A North Pole Traveller Ben
Saunders Short and shy, Ben Saunders was the
last kid in his class picked for any sports team. "Football, tennis
Cricket-anything with a round ball, I was useless, " he says now with a laugh.
But back then he was the object of jokes in school gym classes in England’s
rural Devonshire. It was a mountain bike he
1 (receive)for his 15th birthday that changed him. At first
the teen went biking alone in a nearby forest. Then be began to cycle along with
a runner friend. Gradually, Saunders set his mind 2
(build) up his body, increasing his speed, strength and 3 (endure). At age 18, he ran his first
marathon. The following year, he met John Ridgway, who became
famous in the 1960s for rowing an open boat across the Atlantic Ocean. Saunders
was 4 (hire)as an instructor at
Ridgway’s school of Adventure in Scored, where he learned about the older man’s
cold-water exploits(成就). Intrigued, Saunders 5
(read) all he could about Arctic explorers and North Pole
expeditions, then decided that this would be his future.
Journeys to the Pole aren’t the usual holidays for British country boys, and
many people 6 (dismiss) his dream as
fantasy. "John Ridgway was one of the few who didn’t say, ’You are 7 (complete)crazy, ’" Saunders says.
In 2001, after 8 (become)a
skilled skier, Saunders started his first long-distance expedition toward the
North Pole. He suffered frostbite, had a closer encounter(遭遇)with a polar bear
and pushed his body to the limit. Saunders has since become the
9 (young)person to ski alone to the
North Pole, and he’s skied more of the Arctic by himself than any other Briton.
His old playmates would not believe the transformation. This
October, Saunders, 27, heads south to 10 (explore) from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back, an
1800-mile journey that has never been completed on skis.