Amundsen's 17-Mile Days and the 20 Mile March, Checked Against the Diaries

“We could easily have done twice this, but as it was more important to arrive than to show great speed, we limited the distance.” Roald Amundsen wrote that in The South Pole about the first stretch of his 1911 dash, 17 miles a day between the depots at 80 and 82 degrees south, with 52 dogs and four sledges.

That sentence is the seed of what Jim Collins and Morten Hansen named the 20 Mile March in Great by Choice (2011): hit a modest, fixed daily distance in every kind of weather, and do not run past it when conditions are kind. Does it work? As a description of Amundsen, partly. As a business finding, it is an illustration rather than a test. As a way to run a personal goal, the logic holds up better than the history it is hung on, and that is worth sorting out carefully.

What is the 20 Mile March?

Collins and Hansen use the phrase for a discipline of consistent performance markers. Their study, as Collins describes it on his site, began in 2002 with 20,400 companies and narrowed through 11 layers of cuts to seven that beat their industries by at least tenfold, including Southwest Airlines, Stryker, Amgen and Progressive. Each was compared with a weaker rival. Their summary line for the idea is that it “imposes order amid disorder, consistency amid swirling inconsistency.”

The Antarctic comparison is the book’s way of making that concrete. Amundsen and Scott were similar in age and experience, the authors say, and the difference was behavior. Amundsen is credited with marching a steady 15 to 20 miles in clear weather and in storms, and with holding back on the good days. Scott is credited with the opposite: huge pushes when the weather allowed and long stalls when it did not.

The rule of thumb that comes out of this is simple. A floor you will meet on the worst day, a ceiling you will not exceed on the best.

What did Amundsen actually write?

His book supports the ceiling clearly and the floor mostly. Of the leg between the depots, he says the team limited itself deliberately, with food plentiful and the dogs untested. On the way home he fixed “fifteen geographical miles (seventeen and three-eighths statute miles) as a suitable day’s march,” and gives the reason: “we were afraid of overworking the dogs.” The dogs outperformed the plan, and the team covered the distance in five hours, “and our rest was therefore a long one.”

The stated purpose of the cap is a point the business version tends to skip. It was not willpower theater. It was protecting the animals that pulled the sledges, which Amundsen planned from the start to feed to each other and to the men. Of the 42 dogs he intended to take to the plateau, 24 were to be slaughtered there. The pace was matched to the energy the animals had to give.

It also was not rigid. Amundsen records a day of “close upon twenty-five miles” on December 4, on the plateau, ten days before reaching the Pole. And on the return he and his four companions got bored by the long rests and changed the rule: fifteen miles, six hours of sleep, fifteen more, repeated. The alternating days were 17 and 34 miles. “Our dogs need no better testimonial,” he wrote, “than this — one day seventeen miles, the next day thirty-four, and fresh all the way home.”

The surest part of the story is the bad-weather floor. Of one return stage he quotes his own diary: “Same beastly weather,” with overcast, thick weather and drifting snow, and they still picked up every beacon they had built on the way south. His overall average for the 870 miles to the Pole came to 15 1/2 miles a day. He reached it on December 14, 1911.

What did Scott’s diary show?

Scott arrived on January 17, 1912, 34 days after Amundsen, and wrote, “Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

The swings that Collins and Hansen describe are visible in the journal, though the causes are more mixed than the lesson implies. In early December, the party sat out a blizzard at what Scott called the “Slough of Despond,” camped just 12 miles from the Beardmore Glacier. The ponies were shot at the foot of the glacier, and from then on the men hauled the sledges themselves. On the return, the pace fell apart. By Susan Solomon and Charles Stearns’s reconstruction, the party covered about 15 miles a day in November 1911 and only 6 to 8 miles a day between March 5 and 14.

The March 14 entry is the one worth reading slowly. “Yesterday we woke to a strong northerly wind with temp. -37 degrees. Couldn’t face it, so remained in camp till 2, then did 5 1/4 miles.” Nobody reading that can call it laziness. Scott had frostbitten companions, Edgar Evans already dead and Lawrence Oates’s feet failing. But it is also what a day looks like with no floor: the decision is made at dawn, by someone who is cold, tired and badly short of options. Scott’s last entry is dated March 29, when he and two others were 11 miles from a depot and pinned by a gale.

