7th annual Siku Extreme Arctic Challenge
Arctic Adventures
Jody Zwicky (Team Explorer) / 30.08.2007
Greenland, nestled in the Arctic Circle is a place of excessive beauty, rugged mountains, glaciers, and icebergs; any racer’s dream location. A place that left Team Explorer’s jaw’s hanging open, and grinning from ear to ear to be fortunate enough to experience a place like this. For 5 days we ran, climbed, biked, and canoed in this fascinating place. Although we did not get to see any of the mythical Trolls, and most fortunately didn’t get eaten and chased by the giant polar bears that roam the coast in search of weary adventure racers.Day 1
In the small village of Tasilaq, the teams congregated with their canoes inflated and ready to make a run for it down to the rocky beach. After a brief sprint to the put in, teams maneuvered slowly in their efforts to hop in the canoes, no one wanted to start off the race falling into the iceberg laden waters. Although later we heard tales of the Brits making 3 swims in the fjord, oh those poor lads!! An hour of full on paddling landed us across the bay and into a mountain running section.
After a lot of uphill grunting and rocky running we hit the base of a technical mountain climb to the summit of Polhem, a climb that had my butt quivering like a rabbit’s upper lip. From the start of the climb till our return to the base the race organization had the clock stopped, so racers could make the climb without pressure of being on the clock and keep safety in mind, it also allowed everyone once they reached the summit to sit down and enjoy the incredible panoramic view of Greenland in all its splendor, most teams carried small camera’s to keep this great memory for a lifetime.
After summiting we clambered down the mountain, got back on the race clock and set off running back to the canoes. We hopped back in the boats and took off paddling back to Tasilaq to finish the Day 1 stage in 3rd overall, and 1st Coed. It was an epic day in Greenland.
Day 2
We started at the same location as Day 1, and hammered out 5 loops of paved steep hills in the village onto sandy, rocky single track that was quite challenging and took about 4 hours or so of sweat and a bit of swearing on my behalf in the technical sections.
After dropping the bikes it was back on foot for a long rocky mountain running section, which consisted of bagging 3 peaks in the surrounding area. Greenland consists of mostly uphill or downhill with technical footing and heaps of boulders and thick scree rock, we adopted a saying “Green is Good�, so if we saw a green patch anywhere that’s where we tried to travel to avoid the heavier rock areas, although there were very few green patches! All the climbing is well worth it though, reaching the peaks is challenging but the rewards of the views are more than well worth the effort, and I am quite thankful that we were carrying a total of 3 cameras between us. See All Event Posts
