They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes you just need to tell a good story.
Achieving the Impossible tells how Lewis Pugh went from pioneer swimmer to environmental campaigner, through his life-defining North Pole Swim. 21 Yaks and a Speedo is a collection of stories about all Lewis’s most impactful expeditions, and the life lessons he learned from them.
21 Yaks and a Speedo
A collection of beautifully told short stories about how to achieve your own impossible.
Lewis Pugh has pioneered more swims around famous landmarks than any other person in history. He swam across the icy waters of the North Pole to highlight the melting of the Arctic sea ice, and across a glacial lake on Mt Everest to draw attention to the impact of climate change on the Himalayan glaciers.
It was there that he met his first Yak.
Trekking behind them up the icy slopes, watching them cross dizzying ravines, and listening to them breathe outside his tent each night, Lewis got thinking about the things he most admires in a yak. He found that those qualities were not unlike the ones that enabled him to meet his own challenges – and achieve things that people believed to be impossible.
The ’21 Yaks’ collected here are the key lessons Lewis took home from his expeditions. These were not just feats of physical stamina and endurance, but about overcoming the psychological obstacles to success. Which is why his strategies are as applicable to business and personal development as they are to extreme sports.
Achieving The Impossible
Lewis’s best-selling autobiography.
At a little after midnight on July 15, 2007, Lewis stood on the edge of the sea ice at the North Pole. It was the fifteenth anniversary of his father’s death, and he was wearing just a Speedo swimsuit, the old-fashioned one that barely covers all that needs to be covered. Air temperature at the North Pole that night was below zero, the water into which he was about to plunge was minus 1.7ºC (29ºF) although this was no in-and-out dip into the world’s coldest water. Lewis was about to swim one kilometre across the North Pole and the thought that he might die did cross his mind.
This is a remarkable story and, ironically, extraordinary testimony to one man’s belief in life. He is a maritime lawyer by training and a pursuer of dreams by inclination. There wasn’t an ocean or a sea that he didn’t want to swim, nor a mountain he didn’t want to climb, and it was no surprise when he quit his well-paid lawyer’s job in the City of London for a life more interesting.
Swimming in the world’s most hostile places; the North Cape, the Antarctic, the North Pole, Lewis developed an understanding of the beauty, the preciousness and fragility of life and its many eco-systems. Driven by nothing more than deep belief, he has achieved things most would regard as impossible. He doesn’t tell us what we must do but shows what can be done.