Day 8
S80 50' 22.56", W79 56' 36.96"
///evidently. tallies.crumpet
Steady progress again today, as the team approach 81 degrees South. Conditions are good. Martin begins to thank sponsors.
“Good evening everybody. Martin here at camp 8.
Last night was a bit windy, so a bit of noise in the tent again. Only about 20 knots, not as bad as it has been. Today: set off this morning, with good visibility again which was fantastic – but the terrain was quite hard. A fair amount of sastrugi – not as much as what we’re going to encounter further on in the trip but an incline as well. And physically that made it quite challenging. I’m struggling with the balance again, especially on an incline with the sastrugi. The pulks are still fairly heavy at this point in the expedition. I’m not sure if I mentioned earlier but the starting weight of the pulk was 108kg, so I’m guessing it’s around the 100kg mark now. Doing that on an incline just takes it out of you.
So I had a real couple of minutes well, more than a couple of minutes – where I was digging deep today, specially from around mid-morning till around early afternoon. I started to question all manner of things. Luckily I carried on going, kept on pushing, got through it. Lou, at one of the stops, gave me a bit of his salami; and that just seemed to make all the difference. About 30 minutes later, just the salt and the fat content just really helped. And the last two shifts of the day, I started feeling the best I’ve felt so far on the expedition.
When we finished tonight I felt like I could have carried on going for the first time. At every camp site we’ve got to so far on this trip I’ve been pretty hooped by the time I get in. But tonight for the first time I felt like I could have pushed on. We only did 12.2 nautical miles today – just because of the incline. But we’re around what appears to be slightly flatter ground now with a more gradual incline ahead
of us potentially. So hopefully we’ll get a decent day in tomorrow. And we’re going to increase the amount of time we’re skiing tomorrow. We’re going to add at least another 30 minutes to the skiing time, maybe even an hour. Slowly trying to improve our efficiencies on the ice, reduce the amount of time that we’re spending at the stops as well.
Another challenging day; but feeling like we’re slowing starting to get into the environment now. Feeling grateful for being here, and I just want to say thank you first of all to one of our headline sponsors, which is Olympian Homes; Mark, who’s the founder of Olympian Homes, and who I met after I came back from the North Pole in 2011, and it was obvious that he was very passionate about helping injured soldiers at the time. I told him about the ideas that I had for Adaptive Grand Slam, and he thought it’d be a great idea to use the power of rehabilitation to – what he described as – extreme endeavour. Well mate, we’re flipping doing that on this one, I can tell you. This is an extreme endeavour, that’s for sure. For everyone at Olympian, especially Rowan as well who’s been helping us with the foundation as well, the AGS Foundation, helping us with the financials for that, voluntarily. And Julia, Mark’s PA, who helps keep us all in shape, and helps get things done, I really appreciate it guys, I’m really grateful. I’m looking forward to seeing you all in a couple of months when
this thing’s flipping done.
Goodnight everyone, hope you’re all well. Keep enjoying the misery. Goodnight.”
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