One of the fun parts of celebrating Christmas and Santa today is by following Santa’s trip around the world on Christmas Eve via Norad (you can check it out on Facebook, Twitter or via the website). But I recently discovered someone even cooler whose adventures are not only even more amazing but very real that you and the SheHeroes in your life might want to follow as well.
Felicity Aston is about three weeks and one-third of the journey of more than 1,000 miles into becoming the first woman to cross Antarctica alone. This week she expects to reach the South Pole this week and despite facing challenge after challenge she keeps moving forward.
"I felt tired today but I could hear my Mum's voice encouraging me, 'Just keep moving. Keep moving forward’” she posted on Twitter last week.
Challenges have included one ski slightly out of alignment causing ankle pain, lighters that are only working intermittedly, icicles regularly forming on her ski mask from her breath thanks to the minus 25 Fahrenheit (minus 30 Celsius) and below temperatures.
"I've done too many polar journeys to know that you can be scuppered by a blister, a bad fall, fuel leaking into your food, weather," she said in an interview last month before starting the expedition.” Every trip teaches you something: how tough you are, what your personal limits are, how to wrap up a blister better, how not to get sick. Particularly on the psychological side, each journey I've had has taught me something about how to feel better about a situation, how to react, how to behave."
Aston wrote a book about a previous expedition where she led a group of women to the South Pole in 2009. On that trip one team member suffered frostbite while others coped with injuries. Her book about that adventure is "Call of the White: Taking the World to the South Pole."
Sit down with your SheHero and follow Felicity on Twitter and then check out her website to follow along her journey on the map.
Hurray for SheHeroes braving the South Pole and inspiring all of us to keep moving forward!
