==========================
THE COOLEST RACE ON EARTH
Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the
Antarctica Marathon
by John Hanc (nonfiction)
Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
ISBN: 9781556527388
Copyright (c) 2009 by John Hanc
RACE (Part 3 of 5)
======================================
I ran all these marathons, and, oh, just to see what it was like, I
was even willing to deliberately "walk" a marathon, one very long
day in Phoenix.
In participating in such events, most of them on the margins and
outside the throngs that choke the streets of the big-city marathons
every weekend of the spring and fall, I began to realize that I was
witness to a trend. People were looking for an adventure, and
completing a marathon race in an offbeat location seemed to fit the
bill, offering the opportunity to view a distant horizon while they
went the distance, so to speak.
Of course, you don't need a travel agent to run or walk 26.2 miles.
Currently, according to the Web site www.marathonguide.com, there
are 384 marathons held every year in the United States and more than
500 internationally. Almost every major U.S. city, and many of the
largest cities in Europe, now hosts an annual marathon or half
marathon (13.1 miles) race. But while the big, urban marathons, such
as New York, Boston, London, or Chicago, attract the largest single-
day fields, what www.marathonguide.com termed an "amazing" trend has
emerged. According to the Web site's analysis, as of early 2008 the
thirty largest marathons accounted for just 57 percent of all
finishers (compared to 71 percent as recently as 2006). This, they
believe, suggests that the appeal of the sport is trickling down to
smaller events and, no doubt, to events in unusual places. Other
observers of the sport agree. "It's definitely the case that more
marathon runners are looking for opportunities to do their thing in
more and more far-flung locations," says Hugh Jones, the London-
based secretary of the Association of International Marathons.
"Running a marathon offers a ready-made opportunity to connect with
the local scene, to meet others from a different background on some
kind of common ground."
No ground was more remote or, for that matter, muddier or rockier
than that of the marathon held in Antarctica. I'd heard about this
race after it was first held in 1995, but it wasn't until four years
later that I realized it might represent the way for me to finally
do what, on some level, I'd wanted to do since I was a ten-year-old
kid with my head in the sky.
What put it all into motion was a phone call I received from a
runner named Fred Lipsky.
Like me, Lipsky lives in the New York City megasuburb of Long
Island. He had just returned home from an excellent adventure, and
he wanted to tell me all about it. This is nothing new: runners and
weight lifters and aerobic dancers and karate instructors, or their
public relations people, are always badgering me, telling me about
some hot, new class they're offering or how they lifted a Mack truck
over their heads, completed their first 5K walk, lost fifty pounds,
or raised a thousand dollars during a charity walk--and shouldn't
that be covered in the paper?
In most cases, the answer is "Congratulations, but...no."
Lipsky, however, had done something truly special. He'd been to
Antarctica, where he had run...a "marathon." I had heard about this,
how some crazy travel agent in Boston had organized a footrace near
the bottom of the world. It wasn't until I sat with Lipsky, though,
that I began to get jazzed up about it. Diminutive, fast talking,
and with a wry sense of humor, he invited me to join him for dinner
at a Portuguese restaurant where he was well known and feted like a
king, owing to his having patrolled the high-crime neighborhood
around the restaurant for years as a beat cop. Over beers and shrimp
paella, I listened and scribbled notes as he told me his tale and
illustrated it with what appeared to be about a thousand photos he'd
taken, many of them showing him standing with penguins. "You
wouldn't believe how bad they smelled," he said, his mustache
crinkling in disgust.
But penguins were only part of it. Fred told me about swimming in
the caldera of an extinct volcano, of partying till dawn as forty-
foot waves rocked his ship, of running under the most fantastic of
conditions. As I thumbed through the photos, listened to his
talking, and sipped my beer, it began to sink in. He'd been there.
And he hadn't just gone there--he'd run a marathon there.
"It feels like I just got back from another planet," Lipsky said,
shaking his head at the end of his tale of endurance.
I almost dropped my fork. Another planet! A vision of "Freedom 7"
lifting off on that long-ago spring day flashed through my mind--
mingling with some blurry recollections of the British miniseries
about Scott and Amundsen. Driving home from our dinner that night,
the adventure dream, the astronaut dream, reemerged from the margins
of my consciousness. This, I thought, would be a way to do it all.
At the rate our space program was going, there was no way now that I
would ever get an opportunity to orbit the Earth or land on the
moon--even as a tourist.
