82 Days to the South Pole: How Aaron Linsdau Turned Ordinary into Extraordinary

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From Embedded Systems to Endless White

Before the ice, there was fluorescent light. Before the sastrugi and katabatic winds, there were long days debugging code in rooms where the air-con hummed and monitors blinked like distant cities at night. For two decades, Aaron Linsdau wrote software for embedded systems — the quiet technology that makes air traffic control behave, keeps aircraft instruments trustworthy, and persuades critical infrastructure to do precisely what it should, when it should. It was important work and intellectually satisfying, the kind of career that draws nods of respect at barbecues.

But exciting doesn’t always mean fulfilling. In the gaps between projects, something else kept tapping him on the shoulder — an old curiosity that pre-dated compilers and deadlines. As a kid, Aaron had lived between the extremes of San Diego sun and Jackson Hole winters. He’d learned to love the rhythm of cold and the discipline of being prepared. Scouting refined it further. The Eagle Scout pathway is a quiet distillery for capability: you plan, lead, fail, fix, and try again. You absorb the humbling lesson that the outdoors does not negotiate, and you develop the habit of taking responsibility when the plan meets weather and the weather wins.

That early formation would prove decisive later. The bridge from office to ice wasn’t a midlife crisis. It was a return to an earlier way of paying attention — where your senses do the real work, decisions have consequences, and the scoreboard is measured in kilometres, not key performance indicators.

What changed was not that Aaron was “born different.” What changed was that he began to listen to the part of himself that longed for a bigger arena. He didn’t bolt straight for Antarctica. He took the smallest honest step he could take, then the next, building tolerance, skills, and confidence until the horizon line widened and the South Pole wasn’t a fantasy, but a project.

The Training Stack: How Ordinary Becomes Possible

There’s a persistent myth that people who do difficult things are cut from exotic fabric. More often, they are sewn together from very ordinary threads — applied consistently, stretched gently, and stitched layer over layer until the garment can carry weight. Aaron’s preparation was a masterclass in this kind of stacking.

He started by saying yes to more weather. Cold weekends became multi-day traverses. The push from grooming to backcountry skiing taught him the difference between snow that looks soft and snow that is soft — and why both matter when you’re hauling sleds. Yellowstone in deep winter toughened routine: wake, melt snow, fuel, pack, move; repeat until fatigue stops making sense. Every trip was a rehearsal for something he couldn’t yet see, like learning chords long before you’ve chosen the song.

Then came the Arctic Circle Trail in Greenland, around 160 kilometres of tundra and time. Solo. No phone. No café at the end of the day. The discipline of managing your own safety without a backup chorus alters your sense of what’s plausible. Each successful trip moves the goalposts just far enough to make the next adventure thinkable.

He added skills with the patience of an engineer: redundant systems, field repairs, stove behaviour in wind, tent set-up on hard or drifting snow, layered clothing that works when you’re sweating and when you’re still. He learned that the best gear is the gear you’ve already suffered with; brand-new is rarely field-tested in the way reality requires. He learned to make rhythm his safety net. And he became more honest about fear — not as an enemy to be eliminated, but as a lens to be cleaned and used.

Day One in Antarctica: When the Plane Leaves

Most expeditions have the same first day: the moment the vehicle that brought you departs and silence rolls in behind it. At Hercules Inlet, the aircraft lifted, dwindled, and then the last human sound was gone. There is a kind of noise the wind makes on the coast of Antarctica that feels like a conversation you can’t quite join. It’s not menacing. It’s indifferent.

Two sleds. Weeks of food. Fuel and spares. A sun that won’t set. And the overwhelming emptiness that replaces the comforts of edges, trees, and scaling cues. Aaron turned slowly in a circle. No animals. No birds. No smells. The beginning of the routine was the beginning of survival: a wake time that resisted the seduction of constant light, a workday long enough to bank real distance when conditions allowed, and the humility to stop before sloppiness invited risk. He pitched camp with the deliberateness of a person who believes he will need that tent not only tonight but for many more nights to come.

The first days were cruel in a familiar polar way. Near-coastal snow often behaves like a practical joke, filling the troughs and softening the surface so that the sleds grab and grind. Progress was counted in the low single-digit kilometres. Move a load forward, ski back, move the second half, close the gap; repeat until you can no longer invent reasons to continue. He didn’t despair because he had read the logs of those who’d suffered before him and because he’d already suffered in smaller ways himself. The pattern changes. It always does. If you hold your nerve, sastrugi thin, snow hardens, and the horizon begins to move again.

