Farmer : getting ready for the icy leg
Published on 28.12.2011 - Pole to Pole Run
Saint Nicolas is everywhere...
© Expedition website
Australian explorer Eric Phiips who is going to help Pat Farmer for his fifth and final leg (Hercules Inlet > SP trek) announces that the ultramarathon runner has arrived on 27 December in Punta Arenas. They are getting ready to fly to Union Glacier ALE base camp.
Where as he ended his South American leg ?
We propably will never know where exactly has ended the South American leg of Pat Farmer. One certainty though : he has not run the entire length of Chile. The topography of the national Parks that cover the southern part of this country has probably tempered Farmer ambitions. Another one : on Christmas day, he was still running and has covered the distance of 76.2 km.
Here are the whys. Pat Farmer has given his last position on 21 December ; he was then north of a city called Freire. If we take the nearest southern big city (related to his position) which is Valdivia, we know that at that time, Farmer had still at least 1.493 km to run to reach Punta Arenas, bird's-eye. As he arrived in Punta Arenas on the 27 December, and if he had run this all land distance, he should have done it at a pace of 248 km per day. So he did not. µ
But then : why to keep that part of the trip secret ?
Eric Philips comes back in the arena
Anyway, this is not so important. Pat Farmer has still a leg to cover ; now we know that famous explorer and compatriote Eric Philips will join and help him to complete that task.
Here is what he (Philips) writes on 27 December : "... It has been a while since our last update in mid-May. Since arriving in Canada from the North Pole, Pat has been running south through the Americas, doing more than two marathons daily, without a day off. Today he arrives in Punta Arenas, Chile, from where we fly to Union Glacier camp in Antarctica on the 29th, together with cameraman Mind d'Arcy and Scotty, the driver/mechanic of our 6x6 Ford Transit van. From Union Glacier we drive to Pat's start point at Hercules Inlet on the Antarctic coast from where he will run to the South Pole, averaging between 50 and 60 km per day."
"As with the Arctic leg, we will send daily despatches from the ice, mostly short text messages, sometimes voice recordings or an email with photos, but our priority with comms is to send a minute of footage every day to our media team, which they gather, edit and send to Channel 9 in Australia for a weekly broadcast on the Today Show ..."
We are not completey sure though that with the ice and plateau condititons of this year (experienced these last weeks by the 2011-12 season' expeditioners), the australian pair will be able to 'run' 50 km par day ...