I'd like to say that I ran right out of the restaurant and signed up
for the next Antarctica Marathon, but I didn't. Instead I raced home
and wrote two thousand words about Lipsky and the smelly penguins,
about the race and his experiences. As part of my research, I
interviewed Thom Gilligan, the marathon organizer, and read Caroline
Alexander's then-new book "The Endurance," on Ernest Shackleton and
his ill-fated but heroic voyage south. The story about Fred Lipsky's
excellent adventure appeared on the cover of "Newsday;" the next day
it was in the recyclable pile, and I had moved on to the next
assignment. But I couldn't stop thinking about the marathon in
Antarctica. The race seemed to offer an opportunity to satisfy two
great passions in my life, the unfulfilled need for adventure and
the urge to run marathons. I realized that this was the opportunity
I had been waiting for since I failed the geometry final that drove
home the realization that I was too dumb to be an astronaut, ever
since I woke up and saw that my life was about to slip away without
a proper, new-world, end-of-the-Earth adventure. I had no hope of
going into outer space as an astronaut or a billionaire tourist. I
was too old and settled to jump into a sports car and drive across
the country. I was too chicken to try to climb Mount Everest. But
this..."this" might fit the bill. A trip to Antarctica, and not
"just" a trip, but one in which I would have to do something hard
and memorable and, in the process, experience another world.
Here it was--nice, neat, packaged, and laced up like a new pair of
running shoes.
I just couldn't pass this up. Still, Phoenix or even Prague was one
thing, but to convince my ever-supportive wife that I should be
allowed to drop everything and leave her and our young son for two
weeks to go to Antarctica, I would need a reason. A good reason. I
would need, as we say in the news business, a "peg"--something to
hang our story on, some reason why we should be telling this story
now, as opposed to next year or two months ago, if at all.
Round numbers and anniversaries are always convenient pegs for such
stories, and I suddenly realized I had a good one:
On January 27, 2005, I would turn fifty years old.
One month later, the seventh Antarctica Marathon would be held.
This was my time to do it, to do something crazier than all the
crazy marathons I'd done before. But I didn't realize just how many
loonies had already landed in Antarctica. Nor did I appreciate what
it had taken to make the whole thing possible--a long route traveled
by a guy whose own life had, oddly enough, moved on a parallel path
with mine for a while. My Antarctica Marathon story can't be told
without his.
THE COOLEST RACE ON EARTH
Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the
Antarctica Marathon
by John Hanc (nonfiction)
Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
ISBN: 9781556527388
Copyright (c) 2009 by John Hanc
RACE (Part 3 of 5)
======================================
I ran all these marathons, and, oh, just to see what it was like, I
was even willing to deliberately "walk" a marathon, one very long
day in Phoenix.
In participating in such events, most of them on the margins and
outside the throngs that choke the streets of the big-city marathons
every weekend of the spring and fall, I began to realize that I was
witness to a trend. People were looking for an adventure, and
completing a marathon race in an offbeat location seemed to fit the
bill, offering the opportunity to view a distant horizon while they
went the distance, so to speak.
Of course, you don't need a travel agent to run or walk 26.2 miles.
Currently, according to the Web site www.marathonguide.com, there
are 384 marathons held every year in the United States and more than
500 internationally. Almost every major U.S. city, and many of the
largest cities in Europe, now hosts an annual marathon or half
marathon (13.1 miles) race. But while the big, urban marathons, such
as New York, Boston, London, or Chicago, attract the largest single-
day fields, what www.marathonguide.com termed an "amazing" trend has
emerged. According to the Web site's analysis, as of early 2008 the
thirty largest marathons accounted for just 57 percent of all
finishers (compared to 71 percent as recently as 2006). This, they
believe, suggests that the appeal of the sport is trickling down to
smaller events and, no doubt, to events in unusual places. Other
observers of the sport agree. "It's definitely the case that more
marathon runners are looking for opportunities to do their thing in
more and more far-flung locations," says Hugh Jones, the London-
based secretary of the Association of International Marathons.
"Running a marathon offers a ready-made opportunity to connect with
the local scene, to meet others from a different background on some
kind of common ground."
No ground was more remote or, for that matter, muddier or rockier
than that of the marathon held in Antarctica. I'd heard about this
race after it was first held in 1995, but it wasn't until four years
later that I realized it might represent the way for me to finally
do what, on some level, I'd wanted to do since I was a ten-year-old
kid with my head in the sky.
What put it all into motion was a phone call I received from a
runner named Fred Lipsky.
