Antarctica Blog - Days 4 & 5 - 22nd December 2012
Yesterday was my best day so far, I covered 27.4km/17 miles and the going was good. I was having trouble with the skins on my skis yesterday morning so I took them off and put on my spares and my new set were a little wider which made things better, just as much glide going forward and better grip.
Last night I noticed I have blisters on my left and right heel. I am looking after them though, I’m on top of them and they are no worse today.
Today was my toughest day by far. I woke up this morning and I was feeling really tired, my body was sore and I found it hard to get out of the sleeping bag.
The light was completely flat, conditions were poor and I was making really bad progress, fighting for every foot and because I wasn’t going very fast my pulk kept dropping in to all the sastrugi and I had to pull the pulk out of every bit of sastrugi, it was so demoralising. There were no shadows, nothing to get a bearing on or follow a bearing and it was really slow going off my GPS. I got really frustrated so I put my tent up, cut my cooking board up and made a chest harness for my GPS unit so I can navigate better, then I read some notes from people special to me and pulled my socks up and had a word with myself.
It’s the first time I have had to give myself a bit of a talking to.
The weather got better and I made good progress this afternoon so I skied on for longer today to make up the time. I covered 25.4km/15 miles today and pretty much all of it was in the second half the day.
My muscles are really sore and it was always going to come I guess. Surprisingly though I feel much better than I did this morning and I had beef and ale stew for dinner tonight which was amazing. Tomorrow is going to be a better day.
Altitude wise, I’m at just under 800m so in the last 4 days I have climbed 600m.
Today was a bit of a milestone, I put the mountains from the coast in my rear view and there is now absolutely nothing on the horizon for 360 degrees.
I will continue to climb in altitude all the way to the polar plateau, which is at around 87 degrees.
Expedition total km/miles travelled to date: 119.2km/74 miles
