Preparations & the Pre-Trip Story

(Our journal began with some introductory comments and explanations about how we came to do this trip, and the things we did to prepare for it. There is also the story of the injury that nearly put Mike out of running commission before the trip ever started.

For anyone thinking about doing such an adventure themselves, I recommend you read this section. However, if you are not interested in these details, feel free to skip on ahead to the story of the trip itself.)


Preliminaries:

1) How we found this trip & when we signed up

It was late summer, 2003, and Joan was looking ahead to her 50th birthday, and trying to come to personal terms with reaching that age. One thing she decided would help her would be to run another marathon, to prove she could do one past the age of 50. We were running one in December, 2003 (Huntsville), but technically while she was still 49, and that did not count. She started checking for other marathons in the March/April, 2004 timeframe or beyond, and while she was at it, she figured, let’s make it interesting and look for an international one. So, she started an internet search, and that led her to a list of international marathons, which she started reading through. Then she found it. “How about Antarctica?”, she asked innocently enough. My first reaction: “You’re crazy!!” I could not imagine doing anything so extreme, in such a harsh climate…. That was obviously for the polar explorer type. But then she started reading more about it, and I started reading, and it started sounding…. Well, pretty cool!

The course sounded like it could be very difficult, but the scientifically-oriented nature of the rest of the trip down the Antarctic Peninsula really started to appeal. We read more, we contacted the web site, and had a couple of phone calls with the Marathon Tours people who conduct the trip. In the key conversation for me, talking with Cliff, I asked: “We are 5+ hour marathoners. If we are out there with 2:30 marathoners on this very difficult course, are we likely to be blown away, and be a distant last? Or rather, is the course likely to be a great equalizer?” He thought it was much more likely to be an equalizer. Hence, rather than being in an event in which we were completely out of our league, it sounded like we might just be able to fit in, if we train hard and get the right equipment. And so, we wound up sending in our signup forms and our deposits, and found ourselves with a reserved spot for the most bizarre-sounding marathon possible. It was September 3, 2003. The Marathon date was February 26, 2005, almost 18 months away.


2) Start of training / training schedule with Tamara

At first, even though we were officially signed up and had sent in some money, it all seemed like a hypothetical concept, not a real, tangible goal. It was still too remote, both in time and in our ability to visualize it. And we had other major events/goals scheduled in the meantime. The Huntsville marathon in December. A major trip to Peru to hike the Inca Trail and visit Machu Picchu in April, 2004. But once we were past the Peru trip, Antarctica loomed as the next big goal, and so we started the early planning. We constructed our training schedule / timeline for it, backing out the usual 26 weeks from the Marathon date. We concluded that we needed to start training around September 13. We got a head start, and began running around Labor Day.

At the same time, Tamara Smith, our friend and running partner, was looking at doing another marathon herself, in the similar timeframe. And so we started following the training schedule together. We began with long runs of around 6 miles, and built up weekly from there. Having partners to train with really helped each of us, and kept us on track. As the miles increased, we did some runs at Lunken, and we did some occassional runs downtown to experience the Mt. Adams hills, but the majority of our runs were done in our neighborhood, and around the track at Julif Park. Joan and I also did some running in a more off-road setting, since the Antarctic course was likely to be dirt/gravel/snow/slush, and not paved roads. We did some runs on the grass perimeter around the Julif / Nagel complex, but eventually stopped that for fear of turning an ankle on some of the uneven terrain. We tried some runs at Woodland Mound park, but there most of the running opportunities were still paved. Then we tried the trails at Withrow Nature Preserve, and that ended up being an excellent off-road training setting, with some good hills, and probably the most similar environment we found to our eventual race course.

As we moved into Winter, we began to look for the colder, snowier days. We had now obtained the key equipment that we were going to need – cold weather clothing, trail shoes, etc., and we were delighted by the fact that the Cincinnati winter this year proved to have some unusually cold, windy and snowy days. Whenever such a day occurred, while most of the rest of Cincinnati was curled up in front of their fireplaces at home, we would try to do a run at Withrow. It was excellent training, and an excellent confidence builder in our clothes and in our ability to handle these conditions.


3) Details on running preparation, and a description of the physical injury that nearly put me (Mike) out of commission.

(This was from an email message, written about 2 months after the trip was over. Jeff, a runner from Kansas who we met on the trip, was preparing to write a how-to training guide for others who might want to do the Antarctica run, and asked fellow travellers for their input, advice, and experiences.)

Hi there, Jeff.Kansas! This is Mike Weingarten (Cincinnati), and I think your book is a great idea! Happy to contribute a few thoughts and experiences from my wife, Joan Thomas, and myself.

The first thing that I will say is that one of the biggest challenges that training for Antarctica presented for us was the simple fact that there were so many unknowns. What would the weather really be like? What will the course be like? Do we need to train for absolutely brutal conditions, or would this likely be just a typical, cold-weather run? After having run it now, I guess I feel I know the answers .... for February 26, 2005! But I am also sensitized to the great variability in conditions that one can experience there, and so am concluding that there will always be some significant level of unknown attached to this run.

