)“Hi everybody ahhh just ahhh. finished doing 18 today and it was really quite an amazing day. Ahhh… Ray last night ahh.. got a some sort of food poisoning and ahhh was really really sick all night. He was out going to the toilet all night long and you can imagine how difficult that would be when you’re stuck getting out of a tent, in Antarctica, to go out to the toilet all night long and ahhh he was in a really bad state this morning and ahhh managed anyway to somehow suck it up and continue on with us. We did 18 nautical miles in complete whiteout conditions, ahhummm …with this…. with Ray basically not eating or drinking, which is quite incredible actually. So today that says a lot for that ahhh… that day in my mind his ability to just push himself is just truely astounding. Also I’d just like to say that we finally went beyond a road, and it’s an interesting thing that we’ve been kind of seeing in our visual periperhy for quite some time now, is that there is this cat track that ahhh… the people at ALE, they’re the outfitters that kind of run the operation here in Antartica, had pushed through all the way up to the Theil mountains. And the reason being that they needed to do sort of a cache depot for teams that need support as well as for fuel for the airplanes. Well this cat track could effectively be used by people if one was so inclined and would speed you up because it’s very much like a groomed trail; and we saw and ahhh the line went straight up 80 degrees like we wanted, but ahh… you know you only come to Antarctica once and and ahh.. we haven’t mentioned it yet because ahh…we just didn’t want to bring it up until we were done with this road, but we never touched it, and ahhh… we could see it in our visual periphery and we never skied on it and we never trekked on it and we just wanted to establish that as for the record just in case for the future. Ahh you got to do something right when you do it right, but now were past it 85, we see the Theil mountains to our west, and we’re psyched man we’re heading to the pole, we’ll talk again.”

(Anton) I think a little context is needed for this blog. I talked with Ray earlier about the road made by the snow cat. It appears that when investigating what the road was they saw tracks on the road, we don’t know who made them, but after 18 days of plowing through snowdrifts the team wanted to go on record that the tracks were not theirs.

dec22 (Listen to Audio

“Hey everybody it’s Ray calling from the South Pole Quest team, hope you’re all getting geared up and ready for the holidays. Ahhhummm were in our winter wonderland right now and we start out each day with a breakfast of mash potatos pemmican and coffee. And it is fantastic, it gives us all the energy we need. Plus we also have a special…. sandwich if you will, that’s Richard’s recipe and it’s two pieces of Russian flat bread. Sandwiched inside is butter, peanut butter and macadamia nut butter. It sounds crazy but it’s yum yum good. Anyhow we managed 20.5 ahhh miles and that was in part to our power breakfast that we had. Ahhum I should also mention that while we’re getting breakfast ready it’s someones job, and usually Richard gets stuck with the job (don’t tell him). ahhum to go out and bang all of the ice off of the tent, because you see it’ so cold at night, as we breathe and while we’re sleeping the outside of our tent ices up. So Richard will often go out there and bang all the ice off and then we enjoy our breakfast, out the door we go. I thought you might… would just like to know a little bit of our routine. That was our day for today. I hope everyone’s doing fantastic and we’ll talk to you tomorrow, Bye.”

dec21 (Listen to Audio)

“Ahhhh… today was absolutely fantastic, beautiful weather, much better than yesterday’s whiteout conditions. Although I must say icy cold winds definitely felt like it was slowing us down at little bit as we made our way uphill. We finished 19.2 miles, but ummm our routine got us going and we’ve got this routine that we stick to and this routine that actually we look forward to. I’ll tell you about breakfast another time, which involves a coffee in the morning and some fantastic ????? and pemmican which gets us going, but what I wanted to tell you about this time was how by our third or fourth march of the day, which sometimes they last several hours. The three of us start talking about how excited we are for dinner to have our pemican, and to be able to relax and unwind in the tent, because that’s when we’re outside, and it’s so cold and so blustery and we’re so exhausted. There’s nothing as nice as curling up into our down sleeping bags, into our little home which is our helsport tent for the period of this expedition and chow down on some pemmican and some pasta. I’m tellin ya it’s a little bit of heaven in Antarctica. Hope your all having a great day. I know it’s getting close to the holidays… it is the holidays… getting very close to Christmas there and I hope everyone is getting very very excited… ahhummm it’s a winter wonderland here. We’ll catch you tomorrow, bye.”

dec18 (Listen to Audio)

“Ahhh hey everybody it’s Ray calling from the South Pole Quest team to fill you in on our day, and certainly interesting stories. Something that we haven’t mentioned yet, before to you guys or at least I don’t think we have, is the fact that here in Antarctica we have to keep ourselves completely covered from the the harmful rays of the sun. Because the UV is so strong that anything remotely or slightly exposed will get burned. Ummm we wear special facemasks to protect us from the cold wind but also from the sun, and when the sun reflects off of the ground it can actually burn our lips or roof of our mouth if it is exposed to that sunlight for too long. Fortunately though today we had no sun. We managed 18 nautical miles which … I’m not sure think its around 36.. 35 K. ahhum.. we did it in complete whiteout the entire day. I think in the last hour of the day you know we got some light and mad a mad dash to get a couple of extra miles. Umm very dark day for us, really long hard trudging, still had to keep our faces covered though, because the UV is still there even though you can’t see five feet in front of you, have a great day we’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

dec18 (Listen to Audio)

“Hey everybody, it’s Kevin Ray and richard, we’re calling in to give you guys the blog for today, guess what we went over twenty nautical miles, as a matter of fact we went exactly twenty point one nautical miles which is a little like… a little more than thirty six kilometers. Uphill dragging sleds, so it was a fantastic day, a sunny day ahhhummm the sastrugi or snowdrifts if you will, were bad at times but didn’t slow us down. We were just so pumped up because we we’re just making such great time today, ahhumm that we flew errr.. flew all the way. hope you guys are enjoying the educational component ahhumm… I plan on checking most of them out again when I get home. I’m really excited about it and I’ve heard some great feedback from a lot of the students that are following along. Keep tracking us guys, we need all of your energy, that you so so much everybody for reading and following us everyday, have a great day, bye.”

dec17 (Listen to Audio)

The pictures we have received the last two days have been very pixelated. We will try to resolve the problem tonight.

