Four days after we left

It seems like Alexander's warnings about the crack weren't understated.
We had been warned to be ready to evacuate one night when we went to bed.

The mess tent we ate in.
The tent I slept in...

90 degrees north: The geographic north pole

The last person finished the race about 2am, so we broke open the Jamesons, Jagermeister and vodka, celebrated until about 4am and got up again at 6am to fly to geographic north pole. We were drifting further and further away from it daily due to high winds. (See photo above by Mike King).

We loaded up on the trusty (?) Russian helicopter and headed north .

We crossed over some pretty precarious looking ice.

We really loaded up..

It was spectacular to watch the GPS track of the ice as we hunted for 90 degrees north..

...and found it, albeit a moving target.

Literally on top of the world.

North Pole Marathon 2010: The Characters

Richard Donovan, the organizer, and ultra-athlete extraordinaire with Victor Boyarsky, the legendary polar explorer. When we were snowed in, Victor gave a presentation on his 1990 Antarctic expedition : 6500km in 221 days, the first west-east crossing of Antarctica on foot.

David Attenborough. I told him that my 9-year-old daughter could care less that I had run the North Pole marathon. Telling her I met the guy who created Planet Earth, would really impress her. He's a hero.

Vadim Prudnikov

Vadim is an expedition leader, and a PhD in mathematics. He was a spectacular host and gave an amazing talk on the ice station and history of polar exploration.

Jamie Cuthbertson was stunning, as was Alex Pavanello, the triathlete who guided him. They finished 15th out of 25 and inspired all of us. Jamie lost his sight in an explosives accident while serving as a Captain in the Royal Engineers. He has an athletic resume that makes us all look lame: Marathon des Sables, Trans 333, a 150-mile trek in the Gobi Desert, London Triathlon and Glasgow Marathon.

Sara Olliphant

Sara is 15 and has already done marathons on 6 continents. She sings, and played a mean soccer game when the marathoners took on the Russian ice-station staff. She'll be the youngest person to complete marathons on all 7 continents and at the North and South pole, when she takes part in the Antarctic marathon in December 2010.

The four women in the race: Ivana Pilarova from the Czech republic, who has run 68 marathons; Yours truly; Julia Tizard, a PhD who runs operations for Virgin Galactic (and ace card player) and Sara Oliphant.

And then there were the lunatics ....

Mark Fell and Brent Underdahl

Brent is an multiple ironman triathlete. Mark has run Ultra marathons in the desert and Antarctica. They decided the North Pole marathon wasn't hard enough, so they challenged each other to drink a shot of Vodka on each of the 11 laps. They did, and still finished in the middle of the pack.

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Rik Vercoe raised an extra £750 for charity by running naked at the pole.... He also came in second in the race.An ultra-marathon and marathon runner, Rik has run the London Marathon three times, and ran the Polar Circle Marathon in Greenland. A keen SCUBA diver instructor, he has made 1400 dives in 30 countries and has written 6 diving guide books.

Andrei Rosu is a Romanian banker and wanted to be the first person to drum at the North Pole.

Whose idea was this? and RESULTS

Needless to say, I don't have photos of the race itself in progress, but Mike King was the official photographer and you can see he did a great job.

Look at his photos here

The official website http://www.npmarathon.com/ described the race below.

By the way, as you read: Some challenges and less-than-ideal visibility win the understatement-of-the-year award.

This is me with Victor drinking the Irish whiskey I brought along. It was a huge hit with the Russian crew and didn't even begin to last until everyone finished.

The race was a total blast and Richard Donovan stayed out there, without a break, for ten hours, until everyone was over the finish line. He's an amazing man and he organized an amazing race.

I was thrilled with the event, but totally bummed about my time, which was well over two hours slower than my slowest marathon to date.

Update - Thursday 8th April at 01.00 (GMT)
The last competitor has just crossed the finish line of the 2010 North Pole Marathon with Joep Rozendal from Holland winning the men's event and Emer Dooley from Ireland taking first place in the women's race.
The start time of the 2010 North Pole Marathon was 15.00 (GMT) with weather conditions that presented some challenges to the runners. The wind gusted to 45km/hr which had an effect on both the temperature and visibility. With wind chill, competitors were running in temperatures that dropped to -20 degrees celsius. In addition to this, the wind also led to drifting snow which made for poor contrasts and less than ideal visiblity.
Competitors are due to leave the North Pole for Longyearbyen later today and a full set of results will be posted at this time. There were no injuries at this year's marathon and everyone is delighted to of achieved their goal of completing a marathon at the top of the world.

