PORT ANGELES — You’ve heard of Dances With Wolves? Port Angeles’ Bruce Skinner can say he has gone Mud-Bogging with Penguins.
After traveling nearly 10,000 miles and fighting through gut-churning seas, bracing cold, steep hills and slopping through freezing mud, Skinner can also say he has run a full marathon on Antarctica.
Skinner, executive director of the Olympic Medical Center Foundation and head of the Port Angeles High School Hall of Fame, completed the 20th annual Antarctica marathon in 6 hours, 38 minutes, good for second place in his 70-plus age group.
Skinner has also completed marathons on five continents, with only two more to go — Africa and South America.
He has run marathons in some exotic places — Iceland, Paris, Istanbul and Sydney, Australia — but he had dreamed of running a marathon in Antarctica for years. Skinner sat on a waiting list to run the race for two years, getting his chance when one of the limited slots finally opened up from a cancellation.
Off the beaten path
King George is a 50-mile-long island just off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula that juts out northward from the continent toward South America. No one actually owns it — Antarctic territory is protected by treaty — but there are a number of research stations on the island run by different nations.
It isn’t easy to get there. Skinner had to take a three-hour flight from Buenos Aires to the city of Ushuaia, which is on Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. From there, it was a two-day ride by ship to King George Island across the wild Drake Passage, which Skinner described as some of the roughest seas on the planet.
The passengers were given seasick pills. Some people became ill, but Skinner said he was lucky and didn’t.
Only 100 people at a time were allowed to get off the boat and step foot on Antarctic soil. So, the race had to be run over two days, with one group of people running on March 17 and another on March 18. Skinner ran on the second day.
March is late summer in Antarctica, so it was the warmest time of year. Fortunately, there was little wind, with just a breeze of about 10 miles an hour. The temperate was just below freezing at the beginning of the race and warmed up to about 35 degrees.
The air temperature was just fine for Skinner.
“The temperature and weather were pretty similar to running here [in the winter],” he said.
But, the air temperature getting above freezing was actually bad for running conditions, Skinner said. When it got above freezing, the ice in the ground melted and turned much of the marathon course muddy.
“Any flat area turned into a mud bog,” Skinner said. “A truck from the Russian base got stuck in the mud. Some people lost their shoes in the mud.”
Skinner ran in trail shoes with traction outer soles instead of running shoes to deal with the mud.
The course of the race was six laps between a Russian research base called Bellingshausen and a nearby Uruguayan research base called Artigas.
It was a difficult course, Skinner said. In addition to the mud, the course went up and down some steep hills, some of them as high as 250 feet.
“That was certainly my toughest marathon,” said Skinner, who has finished 17 marathons. “It was by far my slowest marathon. But, I don’t care what my time was.”
Skinner said it was a beautiful place. When asked if there were penguins nearby, he answered, “Yes … thousands of them.” Most of them were chinstraps and gentoos. There were also plenty of whales and seals.
“It’s an amazing place. I would never have gotten to Antarctica if not for the race. Now I would go back as a tourist,” he said.
Skinner’s next adventure will be to Cape Town, South Africa, where he plans to run a marathon in September to complete races on six continents (the Istanbul race being in Asia). He plans to complete his seven-continent marathon quest with a race in Santiago, Chile.
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at 360-417-3525 or plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