The Butter Went Rancid: Starving on 2,500 Calories

Nutrition at −30°C is not just a matter of appetite; it’s a systems problem. The maths said Aaron needed around 6,000 calories a day, a number that makes sense when you consider the labour of hauling weight across a continent while the air steals heat from any exposed skin. Butter is an elegant answer in theory: dense, simple, compact energy. In practice, Antarctica can turn theory into theatre. On still days, solar radiation can warm food more than you’d guess from the air temperature. Somewhere along the line, the butter lost the fight.

He found out the way most people learn uncomfortable truths: his body told him first. Nausea, a heavy fatigue that didn’t respond to rest, a dullness that wasn’t just tiredness. The diagnosis was simple and demoralising. The fix was worse. Those calories were gone. He pared back to what he could safely eat and accepted that he would move slower, feel worse, and be hungrier for a very long time.

There’s a version of the story where the hero storms on undaunted. Aaron’s version is more useful. He did not pretend this was fine. He had a quiet, private reckoning with the reality of the choice he’d made. Evacuation is an option until it isn’t — financially, logistically, or morally. He’d worked for years to earn this window. He had to decide if the risks remained in bounds and, if they did, whether he was willing to suffer without guarantees. He chose forward, but not with bravado. With accountability.

Whiteouts, Hallucinations, and the Mind’s Last Stand

Antarctica erases edges. In a total whiteout, the horizon vanishes. The ground and the sky become the same white. Your brain, hungry for cues, starts guessing. Aaron learned to count ski steps and watch a compass, building a breadcrumb trail of measured certainty in a world where eyesight refused to help. He learned to trust the discipline of numbers more than the drama of perception.

The mind, deprived of stimulus, becomes creative. He saw flashes of colour where none existed and heard fragments of sound inside the wind. Around Christmas, his mind produced a full hallucination of a service complete with hymnals and candlelight. He knew it wasn’t real because he had trained himself to check. Stand still. Breathe. Audit the body. Verify the instruments. If the “injury” fades at rest, it’s a trick. If the “sound” vanishes when you remove your hood and listen, it’s your head playing content creator. The technique is simple, and it scales: pause, test, decide.

There is a point on any long effort where your psychology attempts a kind of coup. It will plead, bargain, and threaten, and it will usually present its argument as pain, dread, or certainty of failure. Aaron discovered a pattern: the mind screams loudest just before progress becomes visible. The breakthrough is rarely a trumpet blast. It’s a day that looks like the day before until suddenly you notice the numbers have moved.

The Engineer’s Edge: Problem-Solving at −40°C

We glamorise adventure as if it’s a series of cinematic shots. In reality, it’s a string of tiny engineering problems solved while cold, hungry, and somewhat annoyed. A shovel snaps and you redesign how your tent stays anchored. A solar panel can’t survive wind exposure; you rewire the charging array and shelter it between the inner and outer tent walls. A stove sputters; you switch to the redundant unit and field-strip the first during a sheltered hour, then keep both because redundancy is what grown-ups carry when the stakes are big.

None of this looks heroic. All of it adds up to distance banked. Aaron discovered that his software years weren’t the opposite of Antarctica. They were preparation for it. Problem definition, hypothesis, experiment, iterate — the loop works whether you’re debugging instruments or your own cold-weather systems. The difference is that the “user” on the other end of the failure is you at −40°C.

16–18 Kilometres a Day: Progress You Can’t See (Until You Do)

Most days he measured progress in single digits and teens. Sixteen to eighteen kilometres is not the kind of distance that makes headlines. It is the kind that makes finishes. The paradox of the polar plateau is that you can travel all day and feel like the world hasn’t moved. Without trees or mountains for reference, scale becomes mischievous. The ledger, however, does not lie. Ten, twelve, sixteen kilometres a day across weeks becomes a number that can surprise you when you finally total it. Aaron’s mantra captures the arithmetic: as long as you keep chipping away at it, you always have a chance.

Chipping away forces humility. You learn to respect the day you are actually in, not the day you wish you were in. You learn to love small wins because they’re the wins you can repeat. You learn to be suspicious of despair and euphoria, because both pass, and because neither is a reliable guide when you must simply keep moving.

Touching the Pole: Joy, Sadness, and What Comes After

Arriving at the Pole is not exactly a surprise. The last kilometres still arrive one step at a time. But the emotions can ambush you. When Aaron reached the Amundsen–Scott research station, he felt euphoria and grief in the same breath. Euphoria because the plan worked. Grief because the plan was over. Any long project does this to the people who complete it. You carry it for so long that when you set it down, you’re lighter and lonelier at once.

At the station he met people who had been following his tracker, ate food that tasted like a festival, and tried to convince his body to stop assuming it needed to conserve heat all the time. He took a photo by the striped marker, then made time to find the true Geographic South Pole, the place that satisfies something precise in those who are wired to care about exactness.

