Journey To The Bottom of the Earth

Hello fellow runners,

In my running career I’ve been fortunate to be able to run and coach in some very different and interesting places. Without question, this month, was the most interesting and spectacular, and unless somehow I get to run a marathon on the moon, I think it will stay on top of the list for a long time. Jill Forsythe asked me to put together a few lines for you about my trip in early March to Antarctica to run a marathon.

The marathon is run on King George Island which, like the rest of the continent, is shared by I think seven countries who have research facilities there to promote science and peace. It’s quite a successful experiment in getting countries to play nicely together and it is all held together by a document called the Antarctic Treaty. The company that organizes this adventure is Marathon Tours, owned by a fellow named Thom Gilligan. I know, it’s hard to believe that we agreed to go on an 11 day cruise, on a relatively small Russian ship, to the bottom of the world, through some of the roughest seas anywhere, with a guy named Gilligan – what can I say, we’re runners :). Anyway, according to Thom, although the Antarctic Treaty does seem to be working, the politics of keeping everyone happy in each of these research stations as we attempted this endeavor was tedious and very challenging. There were a total of 99 people signed up to participate in the event this year. My group of twelve (NF Endurance) started the process of getting a team together for this in 2007 over a couple of beers. It’s not something you will be able to do quickly – I think Marathon Tours is wait listed into 2013 right now for this event. Thom takes people all over the world to run marathons, and someone in his company came up with the idea of a “Seven Continents Club” so he went to work to create this event to make the possibility of actually attaining membership in this club a reality for those inclined to go for such a thing. To date about 1300 of us have run the marathon down on the cold muddy and icy bottom of the earth This year we added 69 more to the total, the rest of the participants on the trip either did the half or made up the bulk of the course spectators.

It was about 35 degrees on race morning. I’d love to tell you that we ran in whiteout conditions, below zero, through 10 foot drifts. . . but honestly the weather we’ve been training in this past winter around the Lehigh Valley was significantly worse than the weather at the end of the summer in Antarctica. There was a 10 foot drift on the course that we ran through, and some ice. . .but for the most part it was about 2 to 12 inches of good old sticky, and sometimes slippery, mud. The course was a four loop out and back and a couple of the runners counted somewhere near 175 small hills that we climbed in the 26.2 miles. The rule of thumb for this event is to add about 25% or an hour to your normal marathon time. That held true for me and I plundered across the finish line in just over 6 hours. The winner – Robert Youngren (35 years old) finished with a time of 3 hours and 50 minutes. His wife came in second with a 3:58. Third place was 4:22. You get the picture – a fat burner’s race. To my knowledge there wasn’t even a representative from Kenya on the boat -:).