Was it the weather? What Solomon found

Solomon, an atmospheric chemist, challenged the common view that Scott’s errors alone killed him. She and Stearns published a comparison of Scott’s recorded temperatures with modern automatic weather stations along his route, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1999. They found that the 1912 daily minimums were on average “10 to 20 degrees F below” those recorded at the same place and season since 1985. In only one of the 15 years of data did the cold come close to matching. From February 27 to March 19, every day with a reading except March 4 fell below minus 30 Fahrenheit. The cold also made the snow surface grainy and slow, which added friction to the sledge runners. She expanded the case in The Coldest March (2001).

This matters for the 20 Mile March because the business book treats pace as a matter of discipline, and Solomon’s data say the return was a different, harder trip than Amundsen’s. Amundsen’s homeward trip, from December 17 to late January, was in what he called unusually favorable weather. Scott’s return fell in the worst cold of the season.

There are limits to this too. The baseline is 15 years of automated stations, a short record. The same paper notes that peak winds in March were not unusual for the region, and that Scott stopped logging temperatures when the final blizzard began on March 20. So the weather explains a lot about the slowdown without settling the argument over whether the party’s planning left it too thin a margin.

Where is the tidy story contested?

Three places, plainly. The first is the team and the tools. Amundsen used dogs and skis. Scott sent a mixed force: ponies, a few dogs, motor sledges that broke down, and finally man-hauling. A rule such as “march 17 miles” suits a dog team that benefits from rest and shorter days, and Scott’s men hauling their own loads were in a different physical position. They were never running the same experiment.

The second is Roland Huntford. The most widely read case that Scott’s leadership was the problem is Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen (1979), later reissued as The Last Place on Earth. Reviewers describe it as one-sided against Scott, and later writers, Solomon among them, set out to correct it. Solomon is no apologist for Scott either. If a business book leans on this literature, the question is which version of the sources it chose.

The third is Collins and Hansen’s method. The Antarctic story is rhetorical. The evidence for the 20 Mile March in business is the seven-company comparison, and critics of Collins’s earlier books, such as Phil Rosenzweig in The Halo Effect, argue that matched-pair studies like this pick winners first and then read their history backward. I read Collins’s own description of the study and secondary criticism of it, not the full methodology appendix, so I won’t claim the pattern is wrong in the firms. It is still a story told after the outcome.

None of that makes the idea false. It means the idea has to stand on its own logic, not on Amundsen.

What actually transfers to a personal goal?

Two things survive the audit, and both are about the structure of a day.

The first is the floor, set before the day arrives. Scott’s March 13 was a decision made in the tent at dawn, at minus 37, with everything pulling toward staying put. Amundsen’s rule was made months earlier, in the warm, and it did not need to be remade. The point generalizes. If the minimum is negotiated on the morning, the bad mornings are the ones you will lose.

The second is the ceiling, which is the less intuitive part. Amundsen’s dogs were fresh at the end because he did not spend them on the good days. The same pattern appears in people who write 4,000 words on a day they feel inspired and then nothing for the next week. A number you will not exceed keeps the next day cheap.

For a goal that is fuzzy, such as “get fit” or “start the novel,” the usable version has three parts: a floor small enough that the worst day you can imagine still clears it, a ceiling, and a place where someone else can see whether you met it. That last part is where Amundsen’s setup is different from most of ours, since four other men watched every day of his.

Evidence that missing once does not wreck a habit is covered in a post on the Herman and Polivy “what-the-hell” experiment, and it fits here: a floor works because it makes one bad day an ordinary day. A tally-style version, the rule sometimes called No Zero Days, has its own critics, which are laid out in a separate look at that rule’s math.

What is the smallest daily floor?

For most people trying to change their life, the first mile of the march is whether they are out of bed at the time they said they would be. That is the only unit of work that happens at the moment the argument for quitting is loudest, which is why the March 14 entry reads the way it does.

DontSnooze turns that first mile into something other people can see: when the alarm fires you have 30 seconds to record a video showing you are up, and if you do not, a random photo from your camera roll goes to your friends. The consequence is fixed ahead of time, so there is nothing to bargain over at 6 a.m. Which friends to name is its own question, and a post on four kinds of people you can name as a witness goes through how each type behaves.

A fixed daily pace is easier to hold when someone else sets the early laps, which is the role the pacemakers played in Bannister’s 1954 mile.

A reasonable test of whether a floor is right is to imagine the worst week of the next six months and ask whether you would still meet it. If the answer is no, shrink it until the answer is yes. Amundsen’s 17 miles were chosen when his dogs could manage twice that, and the choice looks wise mostly in hindsight, in his own words: back at Framheim in January 1912 with two sledges and eleven dogs, “all well.”