Joan and I, and a running partner who was training for another (traditional) marathon at around the same time, basically followed one of Jeff Galloway's less aggressive training plans, a plan we have followed successfully before. We are not regular, nor competitive, marathon runners like many we met on the Ioffe -- Joan and I had each run just 3 marathons before, all in the 5 - 5 1/2 hour range. At the start of our training for this one, we needed to work our way up in conditioning from our normal 4-6 mile runs. The plan had us doing that over a period of about 6 months, gradually increasing long runs on the weekends, pushing the long runs up only once every 2 weeks when we got to 12 miles, and once every 3 weeks when we got to 20. Joan ended up following the plan perfectly, but I did not. More on this below.

Most of the training, early on, was just on our normal neighborhood running course, but then Joan and I bought the trail shoes that we would run the marathon in, and struggled a bit with how best to train in these. We tried running the perimeter of a local park/school complex, on the grass, and found that that was a LOT more work than just running on pavement. That scared us a bit. We also found that the uneven nature of the turf in the fields we were running in seemed to put our knees and ankles at risk of an inadvertant misstep or twist, and that was even scarier. So we stopped doing that.

Then we found a local nature preserve that had excellent hard dirt trails in a 1.6 mile loop, with some moderate hills, but reasonably stable footing, and we started to use this as a training site, perhaps once every week or so. In retrospect, those trails provided the best, most relevant conditions for what we would eventually face, at least on the part of the King George Island course that was runable!

We wondered about cold weather. It was nice that Cincinnati winters coincide with Antarctic summers, and we tried to take advantage of the colder days during training. We actually had an unusual number of cold, windy, snowy days this year. A few days we had a couple of inches of blowing snow and wind chills in the single digits F. We were probably the only two people in Cincinnati (except for maybe Joe) who were delighted to see them! We would try to plan for the part of the day when the conditions were to be the worst, and head to the trails. I think running on the trails in this weather helped psychologically. It boosted our confidence in our cold-weather clothing/equipment, and made us feel we were getting ready, and that we could handle as difficult a set of conditions as Cincinnati could offer. We did not want to feel like we were ever "wimping out" on the worst weather here, because we figured that whatever it was here, it could be worse on the real run. Little did we know that these conditions in Cincinnati for the most part would be much worse than the actual run conditions! But my guess is that we were just very lucky on February 26th, and that it could have been much different.

The only other point I would make about training is the fact that midway through, I developed a fairly serious case of tendonitis in the left knee. Given how many others on the Ioffe, I later learned, were actually dealing with some sort of injury during their training, this may be more of a general-interest topic vs. just a single person's unique experience. For me, my knee started getting very sore at the end of October, after I had reached about 15 miles in training. I stopped training completely for 3-4 weeks, then did several weeks of working out on the eliptical trainer at a local health club, figuring that avoiding knee impact but still maintaining aerobics was the way to go. I think this did help a lot, but some drawbacks: a) it was still an atypical motion vs. running -- my feet would go numb after a couple of hours of this! b) After a while, I would still feel pain in the knee, so it was not completely resting the knee; and c) it was boring as hell !
In mid-December, I figured this was not working, and went to my doctor again, who referred me to a specialist, who found that I had very poor flexibility in my hamstrings, and recommended physical therapy for that. (By the way, for anyone needing medical attention while training for this marathon, tell your doctor what you are training for. I found that it really got their attention in a positive way -- captured their imagination, as it had with many of our friends -- and they really helped by facilitating referral processes, etc. and getting me appointments as quickly as possible. They were great.)

I started physical therapy on January 3. Really worked on stretches and building knee and leg strength. Two weeks later (exactly 7 weeks before marathon day), I went back out on the road for the first time and ran 2 miles. I pushed it to 5 miles, then 8 miles on the trails within the next 2 weeks. I found that running on the trails was easier on my knee than the pavement, and that if I walked the downhills, and stayed conscious of my stride, I could manage the stress and the pain on the knee. Four weeks before the marathon, I was on a business trip for a week in San Jose, Costa Rica (not exactly Antarctic conditions). I used a treadmill during the week at the hotel, but then got stuck there over my normal long run day, when ice storms in Atlanta forced my flight out of San Jose to be cancelled. A very nice man from the office there, a runner himself, took me that Saturday morning to La Sabana, a downtown park in San Jose, and got me successfully through a 15 mile run there. A moral victory -- back into double digits, with a month to go, and not letting logistical constraints stop me! Back in Cincinnati, 2 weeks before the marathon, I did my final long run... 21 miles on the trails in the Nature Preserve. And at that point, I declared myself as ready as I was going to get.

