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Team Artemis came in 3rd postion, in the toughest race in the world - and believe me that is no understatement. Our official race time was 16days 8 hours 30minutes.
We reached the magnetic north pole at 01:17hrs on the 13/5/07 after ski-ing for 15 hours over the hills of the noice penninsula on Ellef Rignes island. We reached the coast, well the start of the sea ice at 22:00hrs on the 12/5/07 with 5 nautical miles to go to the pole. The finish line was 16nm beyond the pole position, so we had to decide if we were going to go for it that night, or force ourselves to do 21nm on the 13th. In some respects it was the toss of a coin, because one of the team was close to dropping, but the weather was good. I decided to haul my exhausted team mate's pulk in addition to my own - a whopping 240Ibs all in for 2 hours. My other team mate also doubled up for 1 hour, leaving the exhausted individual to haul for only 30mins.
Good team decision, we made the pole, and camped the night there. Got the tent up, had a brew and kitted up to go back outside to get some photos - when the weather turned and we got engulfed by an arctic storm, and believe me it got cold - even by local standards. Had dinner and got to bed by 4am. Had 3 hours sleep and set off again, in a blizzard for the finish line. After what seemed like a lifetime - 20:30hrs - we crossed the finish line, at Isachsen.
Despite eating around 8000 calories a day, I lost 18Ibs in body weight, principally around my shoulders, chest and the beer belly is gone! I didn't suffer too much in terms of injury. I got a wee bit of frost nip on my left cheek, which has healed and 6 of my fingers are still a bit numb and have partial feeling - this comes back in time.
I didn't see a single polar bear, but our tent was visited one evening, whilst we were sleeping. We didn't hear a thing - very deep sleeps! The next morning there was a set of fresh tracks around the tent. The whole Polar Bear thing didn't worry me a bit. Too tired to worry, excellent training from ex special forces and generally not letting these psychological distractions cloud the judgement.
Overall, a fantastic experience. As an individual, I went to places within myself, that I didn't know where there.
At the moment the charity pot is sitting around the £12,000 mark.
Web page is still being updated. More to Come.