Jonny Huntingdon's incredible South Pole expedition

I had basically a blood vessel burst in my brain, so I was paralyzed completely from the neck down

on my left-hand side. Antarctica is the world's largest desert for the entire trip

I was the only living, breathing thing at all. There's no time zones down there. With no darkness

you have no circadian rhythm. I was spending a lot of time basically worrying about

is my belief just going to snap. I'm Johnny Huntington and I've just been awarded

three Guinness World Records titles for the first ever disabled person to scoot to the South Pole

solo and unsupported, and the fastest of the same, and also for the furthest

polar expedition done by disabled persons, solo and unsupported. I went to the Royal Military Academy

Sandhurst, which is the officer training college in May of 2013. I commissioned from there in April of 2014

and then literally eight weeks after that sort of sustained my injury

June 2014, I had basically a blood vessel burst in my brain

So I was paralysed completely from the neck down on my left-hand side. My entire army career was not quite four years

I spent two and a half of that, you know, in rehab

So really fortunate to have been afforded amazing rehab by the military, etc. in the army at the time

But sort of long story short with it is that I still have quite a lot of residual paralysis down one side

So my left foot is completely paralyzed. My ankle is more or less completely paralyzed

So, you know, the further up you get, the better it gets. You can see my hand works pretty well when I'm just like failing it around

But yeah, there is basically residual injury all the way down the left side of my body

As part of my recovery journey from my injury, I was introduced to a couple of military charities

one of which did Armed Forces Paris Snow Sports team, which taught me how to ski and helps injured service personnel to rehabilitate through snow sports

And the other of which is the Adaptive Grand Slam, which gets not only actually sort of disabled military personnel but it's a civilian charity as

well but they introduce basically disabled people to expeditionary stuff hill walking mountaineering

these kinds of things so I was really fortunate to be afforded these opportunities at a point in my life actually where from you know not only a physical point of view but from a mental health stance like really

needed them as well actually. That's basically where I like pretty much learned to ski, learned

to do a lot of this slightly peculiar stuff that I now call a job. When you do these you plan on

losing quite a lot of weight so I lost about 10 kilograms over the course of that sort of 46 day

period and so I had to basically put that on prior to going down so I spent quite a long time

about the best part of nine months really focused on sort of training and putting weight on and

doing all of these things. So you fly from the UK to Punta Arenas in Chile so you fly into Santiago

Transfer from there it's still about another four and a half hour flight from Santiago to Punta

because Punta's right on the southerly tip of Chile. So it's pretty much the closest city you'll get to Antarctica itself

I then spent about a week in Punta. So you're like sorting all your food out

freeze drying it, like backpacking everything, blah, blah, blah. So lots and lots of admin to do

because I got my kit shipped there about, I think it was about a month before I went down there

So sort of reunited with this like absolute sort of gang of kids

which you then have to like deal with um so you sort of spend a week basically stuck in an apartment

doing all the bits um and and then actually a really quick turnaround you fly from punta to

union glacier i was at union glacier for about i want to say 48 hours before the expat sort of

started and it was like right flying to your start point today so the journey itself took

just under 46 days you are completely alone and it's quite a disconcerting thing and even like

weeks into it because the thing is there's just nothing alive down there so the one that used to

get me was whenever you put your ski pole into the ice every now and again it'll squeak when it

rotates a bit and you immediately look up because you think it's like a seagull or something

and it's like two weeks into the expedition of still looking for seagull like you idiot you

you know there's you know there's nothing here so where I was starting which is the

inner coastal start you know there 800 kilometers of ice out towards the sea beyond where I was so I was not even anywhere near any of the penguin colonies So literally for the entire trip

I was the only living, breathing thing at all. Antarctica is the world's largest desert

What that means is because there's so little moisture there, it's incredibly, the air's very, very dry indeed

which is actually one of the reasons why, you know, despite being incredibly cold

it kind of doesn't feel as cold compared to what the equivalent temperature in the UK would feel like

That constant sunlight, 24-hour sunlight, that causes the snow to melt. But actually when the snow melts down there, the water evaporates

and you get left with these powder crystals, which feel like grains of sand

They don't feel like snow. It feels like you're skiing up a beach

From an expeditionist's point of view, it was awful. Today's just been horrendous, like genuinely horrific snow

Sort of powdery and sticky. So like 22 and a half kilometres took me 11 and a half hours today

and it was just a grizz all the way. There's no time zones down there and you basically, what most people do is just pick a time zone

Most of us use Chile because the camp that you have to be in contact with are on Chilean time, so fine

Some of the people attempting like speed records and stuff were working to a 30-hour day

because they just wanted to ski for longer and, you know, sleep the same

I worked to like a really standard 24-hour day. It just seemed sensible to like not overcomplicate things for myself

with no darkness you have no circadian rhythm so you can take your sleep mask off and you know

that's literally all you're using to to differentiate between day and night basically

as soon as that sleep mask comes off you're awake the only thing that really like that didn't go

pretty smoothly actually was the fact that because my because my right leg was having to do so much

work because my left simply doesn't. I basically started developing like a bit of Achilles

tendonitis towards the end of the third week. The snow been really soft so moving for the last few weeks has been really quite hard work I probably taken like more wear and tear than one might have hoped at this stage When you just skiing for 12 hours a day with no stimulation and nothing to

kind of think about really, I was spending a lot of time like basically worrying about is Michael

he's just going to snap and then that's you know that at that point is that game over? I don't know

how one limps with both legs, but, you know, figure it out. But other than that, in all honesty, actually

whether through luck or judgement, who knows, but everything went really smoothly

I mean, we really didn't have any bad problems. So you can see the South Pole camp from about 18 kilometres away

You are pretty confident by that point it's going to be your last day on the ice

And from my point of view, it kind of had to be, because I only had 24 hours worth of food left

We are now going to ski until we get there. I think you are so tired by that point

that there was certainly no prospect, in my case, of a sprint finish or anything

and you're not allowed to ski straight to the south pole. You have to ski to a signpost called the West Waypoint

and then into the poles, so you don't disrupt scientists who are doing something actually important down there

Having been able to navigate to some random waypoint in the middle of Antarctica

and then you just turn left a bit and doing that for like 250 kilometers at a time

for the last month and a half. So that was slightly, slightly nervous

because your GPS has just stopped. It just doesn't work. Everything is contingent on you hitting this signpost

that's in the middle of nowhere. And so all you're doing is thinking, right, whatever you do, like, don't mess it up now

I really enjoyed, and I appreciate it's a cliche, but like, I really enjoyed the journey itself

You know, I think the, what a privilege to be able to be on, you know, the most unique continent in the world on your own

Because you don't have any external interference, you have no worries. So you only, you can focus entirely on being present

And I love that because it meant that I kind of feel that I got to experience that continent, like, to the fullest extent possible

and like I say, what's a privileged actor? If one person with a disability considers something

that they had previously thought they weren't able to do, if one person considers doing that thing or trying that thing

that's why I do this