Trying to reach the Pole is a huge challenge in itself, but any kind of visual impairment makes it even tougher. Alan speaks about his condition and how it will impact him on his journey to the South Pole:

“I have lived with macular degeneration since my mid-twenties when it forced me to end my career as an officer in the Royal Navy. Macular degeneration is an incurable eye disease caused by the deterioration of the central portion of the retina, the inside back layer of the eye that records the images we see and sends them via the optic nerve from the eye to the brain.

Macular degeneration affects principally the central vision, blurring it and eventually leading to blind spots in your vision. Essentially, anything you look at ‘disappears’ into a blurry fog, and that fog gets increasingly larger and larger as time goes by. To add to this problem, your eyes become hyper sensitive to sunlight, causing headaches and making sight without sunglasses very painful.

It is hard to imagine what macular degeneration is like unless you have first-hand experience, not only the condition itself but also the difficulty of losing one of your key senses to an, as yet, incurable problem that is getting progressively worse.

Day to day, it is possible to adapt to the challenges that macular degeneration presents, I obviously can’t drive any more and I can’t read most things unless they have been adapted for the visually impaired. However, organizing the various elements of the expedition, even with the great help ofthe rest of the team, is tough with this impairment. On the ice, it will be even tougher, as the bright environment and the obvious difficulties in seeing the terrain in front of me will greatly add to an already immense task.

But, as with many things, it is overcoming the challenge which is the reward itself. Whatever difficulties I and my team will face in Antarctica, I know others face a much worse situation in the form of the everyday hurdles that confront many blind people all around the globe.”