Like me, Lipsky lives in the New York City megasuburb of Long
Island. He had just returned home from an excellent adventure, and
he wanted to tell me all about it. This is nothing new: runners and
weight lifters and aerobic dancers and karate instructors, or their
public relations people, are always badgering me, telling me about
some hot, new class they're offering or how they lifted a Mack truck
over their heads, completed their first 5K walk, lost fifty pounds,
or raised a thousand dollars during a charity walk--and shouldn't
that be covered in the paper?
In most cases, the answer is "Congratulations, but...no."
Lipsky, however, had done something truly special. He'd been to
Antarctica, where he had run...a "marathon." I had heard about this,
how some crazy travel agent in Boston had organized a footrace near
the bottom of the world. It wasn't until I sat with Lipsky, though,
that I began to get jazzed up about it. Diminutive, fast talking,
and with a wry sense of humor, he invited me to join him for dinner
at a Portuguese restaurant where he was well known and feted like a
king, owing to his having patrolled the high-crime neighborhood
around the restaurant for years as a beat cop. Over beers and shrimp
paella, I listened and scribbled notes as he told me his tale and
illustrated it with what appeared to be about a thousand photos he'd
taken, many of them showing him standing with penguins. "You
wouldn't believe how bad they smelled," he said, his mustache
crinkling in disgust.
But penguins were only part of it. Fred told me about swimming in
the caldera of an extinct volcano, of partying till dawn as forty-
foot waves rocked his ship, of running under the most fantastic of
conditions. As I thumbed through the photos, listened to his
talking, and sipped my beer, it began to sink in. He'd been there.
And he hadn't just gone there--he'd run a marathon there.
"It feels like I just got back from another planet," Lipsky said,
shaking his head at the end of his tale of endurance.
I almost dropped my fork. Another planet! A vision of "Freedom 7"
lifting off on that long-ago spring day flashed through my mind--
mingling with some blurry recollections of the British miniseries
about Scott and Amundsen. Driving home from our dinner that night,
the adventure dream, the astronaut dream, reemerged from the margins
of my consciousness. This, I thought, would be a way to do it all.
At the rate our space program was going, there was no way now that I
would ever get an opportunity to orbit the Earth or land on the
moon--even as a tourist.
I'd like to say that I ran right out of the restaurant and signed up
for the next Antarctica Marathon, but I didn't. Instead I raced home
and wrote two thousand words about Lipsky and the smelly penguins,
about the race and his experiences. As part of my research, I
interviewed Thom Gilligan, the marathon organizer, and read Caroline
Alexander's then-new book "The Endurance," on Ernest Shackleton and
his ill-fated but heroic voyage south. The story about Fred Lipsky's
excellent adventure appeared on the cover of "Newsday;" the next day
it was in the recyclable pile, and I had moved on to the next
assignment. But I couldn't stop thinking about the marathon in
Antarctica. The race seemed to offer an opportunity to satisfy two
great passions in my life, the unfulfilled need for adventure and
the urge to run marathons. I realized that this was the opportunity
I had been waiting for since I failed the geometry final that drove
home the realization that I was too dumb to be an astronaut, ever
since I woke up and saw that my life was about to slip away without
a proper, new-world, end-of-the-Earth adventure. I had no hope of
going into outer space as an astronaut or a billionaire tourist. I
was too old and settled to jump into a sports car and drive across
the country. I was too chicken to try to climb Mount Everest. But
this..."this" might fit the bill. A trip to Antarctica, and not
"just" a trip, but one in which I would have to do something hard
and memorable and, in the process, experience another world.
Here it was--nice, neat, packaged, and laced up like a new pair of
running shoes.
I just couldn't pass this up. Still, Phoenix or even Prague was one
thing, but to convince my ever-supportive wife that I should be
allowed to drop everything and leave her and our young son for two
weeks to go to Antarctica, I would need a reason. A good reason. I
would need, as we say in the news business, a "peg"--something to
hang our story on, some reason why we should be telling this story
now, as opposed to next year or two months ago, if at all.
Round numbers and anniversaries are always convenient pegs for such
stories, and I suddenly realized I had a good one:
On January 27, 2005, I would turn fifty years old.
One month later, the seventh Antarctica Marathon would be held.
This was my time to do it, to do something crazier than all the
crazy marathons I'd done before. But I didn't realize just how many
loonies had already landed in Antarctica. Nor did I appreciate what
it had taken to make the whole thing possible--a long route traveled
by a guy whose own life had, oddly enough, moved on a parallel path
with mine for a while. My Antarctica Marathon story can't be told
without his.
选择“Disable on www.wenxuecity.com”
选择“don't run on pages on this domain”
