The race is organised by Richard Donovan who is an Irish ultra-marathon runner and organises fascinating extreme races. Among these are the North Pole Marathon, the Volcano Marathon (in the Atacama Desert in Chile where the runners are challenged by both heat and altitude) and the World Marathon Challenge where the participants race against the time to run 7 marathons in 7 days in 7 continents (7-7-7). My wish is to join all of his challenges.
Antarctic Ice Marathon is known as the earth’s southernmost marathon. It takes place at Union Glacier basecamp on the mainland. Even the summertime temperature with wind-chill varies between -20/-30 C. Runners are not only dealing with icy, snowy ground and cold weather but also with extremely strong winds.

In case you need the address, the race location is: 79°46′05″ South  83°15′42″ West 🙂

 

WHY DID I SIGN UP?
The race was mentioned to me by my friend, Rob Scott, who was preparing to ski the last 60 nautical miles (69 mi/111 km) to reach to the South Pole, which he has now successfully completed. I didn’t take much notice of it but clearly it was in my mind as I ended up looking it up one day and that was that, I had this butterfly feeling in my belly and knew that I had to go there.
Why exactly, is I don’t know but I think that the answer might be something like this: I am lucky to be quite driven by my nature and have this tendency to get deep into anything that I try. Marathon running made me realise that you really have to put lots of mental effort which I love and to do that, you almost have to be with yourself in a different dimension. This is not a feeling that’s unique to me, most runners experience this and the body gets to a level of exhaustion that you are almost in a meditative state, putting one foot in front of another and pushing yourself beyond your limits. And, when you come out of it, you feel what they call the “runners high”, a joyful state of being. Going through something like this also make you very confident. So, all of these combined plus the sheer beauty of the continent meant that I had signed up.