Results
Men's 2010 North Pole Marathon
1st Joep Rozendale (Netherlands) 5hrs 00min 58sec
2nd Rik Vercoe (Great Britain) 5hrs 07min 30sec

3rd Yen-Po Chen (Taiwan) 5hrs 29min 47sec

Women's 2010 North Pole Marathon
1st Emer Dooley (Ireland) 5hrs 56min 54sec
2nd Julia Tizard (Great Britain) 7hrs 31min 05sec
3rd Sarah Oilphant (USA) 7hrs 48min 14sec

April 7th 2010: North Pole Marathon Day.

After a night of howling winds and accumulating snowdrifts we fought our way, despite the weather, to the mess tent, for breakfast.

Victor Boyarsky, a legendary Russian explorer, now runs the ice station at Barneo. He and Richard decided there was no way we could run the race as planned at 10am on April 7th. The winds had moderated from 50Km/hr to 30Km/hr or so, but the forecast was better. We'd run at 4pm. Worst case, we'd do laps of the runway -a 1500m flat strip that had last been ploughed two days ago. Nobody was very excited about doing 14 laps of the runway but for safety reasons we couldn't be out of sight of the camp.

At lunchtime, after a snowmobile inspection of the original course, the race start was set for 4pm and we were set to go.

The only spectators were the Barneo staff (who were the most amazing collection of bright, sunny helpful people) and the somewhat-amused BBC crew.

As Jbal, our great friend, would say: "What's the point in being stupid, if you don't prove it every now and again"

Life on the Arctic Ice and setting the course

" I'm at the top of the world looking down on creation...."
They had the cutest husky team stationed at the camp. Raphael, the trainer gave an amazing talk when we were snowed in one day....later.

We slept 10 to a tent.




The amateurs and...... the pros
David Attenborough was there with a BBC team heading to the geographic north pole to film.
Some people do things to change the way we think about our world. And then there was us....




We tromped around in the snow for hours setting up a marathon course.



See how far down Richard (our fearless leader) is sinking! And that was before a night of 50k winds which caused even even more snowdrifts.
I kid you not. This was what the terrain was like. Your Wednesday night track workouts do not prepare you for this.

And of course, no race is complete without a banner at the Start/Finish line. Now this is a drill that the Alpental ski team could use to help set up those slalom courses every weekend.

Heading North

Flying out of Longyearbyen, Svalbard

Heading North

..With the Russian crew smoking in the back of the plane ...(Remember those days???)

Welcome to ice camp Barneo 89 degrees north and drifting....

The Russians build and maintain the camp for about a month in April once a year. It costs about 2.2 million euros for the month. They have seven research scientists (polar, geophysics, math etc.) and about 20 staff and subsidize the cost with tourists like us.

The camp sits on the arctic ice and drifts.......

In the 24 hours before we arrived it had drifted 4km.

The winds picked up and in the next 24 hours we drfited 15km in 24 hours. The morning of the marathon we were drifting at 1km an hour -not a good sign.

We'd had 50-60km winds during the night and the Russian crew was up all night putting in new anchors for the tents.

The flags give some idea...It was a shock getting off the plane.

Not complete without a picture of a Russian in a furry hat...

Getting ready to go

It's been an eventful few days......

Here's the motley crew at Lonyearbyen (78 13') ready to fly out to Camp Barneo at 89 degrees N.

Here's an interesting article about how they put in the camp! they drop tractors and drivers by parachute to clear the runway. http://www.barneo.ru/2010e.htm

A ticket a plane and we're in Russian hands for the next few days..

Longyearbyen 78° 13'N

I went to check out of the hotel to catch the train to the airport this morning at 4am. My phone was off by three hours, so I went back to bed until 7.





The flight from Oslo to Tromso was spectacular. Snow-covered mountains, fjords and a blue blue sea. It closed in after that and was -6C (21F) and snowing when we arrived in Lonyearbyen and met up with Richard Donovan , the organizer, and the rest of the motley crew.









Longyeabyen has an operating coal mine, but the big business is tourism. The main street wasn't too busy at 4pm.



Interestingly, the world seed vault is here.


The entrance is by the airport. All the countries in the world send their seeds here for preservation.






The entire group met, had a quick briefing, packed our gear for the flight at 9am tomorrow and headed to the airport again to get briefed on the camp at the North Pole.

The airport was busy. Borneo, the north pole camp, opens on April 1st, so a BBC crew arrived today, as did Richard Attenborough, Prince Albert of Monaco and Zinedine Zidane.