Meeting Mieke

Yesterday Boudewijn, Joost and myself, met Mieke, a lady that did the last two degrees (88°-90°) in 2006. We read an article, in diary format, of her published in a mountaineering magazine. The article was written in such a way that we could truely imagine how the journey would be. By coincidence, a friend of hers was a mutual friend to Joost's girlfriend. Mieke invited us to share her experiences of her trip. It was a very learning evening, we were treated with a slideshow of pictures, and with everyone of them came a story. Stories about the cold you carry with you, about being and staying focussed on yourself and every movement, about the importance of being guided by a pole expert, about the beauty of nature that had a huge impact on her and many more. Eventhough we all three read quite an amount of books on the polar regions, and saw many pictures, we still were impressed about her presentation. The leads we will have to cross seem larger than expected - sometimes 200-400m width- and the pukas used as boats to cross them immersed deeper than we thought. The walls of ice blocks, formed by the collision of two iceplates, are much higher when you see them in relation to a human being than on landscape pictures, and crawling them seemed a very hard and tough job. Some pictures gave us comfort and confidence - after all we're preparing for about two years-, others made us realize we have quite a dangerous and acrobatic event ahead. We were happy to see the picture of her final destination: the Northpole, a view of the GPS screen with 89°59'59'. We kinda had to laugh with the fact that the real Northpole wasn't reached, but Mieke challanged us to come back with a screenshot showing 90°. Knowing that the ice moves fast and we will have to jump around to even get a 89°59'5x', we took the challange and we will not go for less than the 90°. A big thank you from all of us to Mieke, for putting her house open, sharing her experiences with us and sending us back home with an almost impossible mission.

Ready to go

Received a message from Joost. Last week he was on altitude training period in Serfaus, mainly to ski. It's one of his last preparations before the "real thing". He's looking the challenge straight into the eye.

Les Hivernales

Sunday, a team activity took place in Brussels. Although most of the people were not able to join, the "hard core" was there: Ruud, Patrick, Dixie and his wife Julie, who's part of the expedition as logistic and organisational crew member. PJ also ran but decided some time ago not to join for the expedition itself. He's however a real sportsman and keeps on following our group, en whenever possible joins the group events.

Most ran 20 km (Patrick 10km) in the neighborhood of Watermaal-Bosvoorde, near Brussels. A very nice parcour, amidst the woods.

Times were very sharp!

Dixie 1:18:55

PJ 1:29:33

Ruud 1:44:08

Julie 1:53:47

Patrick 56:10 (10km)

Unfortunately, I had to give forfait due to soar throat.

Tour and cross country skiing his brains out : PATRICK

Each of us is scheduling his own training program according to his sports preferences. Patrick went early January to Switzerland to practice tourski, pulling himself up 1000 mt/day. On the way up, he crossed some of the specialists in the field and the world champion is a Swiss guy from Verbier. THE big bi-annual event between Zermatt and Verbier is the "Patrouille des Glaciers" (http://www.pdg.ch/) which takes place on April 21-24, 2010, organized by the Swiss Army (Federation). You need a team of three persons and you can do half of the track, starting half way from Arolla, with a height difference of approx 1500 mt or the full race from Zermatt which is twice 1500mt plus about 50 kms climbing with skis, rope skiing and running. Patrick is dreaming to participate to this after his NorthboundQuest. In the meanwhile, he's building up his condition slowly but surely. Trying to benefit from the exceptional amount of snow (65cm) in the East Cantons of Belgium last week, he did twice the 25K track from Haus Ternell (between Eupen and Monschau(D)).

How to involve your kids?

Already for some weeks, most of the conversations in our house have something to do with the expedition. Our oldest, Lies, a 14 year old girl enjoying puberty at the fullest, is not that enthoustatic about our adventure. Although she's pretty adventurous herself and loves outdoor life like camping in the wilderness, she's afraid that something dangerous will happen and for sure she now already knows she's going to miss us a lot. It's difficult to get her attention and interest in the whole preparation process, she doesn't want to hear a word about it. Our youngest, Wouter (11 years) is less thinking about potential dangers, and finds it quite "cool" what we are going to do. He's very interested in nature, animals, the earth as part of the universe, so we like to talk with him about all the aspects of the expedition. Last Thursday, Ruud had a brilliant idea. It was his turn to prepare dinner, and as we still had some left overs from the Iceland trip, he prepared for us a full "expedition dinner", a dinner as we will have on the Arctic ocean. The kids liked the idea very much: no fresh veggies - Wouter hates veggies - but prepackaged food! So we prepared together a nasi sate and a goulash dish: heating up the water, open the package, pour the water into the package, let it rest for 10 min, and eating the whole thing. The kids like the food and top of the bill, Ruud could offer them a dessert as a reward: chocolat mousse! (You eat chocolat mousse almost everyday???) We had a great dinner time and above all, we got our daughter interested in what will probably become the most exciting thing we've experienced in our whole life.

Super Jo

This summer Jo Van Gorp, another expedition member, trained for the Zwintriathlon. The Zwintriathlon is a competition with 1000m swimming in the North Sea, 45km biking and 10km running. His goal was to finish this competition. More than that he had a very good time, both in running and biking. On the video you can see Jo near the arrival, still fit like he went for any easy walk and with the speed of light. Jo's a real champion!



Jo's detailed times, changes included:
swimming - 37:07
biking - 1h28:41
running - 54:36

Joost like in Toast

The date of departure is coming closer for all of us. All team members are fully focussed, mainly on their physical condition. This is the only parameter we have full control of, and which is the basic condition to start such an adventure. Yesterdag I received an update of Joost. As CEO of a construction company, he has a very busy life, not only professional but also social, so managing his agenda to build in physical preparation time is key.

Last week, he has really kicked off with a full training schedule.

Four days in a row, Joost swam, biked, ran and trained his abdomen muscles.

Last weekend, he set up for the first time the tent we're taking to the North Pole. He enjoyed laying inthere, dreaming already about how it would be drifting on the Artic ocean.

He also started to use the fitness room he has in his company. Most of his Friday evenings he uses the room for extra exercises to increase his overall muscle strength under supervision of his sportscoach. He's currently reading a book about surviving after extreme exhaustion.

Like most of us, Joost has lost some weight and adapted his lifestyle - less fat, less alcohol :-) - to be in the best possible shape. We can hardly wait to enter the plane!

People asking questions about the title of this post: it's a gig. Troy, one of our guides and American US, had difficulties in pronouncing Joost, a typical Flemish/Dutch name. Looking for any resemblence with an English word, I came to toast. From now on Joost is called by the group Toast or Toastie.

Training with tires

Sunday was a very beautiful day. Sun was shining, and as we have quite some nice places to walk in our surroundings we decided to go for a good walk, as training excercise for the expedition. To simulte pulling a sled, Dixie, adviced us at the beginning of our 2 year preparation to pull a tire, attached to the harnas. And that's what we often do. The walk was quite though. Most of time we had to pull our tire through the loose sand, which is typically for the Kalmthouse Heide, the park where we went. Luckiliy there were some places where we still had some ice which made the resistance of the rubber on the soil much less. Both Ruud and myself enjoyed the training, but realized our journey will not be a piece of cake.

Next weekend, Joost will strenghten its bond with his tire, on the Belgian coast.