Running the 2015 Antarctic Ice Marathon

Some photos: Copyright Antarctic Ice Marathon. Used by permission.

The tale of 3 knuckleheads: Erik, Michael, and myself who ran the Antarctic Ice Marathon at Union Glacier camp November 20, 2015.

Punta Arenas

The rendezvous point for race participants was a waterfront hotel in Punta Arenas at the southern tip of Chile (22 hours of travel away from my home in Washington, DC).  I was excited to go to Chile.   Fresh seafood, wine, and an ocean view? What’s not to like?  It turns out: Plenty!  We had zero good meals during our time there and not for lack of trying.  The food was bland at best.  Sometimes completely inedible.  Even the wine was bad.  Every restaurant had a wine list of length 2.  Vino tinto (red) and vino blanco (white).  If you asked for a 2nd bottle just like the first, a completely different, but identically bad, wine showed up.  Maybe all the good stuff is exported to the USA.  The beer was ok, but I wasn’t looking to get all bloated just days before a marathon.  

View from my room.  Punta Arenas

In the build up to the race we had what seemed like an endless series of mandatory briefings, starting in Punta that first night.  I'll confess that of these "mandatory" briefings, there was, I think, only 1 where all 3 of us were in attendance, awake, and sober.  And that was the very first meeting.  ...and we brought a bottle of wine to that meeting.  We immediately noticed that the other race participants were taking this whole race thing pretty seriously.  Whereas we were pretty much focused on goofing off and having a good time together.   After our first night's escapades we already had a reputation.  The next morning we got admonished by Richard, the race organizer.  “Some of the runners have been complaining…”  Yeah, yeah, we get it, we'll ease up a bit.   Richard's a great guy, and his runs are the stuff of legend.  For example his more recent run of note was San Fran to New York.  He averaged over 50/miles a day running coast to coast. According to his facebook his first request after finishing the journey was "Hey, I'm Irish, I want a beer".  An intense guy, but still fun.  Unfortunately this would not be the last admonishment.  Oops.

Flying Out

Weather delays complicated our getting into (and out of) Antarctica, so there was a fair amount of hurry-up-and-wait before we got there.  On our first attempt we rushed to check out of the hotel and be ready to board a bus to the airport at 8am.  “Sorry guys the weather is no good.  We'll make another attempt to go tonight at 7pm.”  So we spent 12 hours hanging around doing nothing in the hotel lobby (where we no longer had a room, of course).  

8pm:  “Ok we're going!   Get ready for the airport”.  Psych!  Minutes later we were advised that the weather had quickly deteriorated so the flight was scrubbed.  Again.   Report back at 8am the next day.  

7:40 the next morning the race organizers were pounding on hotel doors: “We're leaving in 5 minutes, we can’t wait until 8am after all”.  The weather was threatening to deteriorate again so we needed to leave now or miss our window.

At the airport we went through normal security.  Although I’m not really sure why, since anything we wanted to bring onto the plane could be left on our bus which bipassed security entirely and took us right to the plane.

Our plane, an Ilyshian-76 is a Soviet cargo plane that was designed to supply remote areas of the Soviet Union and, more importantly for us, land on ice.   Even from the southern tip of South America the journey is as far as flying LA to Chicago.  4 1/2 hours of flight and we would be landing on a naturally occurring blue ice runway, right there on the glacier.  The landing was intense.  The "runway" (if you really can call bare ice on a glacier a runway) is 3km and it seems most of that distance is needed to slow that big fat pig of a plane to a halt.   I could feel the plane slip and squirm on the ice and for a while it seemed like we actually gaining speed rather than slowing down.

Arrival in Antarctica

Stepping out of the plane was an incredibly beautiful scene.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  And with so much sun I didn't even need to wear my parka after a while.   We all mugged for selfies and were in no hurry to board the winterized 6 wheel vans that would take us the 20 minute journey to Union Glacier camp.  Unfortunately we never saw conditions this nice again during our stay, especially not on race day.

Moments after arriving.

Practice Run

The day before the race we got a chance to try the course.   Not bad.  It was packed snow just like a bunny slope at your local ski mountain.  I learned a number of things during this short practice run:  

1. Despite being only 2000-some feet above sea level, we were effectively running at elevation.  I noticed the thinness of the air right away.  For a variety of science-y reasons the air is considerably thinner at the poles.  
2. I was losing considerable energy with each stride in my regular Nike Vomero running shoes.
3. Almost every competitor other than me had on red Salomon snow running shoes with metal spikes.  Gee that would have been a good idea. Oh well, too late now.
4. Both goggles and glasses fogged over almost immediately and quickly froze over entirely.   
5. Wearing a  balaclava or mask (to, oh I don't know, protect your face?) made the eyewear problem much worse.

During this practice the organizers staged a lot of photos/video to use as “race photos” (shhh! don’t tell).  They even had us to do a pretend start that was filmed for a video from a drone.   It seems they knew something we didn’t:  The weather was going to be pretty crappy during the race.  Oh great!

