?Beating the odds is always a great feeling.Unfortunately, he chose the wrong direction and, over the next few days, moved farther and farther away from safety and rescue, Knowing that eating snow lowers body temperature, Le Marque ate only tree bark and pine seeds.?For days, Le Marque struggled through hunger, freezing temperatures, and 12-foot (4-meter) deep snow.At the
?age of 23, while she was sailing the South Pacific, Ashcraft was caught in a violent hurricane.?Determined to survive, Ashcraft created a sail from scraps of material and charted a path to Hawaii, which was 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) away.?Having lost 40 pounds (18 kilograms) during her ordeal, Ashcraft was thin and haggard when she arrived.One day in February 2004, Le Marque set out for a day of snowboarding in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains.?Just ask anyone who has been accepted to a selective college, or unexpectedly won an

?athletic event.?Tami Oldham Ashcraft knows this feeling.The 50-foot (15-meter) waves overturned her boat.When she awoke 27 hours later, the boat had turned right side up again, but the storm had been so violent that the sails were destroyed, the motor was dead, and the radio was lost.Only the rudder, which steers the ship, was intact.Ashcraft, who still sails, eventually told her tale of survival in a book called Red Sky in Mourning.?Another such tale of survival against the odds can be told by Eric Le Marque, a hockey player who played with the French national Olympic team during the 1994 Olympics.?While looking for a good place to snowboard, Le Marque lost his way and ended up in the wilderness at the back of the mountain.He noticed that whenever he pointed the radio in a certain direction, the reception for a local radio station grew stronger Using this radio reception as a guide, Le Marque switched direction and started walking towards safety and, ultimately, rescue.