My Polar Dream by Jade Hameister

Author:Jade Hameister
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2018-12-23T16:00:00+00:00

Seventeen days in and I continued to put one ski in front of the other, fighting the pain of sore muscles and blisters. It was relentless and, at times, very monotonous. The name of the polar-crossing game was to take it one day at a time, rest, refuel and repeat.

Sometimes performing the same movement over and over again became frustrating, but most times I managed to lose myself in the motion, which seemed to make the hours pass much faster. When we stopped, though, it was apparent my body had been performing the same movement for hours on end. When I stretched, I could feel how sore all my muscles were. But there was no avoiding the aches and pains.

Because we’d hit 2500 metres above sea level, I had started to feel the altitude a little, too. The air is thinner the higher you go, so there’s less oxygen to fuel the activity. I had periods of feeling incredibly light-headed – it was especially bad when I stood up suddenly or bent over to fix the bindings on my skis. I also had a couple more of my big nosebleeds. I knew they were caused by breathing in cold, dry air through my nose, but I’m pretty sure the altitude didn’t help.

Eric was still worried about our progress. I was still having issues with privacy during toilet breaks, and he had issues with my need for privacy causing delays. I came up with the solution of stopping for my toilet break a few hundred metres before where everyone else was stopping for break. Then I would catch up and have my break. This seemed to work well, but it meant that in harsh conditions, my breaks were a lot more crammed than the guys’.

Eric’s concerns about pace were justified, and I understood he was thinking forward to our Antarctica trip, which was only around six months away. It was going to be tougher and much longer, so I needed to be able to perform efficiently even when I wasn’t feeling efficient. He wanted all of us to keep our fiddling – putting on mittens, getting headphones in our ears – to a minimum. It was a little hard to believe that 10 seconds here and 30 seconds there would make that much difference to our progress, but Eric had done a huge number of these expeditions, so I took his advice and tried harder.

It had been a pretty rough few days and I was feeling quite low emotionally as we reached the highest geographical point of the whole journey. It helped to take a few moments to remember the enormity of what we’d achieved already, climbing upwards for 300 kilometres.

To make it to the coast in 27 days still looked remotely possible, but we’d need everything to go right from here. No bad weather, no injuries and everyone giving it their best shot. But conditions were still not great – visibility was very low and, although we tried to stick

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