Race Start

The race start was moved up from noon to 10am because the so-so weather conditions were forecast to get much worse.  I’m sure that 2 hours helped the top 3 finishers.  But those of us who spent more than double the winning time on course would still be out there for snowy whiteout conditions and additional loose snow underfoot.

Snow fall begins.

The start felt ok.  I purposely hung at the back, determined to pace myself rather than get caught up in the excitement and push too hard too early.   Besides it's more fun to pass than be passed.  The underfoot conditions still felt decent (at first) although the low visibility and low contrast was really annoying (and this was before the snow hit and degraded visibility even more).  Eyewear was mandatory (to prevent snow blindness) and it was strictly enforced so I borrowed sunglasses from Michael.  They fogged up immediately, and then they froze over completely.   Not good.  And my nose hurt already.  Sign of frost nip?  CHECK!  Also not good.  In order to see I found myself moving the glasses upward where they are no longer protecting my eyes.  Only serving to fake out the course workers who were policing the eyewear rules.  Really not good.   Oh, and now my nose has stopped hurting.  Wait, is that good or bad?  Let's also file that under: Not good.  

Conditions Worsen

The early part of the course was the same as our practice area.  But as we took the first turn by the Christmas tree we were now on a part of the course which was off-limits during practice.  And the underfoot course conditions were entirely different from the well-groomed practice course.  They were worse and they varied from stride to stride.

 Union Glacier Camp's own Xmas Tree.  "The only tree on antarctica"

During one stride a snow drift of fresh powder would sap my energy the same way running in dry sand in new leather-soled dress shoes would.  The next stride might land on crusted-over snow that would collapse under my 200lbs and snare my foot momentarily.  Yet another stride would land on crunchy, non-flat, snow that would conk my ankle to one side or the other.  Now I know why eskimos have so many words to describe snow.  The worst part was that without being able to see there was no way to know which snow condition your foot was going to land on next.   Even if I was lucky enough to briefly de-ice my glasses it was still nearly impossible to deduce the condition of the snow without any contrast.  All you saw was white.  This was nothing like the bunny slope conditions we practiced on.  This was exhausting and a little frightening.   I stumbled and almost fell so many times I lost count.  Falling wouldn't be so bad, but I really didn't want to twist or roll my ankle.  I came close several times.

Otherwise I was doing ok.  My pace was steady (at an abysmal 12:30/min mile. A full 2 1/2 minutes slower than my very slowest running pace in normal conditions.)  I was passing people and I was not pushing myself too hard.   

But after 11 miles of blind  running   ..er stumbling my ankles were toast.  I was conditioned for the distance, I was rested, hydrated, and fueled.  I had the right gear on (except for lacking the omnipresent red spiky shoes).  But I just didn't have the muscle strength in my ankles to continue like this.  I decided it would be better to slow down and make sure I could finish instead of risking injury.  What would I be risking injury for anyway (other than trying to pass Erik)?  I was in no risk of a podium finish.  For that matter I wasn't even at risk of breaking The_Oprah_line.  That is, finishing at Oprah-pace (Oprah ran a 4:29 at the Marine Corp Marathon in 1994).  There wasn't much to be gained by finishing as fast as I could.  

But there was a problem with slowing down.  I was soaking wet with sweat and now I felt my body temperature dropping quickly as soon as I slowed down.  Luckily, at mile 11, I didn't have far to go before I could change into dry clothes.  The marathon course was a 13.1 mile loop that we had to complete twice.  This was good and bad.  Changing to dry clothes would be easy.   But it was going to be awfully tempting to quit.  In the end about 10 of the competitors opted for the conciliation prize of an Antarctic half marathon when they reached the mid-point.  It was going to be hard to get back out there but I had to do it.   So now I had decided to walk/run to the half way point and change into dry clothes.  But should I do the full polar gear I rented including parka, overalls, and clunky moon boots?   No, the moon boots and parka were too clunky I’d better stick with running shoes and hope I don’t freeze my toes off.  I would add the polar overalls and ditch the fancy outer running pants though.

Halfway

At the halfway point I ran over to my unheated 2-man tent and started changing clothes as quickly as I could.  I traded Michael's sunglasses in for my ski goggles.  A new dry base layer top (wool this time), a new fleece layer, new dry tights (yes, real men do wear tights), and polar overalls instead of my fancy running pants this time.  My outer layers were still damp with sweat but it would have to do as I opted out of the full parka.   "Ok, now we just need 2 new layers of dry socks and…. " "Fuck! Why do my hands hurt so much?”

No hotels.  This unheated 2-man tent was home.