So, how prepared was I? In some ways, better than I thought I'd be. And in other ways, not at all. You know the run. We lucked out weather-wise, and all of my cold-weather preparations and training were more than adequate. (I wasn't prepared though, for how cold it got at the end, when the winds kicked up, and we were done running and trying to get shoes off, boots on, and wait for zodiacs to take us "home".) My knee did great. Because of the nature of the course, we found that we needed to walk so frequently to get past one obstacle or another, that I never really felt like I stressed the knee, and the forced run/walk approach helped push my endurance past the 21 miles I did in training. What I was not prepared for was the extent and difficulty of the obstacles. The mud. The baseball sized rocks that we found we HAD to walk over. Fording streams. The glacier. What an ugly, awful course, by normal marathon standards. But what fun! And what a sense of accomplishment!

So to sum up, here would be my advice to someone training for Antarctica for the first time:
-Find a place with good hard-dirt trails like we did, and at least alternate with road training to get some time in those conditions.
-If you can get in some good cold-weather training, do it. If nothing else, it will give you a chance to test your running clothes and will boost your confidence.
-Work on strengthening of knees and ankles. They will be put as much to the test as your basic endurance. But do it through strengthening exercises, vs. running in conditions that risk injury.
-Train some while carrying your water bottle. I don't usually run with a water bottle in hand, but I ended up doing that during the actual run, as I found the planned water stops inadequate.
-Get the right mindset.... unless you are planning on winning the race (in which case, I am the wrong one to ask for advice, anyway!), go planning to take some extra time and enjoy the experience. This will not be the run on which you hit your PR, accept that! There is so much more to gain from this marathon than anything having to do with what the race clock says.

Well, I was planning to give you a quick answer, but you got me started, and look what happened... I wrote my own book! Hope this helps.... feel free to use whatever of this you think would be useful. And let me know if you have any followup questions. Would be interested in getting an eventual copy of whatever you end up with.... let me know how to do that.

Thanks, Jeff, and good luck!
--Mike


Last point, for the record: Jorge Gutierrez was the person in Costa Rica who helped me get that 15 mile run in that day when I was “stranded” in San Jose. He is a terrific runner, but was willing to go at my slow pace for most of the circuits of La Sabana. We talked and got to know each other, and I credit him with keeping me on a training schedule that had no more "give" in it for delay.


4) Charitable Fund Raising approach

In November, after having numerous people ask us if we were doing this crazy event for some “cause”, we began to think that maybe we should. After all, it seemed that it was an unusual enough challenge to capture attention and the imagination of many, so why not use that attention to do some good? We wrote a letter to our friends and co-workers stating that we would be dedicating this run to Joan’s mother and Mike’s father, and requested that voluntary contributions be made to the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association, in honor of “Joan’s and Mike’s Antarctic Adventure”. We enclosed it in our Xmas cards, and distributed it at our work places. We don’t know how much actually ended up being contributed, because we encouraged anonymous donations, but we do know of perhaps 10 or 12 contributions that were made to one or both organizations for this.


(Text of the letter we sent to our family, friends and colleagues. And I guess if one has read this far and is so inclined, there is no reason that they cannot use this as an excuse to make a contribution today to one or both of these charities. If you do that and want to let us know, great, but anonymous is just fine, too.)


December 17, 2004

To our Family & Friends
SUBJECT: Joan’s & Mike’s Antarctic Adventure

As many of you already know, we are now in training for the ultimate marathon….. one to be run on an island off the coast of Antarctica in February. Go ahead, call us crazy, but we are really excited about this challenge and experience!

We must admit that this started as just a personal quest for adventure, but after having a number of people ask: “Is there some cause that you are doing this for…?” we’ve decided that maybe we ought to choose one. It might help those people who cannot believe that someone would want to run 26 miles in Antarctica just for fun! And perhaps we could actually use this event to do some good for others.

We have each sadly lost one of our parents, one to cancer, the other to heart disease. So, we have decided to dedicate our effort to their memories, Mrs. Mary Thomas and Mr. Hy Weingarten, in the hope that we can contribute something to help others who suffer from these awful diseases. So here’s the deal:

For anyone who wants to participate, we simply ask that you make a donation in any amount you wish to a chapter of either one or both of the following:
-The American Heart Association
-The American Cancer Society.
The addresses for your local chapters should be listed in your telephone book. The addresses of the Cincinnati chapters are included below. Write a short note and tell them that it is in honor of “Joan’s & Mike’s Antarctic Adventure”.

You may do this anonymously – we don’t need to know who is contributing. But if you wish, you can ask the chapter to send an acknowledgement to us at our home address, just stating that a contribution was made (they don’t divulge the amount).

If you don’t want to mess with all of this and just want to contribute, you can send your checks to us and we will forward them on. (But please make the checks out to the appropriate organization name, not to us.)

That’s it. No pressure, no collection quotas, no need to identify yourselves if you don’t want to. But if a few extra dollars find their way into the research efforts for these diseases as a result of our escapade, then that will make us very happy!

Thank you!


Joan Thomas & Mike Weingarten



Cincinnati Chapter Addresses:

The American Heart Association (Updated address - 1/2/10)
5211 Madison Road
Cincinnati, OH 45227

The American Cancer Society
2808 Reading Rd.
Cincinnati, OH 45206