Chris Wright
AFR Sophisticated Traveller, May 23 2024
Read the article as it ran in the AFR here
If the agony of running a 42.2 kilometre marathon is not enough for you, why not spice things up by running it on a moving ice floe in minus 30 degrees while watching out for polar bears? That, in essence, is the pitch of the North Pole Marathon.
When 30 runners gather at the start line at the Geographic North Pole, the top of the world, on August 2 this year, they will mark the 17th iteration of surely the world’s most exposed and isolated marathon. Just 534 people (and, obscurely, two Norwegian dogs called Blue and Duro) have ever completed it, a number kept low by a combination of the endurance it requires and the difficulty and expense of getting there in the first place.
The challenges are preposterous, chiefly of access. There are two editions of the North Pole Marathon, although they haven’t yet both been successfully staged in the same calendar year. The spring marathon is accessed by flying in from Krasnoyarsk, Russia or Norway’s Longyearbyen to a makeshift runway carved into the ice near the temporary Camp Barneo that is built near the Pole each year. The summer version is reached after several days on a 200-capacity French icebreaker, Le Commandant Charcot, from the Norwegian island of Svalbard. The spring marathon that was meant to be held in April this year had to be cancelled because the runway split in half and drifted into a 12-metre gap. That’s the environment you’re dealing with.
Then there’s the business of running it. Temperatures vary dramatically – the April 2018 edition took place at minus 33 degrees, the August 2023 race in a balmy minus 2 – but are never comfortable. Runners are not on land, even ice-covered land, but on a moving floe that can be as little as three feet thick in the summer, with 12,000 feet of the Arctic Ocean underneath it. (Participants in the summer event must run in a life vest, just in case the ice gives way.) The race starts at geographic true north, but because of the drift of the floe, “the place you start won’t be the same as the place you stop,” explains Oliver Wang, the race organiser and, since 2019, its owner.
Incidentally, both the motion of the ice and the convergence of every line of latitude on Earth play havoc with the GPS, so forget about your Garmin. Drones tend to crash because the meeting of latitude lines makes them believe they are all over the world at once. And the running track, such as it is, will be a loop that you might have to run 10 times or 50 depending on just how big the floe is that happens to the be over the Pole at the time. “Depending on the condition of the ice, we don’t want to go too near the edge,” says Wang.
If the endurance is eye-watering, so is the price: the cheapest berths on the icebreaker bring an all-in cost of Eu44,900 for the summer edition. “Considering what you get, it’s good value,” Wang says. “There are many Arctic expeditions that may be the same or a little cheaper, but they don’t bring you to the Pole, just the high Arctic.” Only two icebreakers, the other Russian, can make it this far. The ship is surprisingly luxurious. Sailing to the North Pole will not even deprive you of wifi.
The North Pole Marathon all started when a solo Irish runner, Richard Donovan, ran there in 2002; the following year it was organised as a competitive event for the first time, continuing almost without interruption until 2018 before the Covid pandemic and then Norwegian flight approval issues got in the way until 2023.
A sense of the run’s rigour can be gleaned from the records. The fastest man, Thomas Maguire, logged 3 hours, 36 minutes and 10 seconds – more than an hour and a half slower than the winners of most road marathons. The women’s record, at four hours 52 minutes and 45 seconds (Anne-Marie Flammersfeld), is more than double the women’s record for, say, London.
But people aren’t here mainly to set records. “There’s a combination of people who are attracted to this, mainly endurance runners and polar adventurers,” Wang says. Some are completists, who have already done a marathon on seven continents including Antarctica, in some cases in seven consecutive days: this is the World Marathon Challenge, which Wang’s company, Runbuk, also runs, along with the Antarctic Ice Marathon.
Three blind athletes and a wheelchair competitor (who did endless lengths of the ice runway) have completed it. A 78-year-old ran it in 2016; a 14-year-old, Wang’s son Nolan, ran a shorter version in 2023. Irishman Paul Grealish has run it six times. It has attracted giants of polar exploration; Ranulph Fiennes quipped that it was “pleasantly different in that I didn’t have to haul a sled there.” Most, but not all, have run many marathons before; remarkably, for some people the North Pole is their first ever marathon.
Training for such a challenge is extremely difficult. “There’s no way to imitate conditions like it ahead of time,” says Oliver Wang. “The biggest challenge is, when you step down you don’t know which direction your foot will go.” This demands a softer landing of the foot to preserve the ankles. The best training environment for this is a beach, since sand gives underfoot, but it’s still not the same.
One thing you do know for sure is that it won’t go dark, no matter how long it takes. At the North Pole the sun rises on the Spring Equinox in late March and sets again in September; daylight is permanent between the two.
Wang suggests another perk is “the chance to see polar bears,” though this is surely a mixed blessing. In the spring iteration, given the cover of the ice cap, polar bears are unlikely to be anywhere near the Pole because there’s not an obvious food source there. But in the summer as the sea ice breaks apart and the available space diminishes, there’s a far greater chance of seeing them, and, as Wang points out, “they’re always looking for food.” The event hires polar guards to look out for them. Nobody has ever seen one anywhere near a race, but in 2023 on the icebreaker on the journey there and back, they saw six.
Ultimately, Wang believes the greatest draw is the sense of achievement. “It’s not only a physical journey but a mental process,” says Wang, who is originally from Beijing and is now an American citizen living in the San Francisco Bay Area. “It’s very rewarding and it affects the way you think about the world.
“Many of our runners are successful businesspeople, scientists, experienced travellers, and they think life is under control until they go to the polar regions where we can’t take it for granted that things happen in the order they expect.
“It makes them review their life: maybe there are issues in your daily life, but after something like this you re-evaluate how you prioritise things.”
Photo credits: North Pole Marathon; Studio Ponant, Ophelie Bleunven
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