Facing a 1,000km race across the icy wastelands of the Antarctic is a daunting challenge, particularly when one of the three-man team is blind, writes ROBBIE MEREDITH.
FOR ME, JANUARY is a month when I finally resolve to get in some sort of shape again after weeks of festive excess. Track pants and trainers which have lain mouldering and forgotten are hauled from the bottom of the wardrobe, and I might even make it as far as the front door before the chill wind and horizontal Irish rain drives me back to the duvet and another mug of hot chocolate. If, in the brief gaps between gales, I manage to puff for a mile or two round the local park, I come home feeling like I’ve run the Olympic marathon.
Many people share similar new year experiences, but not, I suspect, Mark Pollock or Simon O’Donnell. For a start, both of them look like they could lap Phoenix Park several times without even breaking a sweat, and secondly, this month, while the rest of us are trying to drag ourselves out of the front door, they are racing as a team for hundreds of miles in sub-zero temperatures across some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth.
And, as if taking part in the South Pole Race across Antarctica to the geographic South Pole isn’t already difficult enough, the two Irishmen face an additional challenge, as Pollock, from Holywood in Co Down, is blind. He lost the sight in his right eye when he was five, but didn’t let his handicap inhibit him. By the time he was in his early 20s, he was studying business and economics at Trinity College and was a notable rower.
But in 1998, his life changed when he lost his sight completely. “I had my driving licence, could read, all was going well, but then I got an unexpected detached retina when I was 22. I was rowing internationally and had a job offer in London, and the sight went in the space of two weeks.” He had two operations to try to restore his sight, but gradually Pollock was forced to accept that he’d never see again. “At the beginning I was trying to get people to look it up on the internet to find out if there was a cure, as I was in denial. For three or four months I couldn’t deal with it, as although I couldn’t see, they were still talking about operations. I didn’t really know what I was facing, so when I was finally told in the middle of July 1998 that they couldn’t do any more operations, the choice was to lie in bed for the rest of my life, which was proving very difficult to do, or to just go and get on a computer course and start re-skilling myself.”
He couldn’t take up the banking job in London he’d been promised, but found alternative work at home. In addition, he took up rowing again, and was so successful at the sport that he won a silver and bronze medal for Northern Ireland at the 2002 Commonwealth Rowing Championships, sparking a desire for more challenges.
“After that I started getting into adventure racing,” he says. “I did six marathons in a week in the Gobi desert, went to the North Pole to do a marathon, did the Everest marathon, iron man triathlon, kayaked across the Irish Sea, all sorts of things.”
It was through kayaking that Pollock first got to know O’Donnell. They had been contemporaries at Trinity College, but had known each other only through mutual friends. O’Donnell, from Dublin, took up rugby coaching after university, with Clontarf RFC and Belvedere College, but he also had a passion for adventure sports.
“A few years after we finished college I heard that Mark was hoping to do the Liffey descent, the big kayak race on the Liffey. I was interested in doing a bit of kayaking, so we starting training a bit for that. Then we lost contact, until a mutual friend mentioned Mark was doing this, and that immediately perked up my interest again, so I made contact and we went from there.”
Which is how the two friends now find themselves as two-thirds of the South Pole Flag team in the first race across the Antarctic since Amundsen and Scott staged their fateful duel to the end of the earth almost a century ago. The third member of the team is the Norwegian explorer Inge Solheim, and the three men face a trek of 1,000 kilometres across the ice in temperatures as low as minus 50 degrees. Their preparation has been meticulous, but as if the race wasn’t daunting enough, Pollock admits that his blindness creates additional problems.
“I didn’t actually realise this until I started to go into the cold and wear gloves, but I rely on my touch hugely. When I was wearing the big gloves in the cold I kept losing things. I lost my gloves, and I couldn’t unzip my gear. I was all over the place, and that delays you, and it delays the other team members, so I’ve been modifying all my gloves, sewing clips on to them so I can clip them together, tying extra long bits of string on to my zip fasteners, and trying to make everything big enough so that I can feel it through the gloves.
“The second thing is, as I won’t be able to see and hear my guides because I have the hood up, I’ll be in my own little world, so I had to be able to come up with a system to follow Simon. So Simon goes in front, sledge behind, and I go behind that, but I’m attached from the sledge to my hips by two carbon fibre poles. It’s the same principle as a guide dog harness,” he laughs. “I can feel when Simon’s sledge goes left or right, or when it goes over a snow hill and down over the other side, so those are the two big issues – being able to move in the correct direction and inability to use my sense of touch.”
For his part, O’Donnell admits that while Pollock is the more experienced adventurer, the harsh polar environment means that their relationship will have to change. “When we’re training up in Dublin we’re in an environment that Mark is used to. I don’t have to intervene very much. He obviously needs guidance when we’re moving about but he’s very much in control of his own space. Whereas down there the conditions mean there’s no time to be feeling around for things, or taking extra time to get yourself sorted, so I’ll probably have to be a lot more direct and interventionist in terms of the way I relate to Mark.” Yet he has no doubts that both of them are ready and able to cope with whatever the race throws at them. They’re up against five other groups, including a British team led by the BBC presenter Ben Fogle and his friend, the Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell. Are Pollock and O’Donnell going to win or just to take part? Pollock says their main aim is to finish, but he can’t stop his competitive urge bursting through.
“When I did the North Pole marathon in 2004 I was annoyed with myself, because Ranulph Fiennes, who is 30 years older than me, came second in the race and myself and another guy, John O’Regan, came eighth. I still was thinking like a rower and I was a bit annoyed with myself for not coming higher up the field. I was moaning a bit about my result and Fiennes said to me, ‘What are you trying to prove? If you come to this place you have to be very clear in your mind about whether it’s a challenge or whether you’re racing. Although I’ve had a heart attack and I’m 30 years older than you, I’m going to beat you in this environment every single time’ – just because he’s the world’s greatest living explorer and that’s his environment.
“So we’re going down to get to the South Pole safely, but it is a race and we’ve trained to go down and race it. I’ll have to see what the terrain’s like, and if it’s worse for me being blind, I’m going to have to accept that we’re in a competition with ourselves. But if it is possible to race it and beat people, we’re aiming to do that.”
Team South Pole Flag hopes to reach the finish line by the end of January. O’Donnell jokes that Belvedere College has a big rugby game in early February that he’s determined not to miss. The challenge facing both men may be beyond the scope or comprehension of most of us, but they sound ready and focused.
For Pollock, the race across the wilderness is actually the culmination of a much longer journey, one that began a long time ago. “I feel that I really am back,” he says. “I’ve carved out a new identity, and I feel the same as I felt 10 years ago when I could still see, and I was about to graduate from Trinity. I feel like I’ve caught up again, and this South Pole thing just feels right.”
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF AMUNDSEN AND SCOTT
- The South Pole race recreates the race to the South Pole between a team led by Roald Amundsen and one led by Captain Robert Scott. Amundsen arrived first in December 1911. Scott's team arrived in January 1912, and perished on the return journey.
- There are six teams in the race with competitors from Ireland, Norway, South Africa and the UK.
- Following a training and acclimatisation period in Antarctica in late December 2008, the teams began racing to the pole on January 4th after a delay caused by blizzards.
- Most teams expect to finish by the beginning of February. The training period of the race involves a trek of around 200km.The race itself is approximately 800km.
- You can follow O'Donnell and Pollock's progress on www.southpoleflag.com or on the official race site www.amundsenomega3southpolerace.com