And then came the reckoning most people forget to anticipate: who am I after this? Aaron discovered that the expedition didn’t send him back to his old life; it sent him forward to a new one. He began to write and make films. He spoke to rooms where the temperature was managed and the audience was warm but the questions were just as real. He kept discovering that ordinary people could use polar lessons to move their own lives in the direction they wanted — not by pretending to be superhuman, but by being patient, honest, and persistent.

Greenland, Wolves & Teamwork: Lessons Beyond Antarctica

Not every lesson he values was learned alone. In Yellowstone, wolves circled his tent at night, reminding him that wilderness has its own agenda and that fear can be data. In Greenland, he crossed with a partner decades older who battled Raynaud’s phenomenon. Each morning, Aaron would shelter him from the wind and warm his hands beneath his jacket until fingers could grip poles. They finished together because they decided there was no acceptable version of the story where they didn’t.

Teamwork in hard places is not about motivational posters. It’s logistics and loyalty. It’s adjusting your pace to the best pace the team can sustain. It’s a kind of love expressed as practical care: do what helps, carry what matters, fix small problems before they grow teeth. The arena might be frozen and far from cities, but the ethics aren’t exotic. They’re transferable to households, teams, and companies that want to attempt something difficult without leaving people behind.

8 Lessons You Can Use This Week

1) Stack Before You Leap

Antarctica wasn’t step one; it was step many. Start with a challenge just beyond your current capacity. Repeat until your baseline rises. We love transformation stories, but the engine is iteration. If you want to run a marathon, run today’s distance; if you want a company, ship today’s feature; if you want a new career, study the next unit. Ordinary effort, compounded, is a revolutionary technology.

2) Plan for Failure — Then Plan Again

Redundancy sounds boring until the wind breaks your first stove. Two stoves, two ways to charge, two ways to navigate — it’s not paranoia; it’s respect for reality. In business, that might mean two suppliers, two hiring pipelines, or two backup strategies for cash flow. Build a second path while the first works so you’re not building under pressure when it doesn’t.

3) Control the Controllables

You can’t bargain with the sun. You can manage wake times, hydration, food intake, and when to stop. Control of routine is not just comforting; it’s performance-enhancing. The more you automate good behaviours, the more bandwidth you keep for real decisions. If a ritual saves you from five avoidable errors a week, it’s not a ritual — it’s a strategy.

4) Expect the Mind to Cheat

When the stakes are high and the work is long, the brain will argue for comfort. It will present fake injuries and real pessimism. Learn to pause and test. Is the pain consistent or does it dissolve at rest? Are you catastrophising because you’re hungry? Can you make a smaller next move that maintains momentum without increasing risk? Treat your mind like a passionate committee: listen, check, decide.

5) Measure in Kilometres, Not Glory

Glory is rare and unreliable. Kilometres accrue daily. The work that no one sees is the work that moves the dial. If you only feel successful when outcomes arrive, you’ll be sad for most of the journey. If you can count progress in repeatable units, you’ll have reasons to be proud all the way to the finish.

6) Ask What’s Actually at Risk

Bravery is not recklessness. It’s choosing exposure that is meaningful and survivable. On the ice, that means turning around when conditions drift outside your risk envelope. In life, it means setting boundaries that keep you playing next season. Put your toe over the line, see how it feels, then choose your next step with a clear head.

7) Write It in Ink

Aaron often talks about writing goals by hand. The physical act of committing a sentence to paper recruits different parts of your brain and seems to improve follow-through. It’s not magic. It’s clarity. Try this: “I want to…” and then “I am going to…”. Name the fear beside it: “I am afraid that…”. Then choose your position: “Even though I am afraid of…, I will… anyway.” Simple sentences, powerful commitments.

8) Keep Chipping Away

The line that anchors his story — and perhaps yours: “As long as you keep chipping away at it, you always have a chance. Quitting simply isn’t an option.” Persistence is not glamorous, but it is undefeated across long timelines. A thousand small swings turn rock to rubble. If you don’t stop, you bend probability in your favour.

The Brave Five: Quickfire with Aaron

Most unexpected takeaway? “That the hardest part wasn’t the cold — it was managing my own head when the landscape gave me nothing to push against.”

First emotion at the Pole? “A laugh that hurt my face and a sadness I didn’t expect. You can love something and be ready to let it go.”

One thing you wish you knew earlier? “That the skills from engineering would transfer cleanly to the field — problem-solving is problem-solving, even with frozen fingers.”

Mindset that mattered most? “Be honest about fear, then act with it, not against it.”

Best advice for anyone starting their ‘South Pole’? “Pick a small step you can’t fail to take today. Then repeat until the big step is just the next obvious move.”

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