I had taken glove liners off and I was trying to change so quickly that I hadn't noticed how cold my hands were.  Now they were so cold they actually hurt.  Even though it was warmer inside my tent the cold of Antarctica was not to be trifled with.   Great.  Now I would have to spend some time warming up in the cafeteria tent before taking off for the 2nd half.   My transition ended up taking over 30 minutes.   I did the math in my head:  I could have just walked the first half, skipped changing clothes and had a similar pace.  Oh well.   On the way out I saw Michael as he was coming into the halfway point. At least I was 75% sure that’s who said "Hi" to me.   Hmm my mind is really clouded.  I guess the mental and physical stress is weighing on my mental capacity.

Union Glacier Camp

Off I go!  But as I got about 50 yards out I heard on the loud speaker:  “Paul Webb, the winner of the 2015 Ice Marathon has just crossed the finish line, blah, blah. blah”  “Very funny guys”, I thought to myself.  But it wasn't a joke.  He missed the Ice Marathon record by about 5 minutes, despite the conditions.  I later overheard that his “normal” marathon time is 2:20.  Wow.

That didn't hurt my ego burt  I was going to get another chance in the 2nd half to have my ego bruised.   With 55 competitors spread over 13.1 miles you can spend a lot of time by yourself.   But with about 8 miles to the finish I saw a little green dot behind me.  It would turn out to be John Fang from Taiwan.   Like several others, he was finishing his 7-contenent world race tour and, for whatever reason he decided to run in a colorful costume from his homeland.  It looked somewhat like a cross between some kind of men's kimono and a Chinese dragon costume but with flags popping out of the back.  He was one of a bunch of people I blew past in the early half of the race.   But now he was gaining on me. 

John Fang (Taiwan) during the practice start.

He caught up with me with 6 miles to go to the finish.  "Not long to go", he said to me.   I wanted to hang with him.  Not just to protect my ego but also just to have someone to run with.  So I started running to try to at least keep up with him.   He wasn’t running fast and visibility was slightly better than before but soon I began to sweat.  That’s not going to work.  My whole strategy for the 2nd half was to stay dry so I wouldn't get too cold when I needed to walk.  So I let him go.  My ego can take being passed by a guy in a dragon costume.  It reminded me of my only other marathon experience,  the Baltimore marathon, wherein I was passed by a guy running in a full polyester tuxedo.  Bright blue.   John finished 8 minutes ahead of me.

Crossing the finish line didn't feel like a huge accomplishment, but it did feel good for moment.  Relief.  The feeling was less “YES! I rule!” and more “Oh thank god that is over!”.

I finished 28th at 7:37 which was lower-mid-pack but well before the cut-off of 10 hours (which apparently isn't always enforced).   And at least I beat Michael by 37 minutes (But who's counting).  Erik, finished 5th with an astounding 5:13.   It was not only his first marathon, it was his first race.  Swedish genes must help you run in snow.  Who knew?

My finish. 

Post-Race Analysis

If I had it to do over again (Anyone up for the 2017 North Pole Marathon?), I would get the snow running shoes with spikes, do lots of training on dry sand, and maybe some kind of ankle strength excercises.  Oh and figure out how to run with goggles and a face mask without freezing them.

A couple days after the race all of the skin on my face was trying to fall off.   The dry conditions, extreme temperatures and ozone-less UV conditions did a number on my skin.

Stranded in Antarctica

For several days our departure was delayed because of visibility and wind conditions.   We were all going a little nuts.  Everyone would buy time on the satellite phone (our only link to the outside world) to change flights, but then a day later they would have to change it again.
Our Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions hosts scheduled the occasional documentary viewing, and presentations about early explorers, and even a yoga class.  But there was usually nothing much to do except play cards and talk shit.  Also the uncertainty and lack of control was obviously wearing on the universally type-A crowd.

The Icemen runneth.

Wine, volleyball, and catch a few rays.

Somehow a deep rivalry developed between us 3 Americans, and seemingly every bloke from Great Britain.   Michael and Erik fanned the flames by beating them at everything (well, not running) from Texas hold 'em to cribbage.   I accomplished the same with a lot less effort:  Being myself.  At one point I derided one of my fellow competitors (who was bragging about his 2 new Ferrari purchases) "You don't know shit about Ferraris".

When the Illyusian finally came to rescue us we were more than ready to go.  There were rumors that the camp’s meteorologist told the pilot in no uncertain terms that conditions were still not good enough to land.  It certainly didn’t look to me like a 7000ft ceiling.  In fact it looked just as bad at the other days.  But what do I know.  We got back safely and the 55 competitors scattered.  Michael and I had a few drinks to remind us how bad the wine was and our adventure came to a close.

THE END
[at least until we decide to run all 7 continents + the north pole]

The race course on my GPS watch.

The tiny dot right before Garmin runs out of map data.

More context: Race course at the bottom of the earth.

Our sleeping bags arrive.

The sun doesn't set this time of year.

That's why they call it Union Glacier.  

You can see the glacier flow in this shot.  (it moves 20+ yards per year).

My poor skin

Me off for a bike ride. 

72 year old Mikio Kawamoto of Japan has run 7 continents 

Battle for 1st place.