Last August I somehow convinced myself that I was going to run the North Pole Marathon.  Fortunately around the end of the year I came to my senses and decided to give away my entry via a contest on YourRunning.com.

Bobby Bostic won the contest and ran the marathon (and the first 26.2 mile North Pole bike race.)  Yesterday I turned to Amy and said “well – the North Pole Marathon was today and our guy finished.”  She looked at me and said “even though the weather sucks here today, aren’t you glad you aren’t at the North Pole.”

Congrats Bobby. 

On 8/8/06, while in excellent shape (I ran the New Mexico Marathon on 9/3/06), I somehow convinced myself that it would be a fun idea to run the North Pole Marathon.  By the end of December, I realized that there was no way I’d be able to maintain the level of training necessary to do it.  I also realized that I’d taken leave of my senses in August when I signed up for this.

I’d paid for everything so I decided that – in conjunction with YourRunning.com – I would give away my entry.  Today we’ve announced that Bobby Bostic is the winner of our contest and will be running the North Pole Marathon in April.

See more videos like this at Running at YourRunning.com

There were 65 incredible entrants with awesome stories.  I’m blown away – and inspired – by the fitness level and accomplishment of these folks.  Congrats Bobby.  Time for my run. 

When I decided to give away my entry in the North Pole Marathon (now valued at approximately $12,000 inclusive of airfare) I wasn’t sure what to expect.  In 15 days, over 30 serious athletes have entered the competition.  The entry descriptions are really cool – if you want some vicarious running, go take a look at a few of them.  There’s still time to enter – please pass this on to any of your crazy runner friends.  Thanks to my buds at PixieMate for being a sponsor – if you want to join them and get some promotion for your product on the North Pole, drop me an email.

Last August, I stumbled into the idea of running the North Pole Marathon.  Early in December, I realized it was a dumb ass idea – at least for me – as I’d never be ready for it given the inconsistent training I did in the fall.  So – I decided not to run it (at least not in 2007.)  As Kenny Rogers once said, sometimes you’ve got to “know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”  I’m not running this time – I’m going to fold ‘em instead. 

The original idea was that the University of Alaska at Fairbanks was going to sponsor me.  However, they ran into some budget issues and ended up not being able to do this.  In the mean time, I’d fronted the money for the entry (about $10,000.)  So – as karma would have it – I decided that I would sponsor someone to run it in conjunction with YourRunning (one of my investments via The Enthusiast Group.)

So – if you have the desire, courage, or basic insanity to take a shot at running the the North Pole Marathon, go to the YourRunning site and apply to be the guy (or gal) we sponsor.  You’ve got to fill out an application – we are only going to sponsor one person.  YourRunning is tossing in round trip airfare, which increases the approximate value of this sponsorship to $12,000. 

If this is not for you, but you know someone (other than me) that this might be for, please feel free to pass this along.  We’ll definitely be highlighting some of the “more interesting” applicants.

Given my attempt to run the North Pole Marathon, I’ve gotten involved in a project called International Polar Year.  While this is a major worldwide scientific research project that’s occurring over the next two years, there’s a concentration of scientists in Boulder – including several of the people at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at CU Boulder. 

Mark Parsons – one of the guys at NSIDC – is deeply involved in figuring out how to manage all the data associated with IPY.  A few weeks ago, we talked about the massive challenge associated with this project.  I asked Mark to write up an overview so that we could start to think about who in the tech business might be able to help us deal with the massive amount of data IPY is going to try to organize.  Following is his summary:

IPY is perhaps the most multidisciplinary, integrative, international science project ever conceived. The polar regions have a large and increasingly apparent influence on global systems. These influences range from global ocean circulation which does much to define current climate to local human adaptations  that help us understand human knowledge in fundamental ways. Understanding these processes and influences is a bold challenge. The fact that more than 50,000 investigators from more than 60 countries are seeking to meet that challenge shows that the scope of the inquiry is huge. Yet at a more fundamental level, it is necessary to identify, integrate, and interpret physical, life, and social science data in new ways. This is a science challenge, but it is also a challenge for data management, information science, computer science, and basic human communication.

