It was on his eighth day harnessed to a 10st (63kg) sledge on the ragged ice of the Arctic only five weeks ago that Rupert Longsdon’s mind took a little holiday. “I was quite sure that there was a black London cab following us. I indicated it to my teammate Rory. I was pointing at an iceberg.”
The trip was conceived nine months previously in the pub that Longsdon, 32, runs in Coates, Gloucestershire. A patron asked him if he had ever considered the Scott Dunn Polar Challenge, in which teams of three amateur adventurers race 320 miles (515km) on skis from Resolute Bay, in Canada, to the Magnetic North Pole. Longsdon laughed off the idea, but visited the challenge’s website and was hooked. He found his first teammate within a week: Henry Cookson, 29, a childhood friend.
The third man, Rory Sweet, 38, another old school friend, stepped up just before Christmas and also agreed that his computer hardware company, Hardware.com, would help to raise the £30,000 team entry fee by sponsoring them. With 15 other teams, the three made a shambolic debut in faux-polar living at a training weekend high above Kaprun, in Austria, last January. “None of us had even camped before,” Longsdon says. An introduction to such essential survival skills as warp-speed tent erection and fire-free in-tent cooking inspired their team motto: “Safety last”.
They realised that they had to get a lot fitter. So over the next four months they scheduled 90 minutes running or cycling, a two-hour gym marathon or a ten-hour hike virtually every day. “It was tough,” says Cookson. “But worse was the mammoth weight gain. We were advised to ‘bulk up’ and it was fun at first — double portions and snacks all day — but it got pretty gross after a month. I gained nearly 2st.”
On April 18, the teams flew to Resolute Bay and for the next five days walked together to the start, receiving the last stages of their training and drills en route, at which Team Hardware.com was consistently the least efficient.
“Then we all set off into this vast white expanse,” says Longsdon, “a mixture of frozen ocean and rocky outcrops, dusted with thick powder snow that blew into drifts like shifting sands. Where the tide had pushed plates of surface ice together, there were stacks 30ft (9m)high of ice rubble. Different routes and speeds soon split us up and the weather determined whether we saw anyone else for days at a time.”
The season’s 24-hour sunlight blurred any sense of time and they marched until they dropped, and rested as little as their bodies could stand, framing the approximate days with huge breakfasts (as much sugar and chocolate powder-infused porridge as they could ingest) and dinners (pounds of pasta). Pocketfuls of chocolate chunks, cheese and Jelly Babies, which were grazed constantly, completed the daily menu.
“A cautionary tale about a competitor last year who suffered, er, personal frostbite when he forgot to do up his flies ensured that none of us relaxed too long while doing the necessary,” Longsdon says. The worst punishment was a touch of frostbite on Rory’s face.
They were asleep one evening when scrabbling outside the tent alerted them that a polar bear, “about the same size as our tent”, was sampling their supplies. “Each team carries a gun as a last resort,” Longsdon says, “but fortunately he moved off when we shouted at him. He got away with some hot-chocolate powder and sugar.”
An unexpected thrill greeted them on their arrival at the first of the course’s two checkpoints: they were in the lead, an hour ahead of unofficial favourites Commando Joe, an ex-Special Forces trio with Marines’ Arctic training. Out of nowhere, winning was suddenly a priority. The Hardware machine kicked up a gear. Daily targets topped 30 miles, and two to four hours became a night’s sleep. Their feet cracked and blistered but their spirits rose, to their latest rallying cry: “You snooze, you lose.” As winds made conversation impossible their iPods were indispensable, with the Rolling Stones and pounding techno giving great motivational power.
An increased but not unassailable five-hour lead at checkpoint two sparked a mad last dash; a 33-hour, 50-mile haul for home. “When winds raged, we could barely see the tips of our skis and every step faltered,” Sweet says. “But 14 hours later, when the sun spent a few hours on the horizon, everything glowed a beautiful orange. I just drifted along. Barely felt a thing.”
The cocktail of sleep deprivation, guts-orglory mentality and mild hallucination proved a winning combination when on May 3, slicing four days from the previous record, our boys crossed the finishing line, in 9 days, 11 hours and 55 minutes. “With so much time to think, I’d imagined finishing so many times I barely knew if we had really done it,” says Cookson. “Then came elation, for about 20 minutes. And then we went to sleep for a week.”
Pure magnetism
The Polar Challenge, since beginning in 2004, has put 23 teams of ordinary people on top of the world at the Magnetic North Pole. Taking place between mid-April and mid-May, extremes of weather and temperatures of -80C (-112F) mean that the race can take between ten days and four weeks.
Application forms for the 2006 challenge can be downloaded from polar-challenge.com. A non-refundable fee of £100 a head is payable with completed forms.
Training The website has advice on building strength, fitness and endurance. With two months to go, you should be able to handle a 90-minute-plus daily workout, plus two 10-hour hikes a week. Special skills trips are organised in Wales, Austria and the Arctic over the preceding five months, and are included in the cost.
Costs and kit Individuals pay £10,200, and teams £30,000, which includes travel, accommodation, insurance, food, specialist clothes and equipment, and 24-hour communication and safety support.
Diet A 30 per cent gain in stomach capacity is advised in the month before the start, achieved by scaling up a healthy diet and snacking on carbohydrate-rich foods — nuts, dried fruit, chocolate.
Reading Polar Dream, by Helen Thayer (NewSage Press, £7.68), the first woman to walk to the Magnetic North Pole describes the challenges. She did it solo.
TV See the 2005 race on C4’s Transworld Sport, today and next Saturday, at 7am.
Interested? Join organisers Venture Challenge for an open day about the 2006 event on June 19 at Wokefield Park, near Reading. To book, 01285 640423; or e-mail, philhb@venture-challenge.com
