Day 35
S79 45' 39.60", W82 51' 24.84"
///mushed.hyperlinks.devolve
Good news from the Doctors and a great day spent stretching their legs on fat bikes
“Hi good evening everybody, it’s Martin.
Today we had some good news; I saw the doctors and they’re quite confident that we’ll get back out on the ground. Not for a few days yet, they want it to have a bit more time to heal still. There’s still a bit of inflammation there, and it’s still a bit tender inside. But we went out today – we’ve got fat bikes at Union Glacier – it’s a bit like a mountain bike but with enormous tyres, and that has given them the ability to move on snow. You’ve got to work quite hard on them, especially in deeper snow. But we went out just to spin the legs out and to see how it was without putting the same kind of pressure through the tendon as you do when you ski, so we did a 10k circuit around here, and it was ok on that. It flared up a little bit on the deeper snow, but overall it was fine.
So now the plan is to go out and do a ski around that 10k circuit with the pulk, at some point in two or three days’ time. If that goes well, we’re going to redeploy. We’ll look at what time we’ve got – and that will dictate how far we can do in order to get to the South Pole; because we need to get back here ready to leave here again – here being Union Glacier – to then leave here on the 9th of January to go and do our Mount Vinson summit attempt. So, from a time perspective, we’ll see what date they’re happy for us to go; weather dictates a lot as well. At the minute there’s no flying at Union Glacier because the weather here’s quite bad, and the pilots can’t land safely. All of these factors will dictate how far we get to do. It’s likely that we’ll probably just do one degree when we go back out, which is 60 nautical miles. And that’ll take us up to around the 400-mile mark in total. So good news, we are going to get back out on the ground, all being well – we will get to the South Pole, all being well. Just not quite the distance we were hoping for. It’s continued to heal well. It feels a lot better now. The anti-inflammatories are doing their work and the stretching’s being going well.
A good day and all going well! We’ll give you another update tomorrow.
Thank you”
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