Richard Webber “Today we started out again, still in the whiteout or semi whiteout whith quite hard visibility, but ahhh.. eventually the day cleared and got real nice and sunny now and we had skied on to a record of 19.2 miles, nautical miles which is about 35 kms. Everyones a little tired, but everyone’s quiet elated by how we’re doing, and that’s it for me, thank you very much.”

http://www.southpolequest.com/

My last week of classes after I got back from Nationals was spent trying to meet assignment deadlines. Everything was due on Friday and I had a few late nights as punishment for not staying on top of things throughout the semester. The team travelled to meets every other weekend so it was a challenge finding that missed time elsewhere in the week. I got it done though and had a sense of extreme relief and satisfaction when I handed everything in. One semester done.

I am almost finished my break from intense running. I spent the first week after my last xc race running at an easy pace for 45’ daily with a day off and one long run on the weekend. Last week I ran for 60’ at a steady pace daily. It was this week that my body finally clued in that I was indeed taking some down-time! I did a lot of resting and lying about that week since that’s all I wanted to do. I still got out for my runs though and started adding my plyometric and strength circuit back into the schedule with some added drills and active isolated stretching that my coach Jon suggested. I’ve also been using this time to focus on my form.

Jon had us running a low-intensity workout last Saturday. I wasn’t sure how peppy I’d feel after slothing about all week but it ended up feeling pretty good. Still, I felt I needed a bit more time to refuel and Jon agreed that now would be the perfect time to make sure I am rested and ready to face another intense training and racing period. I had a big year of training and another week of active rest won’t hurt. So, this week has been much like last week. I have been running at a steady pace for 60’ every day. On Sunday (which thankfully was a scheduled day off!) Victoria got 10cm of snow. This isn’t even worth mentioning in most parts of Canada but this city doesn’t plough the streets or sidewalks so snow-removal is in the hands of the sun and milder temperatures. Doing fast workouts this week would have been a challenge so my timing was good!

My training starts up again on Saturday and hopefully we will have decent conditions to run a grass workout. The UVic Vikes have already started training for the indoor track season although they must be struggling for running venues to replace the track workouts they had scheduled. It is covered in snow at the moment.

This will be my first time running an indoor track season and look forward (admittedly with some fear!) to this new experience. My main event will be the 3000m. The training and racing for this distance along with weekly xc workouts should prepare me well for the xc race(s) in March. I will start writing some regular posts once training is in full swing again after Christmas.

Ray “Well, I’ll tell you what, today I think I’ve seen it all. today we had absolute whiteout conditions. and umm. by whiteout I mean everything was absolutely white. You couldn’t tell the sky from the ground and it was so hard to make our way around. I’ve seen some very very bad sandstorms, but I’ll tell you what, to all the students that are following along and and tuning in to Dr. Affleck’s educational errr resource material; I’ll bet you he makes some sort of reference to these…. these whiteouts in Antarctica are something else, you can’t imagine.. you can’t even see your feet. finding our way across the antarctic landscape was almost impossible, but Richard had a compass set up where… it was almost like a tray in front of us, and we could see mmumn aahh Richard could see and I was able to trek, Kevin and I, and we were able to each take our turns reading the compass as it sat in front of us and so we were able to find our way, and it was really the only thing to look at that we could find our way. We were falling down, and all kinds of stuff as we made our way through the sastrugi, and sastrugi as you recall is the russian term used for snowdrift. So snowdrifts galore and yopu couldn’t see a thing as you were making your way through, but we still got 18 nautical miles done, which is close to 33 kilometers. It was an awsome exciting experience and I just got off the phone with my wife Kathy, and was telling her about it too and she couldn’t believe it so there you go, and she’s from Newfoundland and they’ve seen lots of thick fog in St. Johns so ahhh never seen anything like it. Have a great day.”
Kevin ” Today’s white out was quite amazing and ahhh and in a way the coolest part was ahh I was actually listening to my ipod and ahh (cough) on the ipod I was listening in to a book called ahh “blindness” by Jose Saramago, quite a, quite a well known book, and ahh it’s about people that actually go blind. though as they go blind, instead of going ink black blindness they go milky white blindness, and err it was exactly what we were seeing ourselves. Like we could see nothing but white, and err you loose… there’s a sense of vertigo and we were very much… I kept on thinking to myself, the way I was using my poles was like a preying mantis with it’s huge and err huge arms there probing ahead to see where drops had happened and like sort of sort of fall off things. Very tough day. But we still got our miles in and ahhh we’re all pretty shattered and hopefully we’ll have an easier day tomorrow, but there’s another storm seemingly rolling in right now. I like to wish my my wife Vicky a happy birthday today, Happy Birthday sweetheart, Bye.”

Day 11 — Ray (Listen to Audio)

Day 11 — Kevin (Listen to Audio)