Race across Antarctica

Winter in Antarctica tends to be when people start piling on the pounds. A lack of fieldwork and bad weather tend to stop getting off base as much as in the summer. Every week during the winter we have been weighing ourselves to monitor just how much our weight has been fluctuating. The person that puts on the most weight will be the winner of the “Fat Knacker” award at the end of the winter. None of us want to take that honour. So we were all pleased to hear about another winter tradition the race across Antarctica. This is a competition between all of the British bases to race a certain distance. Each year the distance varies, and this year it was decided to do a race between all of the bases. Bird Island to King Edward Point to Rothera to Halley. The total distance of this is 3992km, but to make it a bit more achievable the distance was halved to 1996km. 

A map showing the route we had to travel.

The methods of travel allowable were walking, running, cycling, rowing, and cross country skiing (no downhill was allowed for obvious reasons).  Some people wanted to allow kite skiing but this was classed as cheating as you are not travelling under your own steam. 

It was decided that each team would consist of four people; mainly because there are only 4 of us on the island so any more would give us a massive disadvantage. However we will still the underdogs as the other bases used the four people who had travelled the furthest distance each day, rather than sticking to the same four people. Understandably we weren’t too happy about that as we assumed they would be entering more than one team each. We had no choice, we would have to be covering decent distances every day to have a chance. 

Craig rowing on the jetty for a change of scenery.

The competition took just over two weeks to complete, and by the end of it we all had extremely sore backsides from the bike seat! On the plus I could feel muscles in my legs that hadn’t been there in quite a long time. After the first week we were falling behind, so we decided to really push ourselves and in the end we managed to win!!! We beat Halley by a day to be crowned the winners. We celebrated with a beer on the beach, and are now taking a well earned rest from the bike. A lot of the success is down to Craig our tech who completed the challenge a couple of years ago when he was at Halley. Most days he was racking up over 100km from a combination of rowing and cycling. It certainly gave the rest of us the motivation to keep going.