Thirty minutes later Dean Karnazes dragged himself through the snow and over the line. At home in California he was a poster boy. Running magazines used him on their front covers, all rippling biceps and sculpted abdominal muscles. In years to come Karnazes would write bestselling books about his feats and appear on 60 Minutes and David Letterman.
He was the all-American ideal, striding through the frozen landscapes bedecked in North Face’s finest fashions, the comic book hero with chiselled jaw and kiss curl. Women wanted him, men wanted his abs. Corporate America was lined up behind, pushing him on and willing him to win. He had too much to lose to consider any other outcome.
Everything about the Antarctic is dependent on the weather. While as they had waited for days to run, Donovan had built an igloo and spent time ruffling Karnazes’ feathers. Before the start he told him the rest of the competitors were going to need a net to hold him back. “Inside,” says Donovan, “I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna get you.’”
Donovan’s motivation was simple, driven by what he carried in his heart. In 2001, after his mother passed away, he decided to run seven marathons on seven continents. The South Pole was the beginning of his life as an ultra marathon runner. It was almost the end, too. “I had so much driving me on. He was running for North Face and the show. You get found out very quickly in these events. You don’t do these races so that you can pose downtown later. You can be as cool as you want before an event, but you will be stripped down and exposed.”
While the others were attaching their snowshoes at the start line, Karnazes took off. The snowmobiles tracked his progress. For long stretches Donovan ran alone, battling against his body and his mind. Inside six miles, Karnazes was blown out. Conditions had deteriorated badly. The wind whipped up and temperatures plummeted to minus 50C. As the snow screeched across the flat plains and Karnazes started to wilt, Donovan trudged slowly past him.
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“In terms of intensity, that South Pole thing is still etched in my mind as the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Maybe it was the fact I was realising it was taking me 20 minutes to run a mile. There was a surrealness to it. I really felt like I was running in space. It was my first experience of feeling, ‘Hey, I’m gonna win this’ especially when you have all these North Face people saying this guy (Karnazes) is going to win it. I could see I was hauling him in.” After pulling away from Karnazes, Donovan’s goggles fogged up. Convention insisted he leave all his headgear in place to avoid injury but his emotions had wrested control. He tore off the goggles, tried to shield his face from the snow and ran on. His face was shredded.
As he neared the finish line, mild delirium had set in. He tore off his balaclava. When he crossed the line, they grabbed him and covered his head. He was suffering from snow blindness. The tips of his fingers had turned white from frost nip. Frostbite had set into his toes. All the while the hypothermia kept him shivering uncontrollably. But he had made it.
Meanwhile, Karnazes was seething. A day later the organisers suddenly pronounced Karnazes the winner of the runners division and Donovan the winner of the snowshoes division, a hastily devised response to Karnazes’ defeat. Soon after, Karnazes wrote an article claiming he was pronounced the only person in history to have run a marathon in the South Pole. Having objected, Donovan then received a letter from Karnazes stating that a complaint against him had been made to the US State Department. “At issue,” he wrote, “is a non-US resident acting aggressively, and potentially with malicious intent toward a US citizen.”
“I was being assassinated by a very large corporate machine in the US,” says Donovan. “It was taking huge amounts of energy and time to maintain the truth of what happened up there.” And so began a year-long court case in Canada, which Donovan rightfully won.
In the meantime, he ran the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu, up the stepped hills and mountain passes 14,000ft above sea level. He ran 333 kilometres across Tunisia, the equivalent of eight marathons in one, and 100 miles over the Himalayas.
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He secretly nipped up to the North Pole ahead of Karnazes on a cargo plane with a group of Russians to become the first man to run a marathon there and was back in Galway drinking pints inside 30 hours. “It made headlines all over the world. Less than a year before I was a guy who was very unfit. Now I was in Sports Illustrated. National Geographic Adventure had me as one of their top 10 adventurers of the year beside your man (Steve) Fossett in the balloon.”
In 2003 he set three different world records in 48 hours while running on a treadmill in the front window of Cuba bar in Galway while the place heaved. Over five days last summer he set a new record running from Malin Head to Mizen Head. For 270 miles he ran on a fractured foot soothed only by some painkillers — handed to him by a woman in the midlands recovering from a hip replacement operation — and a fist of anti- inflammatories.
He has run the cruellest races on the planet and tamed them all. Now he makes them work for him, organising the Antarctic and North Pole marathons from a box room at the back of his apartment in Galway. This April he brings 60 people to the North Pole. After that, every race he runs will funnel towards one goal next year: to run across the Antarctic.
“I want to do a modern-day feat. The thing about trekking to the South Pole is everybody can do it. You get together in groups, it’s hard and takes 50 days or whatever, and then they get airlifted out. Then you’ve people saying we’re going to recreate Shackleton. How? “Everybody has satellite phones. It’s not necessarily going to save your life but it’s a good safety net. A modern Irish connection would be to do something completely different, like becoming the first person to cross it.”
