of Hercules Inlet, there’s a huge number of crevasses, called bridged crevasses because they’re covered. You can see where they are, but typically when you cross over them on skis, your body weight is distributed over a greater area so you don’t crash through. Well, when I was on foot I fell into three of them and I was literally hanging from my sled. I looked down and I could see a half-mile drop that would just kill you if you fell. And by the third one, I was very nervous: I thought the next one was going to be the one that would take me. But it didn’t.

What sparked this interest for you?
I was a long distance runner in high school and college, and I found that the longer the distance, the better I would do. Also, I grew up in Spokane, Wash., and I went to college in Seattle, so I did a lot of driving between those two places, across a 300-mile stretch of unspoiled nature. And I became fascinated with that: the idea of how far I could make it on my own there. At 18 I set out across the desert, and now at 45 I’ve done some pretty exotic places. I like to go to places where there are no roads, no cables, no power lines, no Wawas—it’s like the ultimate racetrack.

What went into preparations for this expedition?
There are three legs to preparing for an expedition. First, you have to have the endurance of an ultra-marathoner. I was doing 25- or 30-mile runs, or I’d cycle 150 miles. And then, since you have a 250-pound sled and you’re going uphill, you really have to get used to pulling something. So I got a pair of roller skis made for me, and I took two tractor tires and filled them with concrete and pulled them up and down Conshohocken State Road and all over Gladwyne for eight or nine hours a day on weekends—they probably want me certified by now. The second leg is you have to be very strong because you’re pulling this big sled over steep ice features, so I lifted a lot of weights. And finally you need fat reserves, so I simply just ate and ate for a year. I lost 40 to 45 pounds during the expedition, so I had to start with my body weight as high as I could get it. So at 3 a.m., the alarm went off, and I went down to the kitchen and had another dinner. And every night I’d eat two pints of ice cream—my favorite is Dulce de Leche from Häagen Dazs—and just copious amounts of food. It’s shocking for anyone else around you when you say, “I’m trying to get as fat as I possibly can.” And trying to get fat and build endurance at the same time, you really have to overeat, just disgusting amounts.

How do you eat while you’re actually on an expedition like this?
I was burning 10,000 calories a day—because I was working so hard and because it’s very cold and your body reacts by increasing your metabolism—so I was eating a little over 7,500 calories. I had three freeze-dried meals a day. But the bulk of my calories were 3½ pounds of fatty sausage, chocolate or meat patties and then a couple sticks of butter every day.

No La Colombe coffee?
Each expedition I say I’m going to bring La Colombe coffee and then each time I bend, because tea weighs so much less than coffee. So I bring tea from our factory and I just dream about coffee. But I’m saying it again—when I go across the Namibian desert this year, I’m definitely bringing coffee. I don’t care how much it weighs.

How does your wife feel about all this?
She’s been around me a while. Obviously it’s a terrible inconvenience, but she says, “Well, I know who you are.” Lauren and I met through trekking. She was interviewing me for the NBC10 morning show. And when we met, I was very clear: Antarctica won’t go away until I complete it, and expeditions are who I am. I’ve been in precarious situations before. There are explorers who have been in the same situation I was, with broken skis, and they stopped. Or there were food problems, and they stopped. Well, there’s a lot more in your tank than you might realize, and she knows that.

You’ve done a lot of global warming advocacy. Was this trip to raise awareness?
I’m not doing these treks in order to teach people about global warming; I think they already know about it. But I’m starting to see the effects of it. When I go to areas in Mongolia where there used to be permafrost, now there’s mud. The environment is changing and I’m seeing it in these marginal places on earth. Antarctica, particularly the north, is being destroyed. So I just feel compelled to  add my voice to other voices making a difference.

Tell us about your next expedition.
With all of the desert expeditions that have occurred to date, the furthest a single man has been able to go is a little less than 400 miles. I would like to see if I can cross the entire length of the Namibian desert—552 miles—and set a new distance record for how far a man can go in a hot environment without help from the outside world. I’m trying to go 22 percent farther than any human has ever done in the history of mankind, in probably the most difficult environment on the planet outside of Antarctica. The area I’m traveling through is known for its population of hyenas, which love to eat humans, and the average temperature is 135 degrees. In order to do this I’m going to have to make a cart that can carry all of my supplies for 32 days, plus all the water, so I’m guessing that’s around 450 pounds. It will be exactly 10 days longer than anyone has been able to maintain life in a desert environment unsupported.

And after that?
I want to do this until I can’t walk anymore. Each of the deserts needs to be returned to, there’s still the North Pole I’m considering very heavily. I feel like some way eventually I’ll be back to Antarctica. So everything is always on the table.