ANTARCTICA: The Beginning of the End, The End of the Beginning

Dry Land™ is not a myth! I have returned from the South.

I’m not sure how best to post what has happened, whether I should do the update in one big go or post the daily journal piecemeal. My personal logs were written contemporaneously and are riddled with inaccuracies and typos. Some are vastly superior in style and prose and some are just goobledegook awful. But they’re a true account, more or less, give or take a lie or two.

This is the story of my Antarctica Marathon. No two stories are ever the same, especially for marathoners. Save for one photo or two photos, I took most of the photos you’ll see in this posts. I grabbed a lot of people’s shared photos at the end of the trip but haven’t bothered going through them en masse. From what I clicked through quickly though, people got some amazing shots. I may or may not do a further update with choice selections of those shared pics.

But in the meantime, here’s the short-short version:

I went. I ran. I had a good time. And I’ve returned.

Now I need to get back into training… the next race is March 26th. I’ve been cooped up on a ship, eating my way back and forth through the Drake Passage and running nary a k for the past week or so.

You’ll see why in the posts that follow.

I’m currently sitting in the Ushuaia airport waiting to begin the first leg of a multi-leg journey home. There’s a labor strike happening… and it has been ongoing since we left. There’s rumors they may close the airport. The adventures continue.

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Kevin’s Log – Supplemental – 2:58 PM

After a four hour wait in the Ushuaia airport, we’re currently flying to Buenos Aires. This was the in-flight snack – a ham and cheese sandwich with the crusts cut off. Meg nailed it by describing it as something a mother would make a 5 year old to take on a sack lunch.

I’ve spent the majority of the flight so far trying to figure out how to get the photos I had inserted into a word document draft of my personal logs “web ready” to upload to the site. I thought I could just cut and paste them in one-go but trying to use the infuriatingly flaky WiFi in Ushuaia proved that only the text got pasted into my website design program. I finally cracked it late in the game that I could save the Word document as a web page and then systematically rename the web images in the html folder MS Word creates. It was tedious but easier than trying to track down the original pics in the chaotic folders I was dumping images in to ensure I had a backup of any files before hitting the ice once more.

Nonetheless, I anticipate the upload of the logs then to be slow and cumbersome. But with a 16.5 hour layover looming in Sao Paolo, I got nothing but time.