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IT’S RAINING in Galway and the weather is getting Donovan down. Last Sunday he returned from the Antarctic. The race he organised went well, the following day he became the first man to run 100km in the Antarctic and they all got back to Punta Arenas at the foot of Chile in good time to make their journeys home. The sun shone and the land stretched for eternity, like a pure white carpet disappearing into the horizon. The run hurt like they all do but his mind was becalmed all the way.
Odd. Ultra marathon running can often do strange things.
“When you put yourself through a huge physical process, you change a lot emotionally. There must be a mind-body connection that sometimes gives you enlightenment and other times you can feel total desperation. You soon realise they’re very close together.
“You do realise you can do things that may have been inconceivable. You don’t look at things as problems that may have been insurmountable. You learn to whittle away. It’s very liberating as well. You realise you are very fragile but you do have a sense of empowerment that comes paradoxically from a realisation that you’re not as powerful as you thought. You get your ducks in a row pretty quickly in terms of what’s important, what you can really do and how life can change so quickly. You learn that some things just happen.”
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Spiritual doctrines have been written and shaped around ultra marathon running. Scientists study the physiological make-up of the athletes in a sport where those in their mid-40s routinely outrun competitors 20 years their junior. After his first race at the South Pole he returned home close to a state of bliss. In the Antarctic, time passes almost unnoticed. In perpetual daylight of the continent’s summer, watches become irrelevant. You read, you sit and you think.
“My first time I came back after nearly a month there very relaxed. I’d developed a little stare that took a couple of weeks to go. I know explorers around the turn of the century who’d spent months down there developed what’s called Big Eye, where you just stare (eyes open wide). There’s not much to do but be patient with yourself. Things don’t matter that used to matter.”
Running was never in his bones, though over the years he acquired a taste. His brother Paul was born with an athletic talent that took him to America. Donovan ran in school and was in Indianapolis when Paul won a world silver medal at the World Indoor Championships in 1991 but, as he made his way as an economist, running receded into the background.
Another brother, Gerard, was a national judo champion and in time took up classical guitar, adding another national title in due course and was recently longlisted for the Booker Prize. His brother Denis moved to Britain, where he became an international bridge player and won a pair of UK titles.
Running returned to his life abruptly. In 1999 Paul, Gerard and Richard entered the Marathon Des Sables, a brutal six-day endurance race stretching for 151 miles across the Sahara Desert, as a tribute to their late father. They read some books and did a little research. Their pedigree was mixed. Paul was carrying a back injury, Gerard had done little running and Richard hadn’t run since school. They arrived at the start line holding their water bottles, their rucksacks bobbing on their backs. He thinks of the innocence of it now. Bless.
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“We hadn’t even tried our backpacks on before we got there. We knew theoretically what we should use. I remember we were at the starting line still throwing stuff out of the bags. I didn’t even have a hydration pack. I was holding a water bottle to fill up at checkpoints.”
While Paul and Gerard eased into the race, Richard took off. After the first day he was still in the top 10. “All these guys looked cool except me, holding my water bottle, backpack bouncing up and down. All the rest were streamlined. I could tell they were looking at me.”
Three years passed and three stones piled on before he resumed. By the end of 2002 he had completed seven marathons and almost destroyed himself. In 2003 his system gave out and he developed pneumonia. Then he left the last of his old life behind. As an economist he had excelled, publishing books in America and lecturing in Arizona State University and the New England Banking Institution in Boston before returning to Ireland where the Vintners’ Federation employed him.
“I was never really institutionalised. I was never really a nine-to-five guy. I never liked being pigeonholed as an economist either. I never really felt comfortable with it. There’s a difference, I guess, in being good at something and it being for you.”
In 2004 he organised his first North Pole marathon with the Polar explorer Ranulph Fiennes among the competitors. Now his business is taking shape but resources will always be stretched beyond their limits. To cross the Antarctic alone he will need to raise $500,000 in sponsorship. After next April’s marathon at the North Pole he will run in the World Ultra Marathon in Taiwan, where competitors will run as far as they can for 24 hours. In July he runs on a 400m track for 24 hours at the British track championships. Then a jungle marathon through the Amazon. At 39, with a young family to tend to and little of the world left to conquer, he will move on soon.
“That’s going to finish a lot of my running. By the end of the year I should have had a full spectrum of experiences from jungle to desert, to frozen wastelands, track and road. I’m going to emphasise training for the Antarctic thing more.
“I didn’t think the 100km took that much out of me, but it took more than I thought. During the run itself I didn’t have any of the (usual) problems. I just kept going. I suspect my idea of running across the continent is going to include every emotion there is.”
Ending, we hope, with joy.