APR-A-5
DAVE TREBER HAD SUBMITTED THIS PIECE FROM MY
PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY BY THE CUMBERLAND TIMES
AND THE QUEEN CITY STRIDERS’ NEWSLETTER
Mary Siemann and Jeff Smith are Striders Race Circuit champions for 2000.
Siemann and Smith were crowned for the year at the annual awards banquet at the Midland Fire Hall on February 3. All-area cross-country runners and race age division winners also received plaques.
Among them, Susan Davis of Hampshire and Ryan Foster of Beall won the 2000 Katie DeRosa Awards for outstanding high school runners. Susan and Jennifer are Marshall-bound next Fall and Ryan has another year of running at Beall.
Everyone needs at least one friend in whom we can live vicariously. Dr. Glenn Geelhoed, not far from Allegany County in Derwood, Maryland, serves such a function for me.
While I have satisfied myself with such exotic marathon locations as Montgomery County and Anne Arundel County, Glenn took on Antarctica.
Upon completion of marathon, Glenn informed me he would become part of a society even more exclusive than the Skull and Bones or Trilateral Commission. The “Seven Continents Club” is not as secretive, though, as a check of www.marathontours.com will attest. This group that handled the logistics of the run subcontracted with a Canadian excursion service, Marine Expeditions, which uses the ice-hardened Russian ship P/V Lyubev Orlova, registered in Malta, sailing out of Ushuaia, Argentina. And to add to the international flavor, the passenger list of runners included Americans, British, Canadians, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, one Greek, one Frenchman, a couple of Australians, a few Germans and a Dutchman or two—aboard a real Panamanian freighter. To be sure, this group of runners did not sneak silently into the Antarctic Convergence, reporters from the press tagged along, ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Running Times and, of course, John “The Penguin” Bingham from Runner’s World. (Bingham, with his “waddle on” theme shown by his site at www.waddleon.com, has championed the cause of the back-of-pack runners in races.)
Steaming down the dreaded Drake Passage to King George Island in the South Shetlands off the Antarctic Peninsula, for a February 5 date (high summer in the Antipodes) runners used wrist bands, Transderm patches and Dramamine to limit the dehydration that might result from hurling through whole days spent crossing the world’s most notorious body of stormy water.
The “sheltered” south side of King George Island was anything but calm. It encloses Maxwell Bay, named for a British ship that had found anchorage there. This island holds the Antarctic Research stations of the respective national interests, named “Artigas,” staffed by Uruguayans, the primary hosts, “Bellinghousen,” staffed by Russians, “Great Wall,” staffed by the Chinese, and “Frei,” staffed by Chileans. This marathon was to be a high point in the long term of duty pulled by these staffers, and they were eager to be a part of it, billed as the only sporting event ever held in the Seventh Continent.
Then, as the freighter headed southward, winds and waves hit so violently. In the Strait, waters were calm enough to make landings on the unusual inlet shore of Decepcion Island, open caldera of an extinct volcano, giving the odd combination of warm steaming waters amid volcanic ash and glacial ice. The race was delayed until the weather changed.
The weather changed, all right. It got worse. The course layout team which set out to mark the miles barely made it back.
A second race day was missed, and the team attempting an Antarctica Marathon decided there would be no more “postponements.” The blizzard was blowing horizontally across the Orlova’s bow and the seas were smashing up to the bridge. The captain’s radio was used in several languages to report to the bases what they could see would be obvious—the Antarctica Marathon on King George Island was cancelled, and the ship was running free again out of Maxwell Bay and down toward the Antarctic continent to seek sheltered waters.
Runners with cabin fever – and perhaps just a little bit of nuts mixed in – planned the next marathon. They measured the ship’s upper open deck, and the enclosed deck beneath it, determining that 422 laps around the upper deck and 320 below—with two hurdles over companionway hatch steps on each course-- constituted a 26.2-mile marathon.
In the first, and perhaps only ever, “ship-board marathon” runners took off and ran the 422 laps. As for cheering spectators, blowing whales surfacing in pods close to the ship would have to do.
Glenn asked me, “Can the Women of Wellesley at the Boston Marathon top this crowd support? I don’t think so.”
Dave Treber sticks to more practical races, like the YMCA Bunny Run coming up in April. He lives in Frostburg and is Vice President of the Queen City Striders.