Fridtjof Nansen was a tough-as-nails Norwegian psychopath with an impossible-to-spell first name and an unstoppable desire to constantly freeze his balls off and risk his life in the name of science and kickassery. Born in 1861 in a town near Oslo, as a teenager this super-brilliant, ultra-hardcore crazy person constantly went outside into the frostbite-inducing snow-covered wilderness Bear Grylls-style to test himself against the most volatile bull**** Mother Nature could furiously dump on him. Spending days and weeks at a time alone in the wild with just his faithful dog, a sharp knife, and his badass 'stache to keep him company, this guy quickly forged himself into a high-endurance asskicker. This dude was so ridiculously tough that that he could get out and cross-country ski fifty miles a day, every day, for pretty much as many days as he wanted. For those of us who have no idea what skiing two marathons back-to-back actually means, the 50km cross-country ski race (30 miles for those of you who continue to resist the global tyranny of the metric system) is the longest ski race the Olympics has ever offered. In the 1948 games, 20 world-class athletes busted ass and finished the race in times ranging from 4 to 5 hours, with seven more guys dropping out and not even being able to crawl their half-dead asses over the finish line. They haven't offered the race since, presumably because that bull**** constitutes something akin to "cruel and unusual punishment." For this guy it was half a day's ski in the woods.
In 1882, the 21 year-old Nansen went on a naval expedition to Greenland and instantly fell in love with the harsh, unyielding hellhole he discovered there. Greenland, contrary to what it's name might imply, is actually a freezing-ass wasteland of ice and pain and misery, but that's apparently the sort of thing that appeals to guys who enjoy spending their time fist-fighting wild animals in the uncharted mountainous regions of Norway. Nansen, who loved learning about zoology, ecology, and oceanography, used his time on the ship wisely – while lesser men were below decks doing wussy crap like huddling for warmth or losing their fingers to frostbite, Nansen was getting up-close-and-personal with polar bears, making observations and writing a damn book about how balls-out he was.
Returning to Norway so pumped up he wanted to barf, Nansen got his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oslo. When he wasn't working on a dissertation exploring the central nervous system of lower invertebrates, developing the groundwork for the field of science that would become neuron theory, or working at a research station with Armauer Hansen (the man who discovered the leprosy bacteria), Nansen took a study break to ski 300 miles over a usually-impenetrable mountain range so that he could participate in a ski jumping competition that was taking place on the other side of the country. I wasn't able to find the results of the competition, but knowing what we know about this guy it's probably safe to assume that he flew off the ramp, did a double backflip and landed on top of a volcano in Iceland.
