By Joseph White
The winner of the North Pole Marathon has finally thawed out.
Well, maybe.
“My thumb right here just went numb,” said Sean Burch, rubbing his left thumb as he sat in the living room of his Virginia home. “It still feels like it’s asleep, which is very strange. It started freezing up after Lap 2. I think I’ve got some nerve damage.”
On April 10, Burch was running his first marathon in windy, 25-degrees-below-zero conditions, trying to keep his eyes from freezing shut. Wearing snowshoes and jumping over cracks in the Arctic Ocean ice, Burch won the third annual race, which literally takes place on the top of the world.
Burch topped a 15-runner field to win in three hours, 43 minutes and 17 seconds – more than 13 minutes ahead of second-place finisher, renowned British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
“Marathons don’t interest me,” said the 33-year-old Burch, who runs his own fitness company. “But a marathon at the North Pole? Wow! OK, now you’ve got my attention. I’m definitely more into unique types of things.”
Unique is certainly a word to describe the North Pole race, the only marathon run completely on water.
Such a deal
Contestants paid $8,500 just to enter – Burch raised his money through sponsors – and were taken to the race’s camp site from Norway via a Russian cargo plane.
“That’s probably one of the most scariest parts of the whole thing,” Burch said, “I don’t think the Russians are really too much on maintenance.”
Two years ago, the first race was a solo effort by Irish runner Richard Donovan over the exact North Pole, but a whiteout forced him and his support helicopter to move to a safer area so he could finish.
Donovan now organizes the race, and this year he based the marathon at a camp less than a degree of latitude from the true north. The runners arrived in the evening, and Burch was expecting to sleep in a heated tent and run the race the next afternoon.
Set to go
Instead, Donovan set up the course and decided conditions were good to go. It wasn’t cloudy. The wind wasn’t too bad. Everybody was pumped.
So they ran the race under the midnight sun in the wee hours of April 10. Everyone was covered from head to toe to fight hypothermia, and Russian guards with shotguns stood watch for polar bears.
“It’s a race where you venture into the unknown,” Donovan said from his home in Ireland. “You’re running on the ice. There’s the thrill, the element of danger. People know they’re doing something different.”
With the race under way, the cold took its toll immediately.
“Your goggles fog up. You take them off so you can see the course,” Burch said. “The wind would start going through you, you start tearing up, then your eyes would start freezing together.”
Burch found the course race, eight laps around a loop, surprising hilly because of pressure ridges where ice floes had collided. He took the lead on the fourth lap and often found himself out of sight of anyone or anything, a peaceful solitude except for the concern over what to do if he spotted a bear. Donovan said the chances of an attack are remote, but Burch kept an eye out nonetheless.
Then there were the discomforting cracks in the ice. “Watch your step” took on a whole new meaning.
“You can hear the rumble underneath as you step,” said Burch, who is familiar with judging ice thickness from his experience climbing mountains. “Different steps create different sounds, so I could tell.”
At the end of every lap, Burch ran into a heated tent for a minute or so to thaw out and rehydrate. Every runner took a break every lap – the conditions are just too brutal to run continuously – even though the official race clock was always running.
Some runners were trembling from the cold and needed 10 minutes or longer to warm up after a lap. The last place runner took more than 20 hours to complete the race – finishing long after the leaders had gone to sleep – but everyone who entered ran the full 26.2 miles.
Burch got a trophy but no prize money for his victory. He said he ran the race for the challenge and to show that his fitness program works. Coming off a knee injury, he did all his training in one month indoors on a treadmill, never coming close to running a marathon distance.
Otherwise, Burch is all about outdoor thrills. He climbed Mt. Everest without a guide last year and has conquered summits in Greenland and Alaska. He’s more of a solo adventurer and motivator than a competitor, so running a marathon was somewhat out of character.
But this was such a thrill that it deserves a sequel. Donovan once ran a marathon in Antarctica, and Burch would like to do the same.
“I’m definitely going to do the South Pole,” Burch said. “It might come down to me doing it by myself.”