Day 11
S81 31' 3.72", W80 11' 17.88"
///fasted.flounce.gamer
Another steady day as the team work their way towards 82 Degrees South. Louis gives an update on the expedition nutrition.
“Hi good evening everyone. It’s Lou reporting in from day 11 of the expedition. I can’t believe we’ve been out here for 11 days now!
We’ve been blessed by the weather gods again; really lucky, we’re having a good run at the moment of just clear blue skies, great visibility, hardly any wind at all today. Temperatures pretty mild, probably round about -10 degrees, which feels positively tropical conditions to be honest, for Antarctica. So it’s great travelling conditions.
Today we pushed out just under a 10-hour day, and made 13.7 nautical miles, which was great. Our target for today was the halfway to 82 degrees south. I talked on the last blog about how we’re aiming for these degrees of latitude, that we’re crossing, and we’re going to try and get to 82 degrees south in another two days, is what we’re aiming for. So we’re going to try and crack a degree – 60 nautical miles – in four days. Which is good going. We crossed South 81 Degrees and 30 minutes today, so 30 nautical miles to go. We’re going to push hard over the next two days and that’ll be great if we can crack that; that would be brilliant progress.
Just want to do a shout out to Mary and the team at Expedition Foods, who’ve supplied all the freeze-dried meals for this expedition. As always, absolutely superb. We’re using their high-energy – I think it’s called the ‘extreme’ expedition range – of 1,000 calories. And for those not familiar with how we’re doing the nutrition for the expedition; myself and Martin are both eating around, probably just under, 6,000 calories, about 5 and half thousand calories a day. Which is a huge amount, considering the average male in the UK is normally on about 2 and a half thousand, and a female about two thousand a day. We’re well over five and a half thousand, to fuel ourselves. And that’s made up of freeze-dried meals in the morning at breakfast. That just means it’s super lightweight, all the moisture’s been extracted from it, and we just melt snow in the tent, add boiling water, and we’ve got our breakfast. And that’s around 1,000 calories. And as we ski during the day, we have a grazing bag, that’s got chocolate, nuts, energy bar, cheese, salami. Every time we stop for a break – around about every hour, we grab a handful of that, a quick drink out of the flasks, and that will keep us going throughout the day. Once we get into the tent in the evening, it’s another freeze-dried main meal, of another 1,000 calories, which is really welcoming. To top all that up, we’re also drinking protein powder, so we have a litre of protein powder in the morning, and the highlight of the day, is when we finish skiing for 10 hours, is collapsing into the tent and the first batch of melted snow, we make up a litre each of this strawberry flavoured protein drink. We kind of just sit there and chug that, and it’s like drinking a nice cold pint of lager at a pub on a summer’s afternoon. It feels as good as that, at times.
So that’s how we’re fuelling ourselves, and how the nutrition works on this expedition, and we’re getting those calories into round about 1kg a day. Our food is weighing towards 50kg in total. Martin’s a bit more than that – old fat boy has definitely packed a bit of extra food on this trip.
That’s all from us, all going well, praying we can get ourselves to the end of the degree.
Onwards”
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