New paradigms and practical methods are necessary to explore, discover, visualize, and synthesize data and information. This includes technical solutions that allow us to derive new knowledge from the growing mountain of data but also include social solutions abetted by new technology that allow us to better share knowledge, coordinate resources, and educate the next generation.

The challenge is all the greater because the data collected during IPY plus the ongoing data supporting IPY will be highly distributed.  There will be no one or even few central archives. Furthermore, the data will be extremely variable in nature including multi-spectral remote sensing imagery, detailed in-situ measurements of polar flora and fauna, and native-language interviews of Inuit hunters and elders. IPY is actively promoting the use of international data description and transfer standards, but there is a limit to how broadly these can apply to such diverse, distributed, and multilingual data.

In short the challenges of IPY provides a unique opportunity to test and implement new technologies and methods for interactive data access and human communication. This is essential to sustain the legacy of IPY and ensure an educated populace able to address increasingly complex world problems.

So – Mark and I are on a quest – we are looking for technology companies that are interested in engaging with IPY to try to figure out how to deal with this massive project.  Anyone out there (including folks that know how to deal with massive amounts of distributed data – hints to my friends at Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo) interested?

I’ve started to round up sponsors for my North Pole Marathon run.  The first one is Pixie Mate, a local Boulder company that makes an awesome specialty drink based on Mate – a South American tea that’s loaded with antioxidants as well as more fun loving caffeine than tea (but less than coffee). 

I met with the founders – T.J. McIntyre (a swimmer) and Duane Primozich (a runner) in their office above Rudi’s near Hwy 36 and Table Mesa.  They’ve got a rocking business going – powered by a bunch of Mate drinks.  I’m been enjoying various flavors of Mate’s for the past few days and am hooked.

We’ve got some fun stuff planned together, including providing a bunch of Mate for the race participants (I wonder if I’ll be the first person to ever drink a Mate Latte at the North Pole?)

As the reality of agreeing to run a marathon at the North Pole settled in today, I was bombarded by intros from Tom Heinrichs to great cold weather / snow runners that had lots of advice to share.  All were incredibly quick to respond, encouraging, and full of great info. 

One of the first email exchanges was about snowshoes.  There’s at least a 50% chance I’ll have to run the race in snowshoes, so I might as well learn about them, train in them, and be ready for the possibly that my IceBugs won’t be enough.  The United States Snowshoe Association has tons of info about snowshoeing so that was a good start, but Tom’s friend Hal had a great summary of the stuff I needed to think about.

• Success in snowshoe racing is very dependent on the conditions. Most official snowshoe races in the US are a mix of groomed trails (by snowmobile) and “single track trails” that have usually been broken in – there are not many cases where racers are running through virgin powder. As a result, snowshoe racers commonly wear very small shoes.
• You should prepare for various conditions. You want a pair of very small, light weight shoes, a pair of “middle of the road” shoes, and a larger pair of hiking snowshoes.  Snowshoes tend to have a give and take between surface area and size/weight (inversely proportional).  Consider the following models:
• Small – Crescent Moon Dual Trac Super Lite (135 sq. inches) for groomed trail
• Medium – Tubbs Catalyst (used to be Tubbs 10K and many dealers know it by this name).
• Large – Atlas or Tubbs hiking snowshoes.
• It is very hard to hike in powder and I’m not sure how long it would take to do 26.2 miles of hiking in this. Some of the hardest stuff to hike in is crusty snow, but that usually occurs after a rain on snowpack or when diurnal sun cycle is high (when sun is rising in day and setting at night, causing melting and re-freezing.) I don’t think it’s possible that the temp is going above freezing at north pole, especially in April, so you should be fine with this. There is no melting/ freezing diurnal cycle because the sun angle is basically constant at pole.
• As for training, it’s a bit different than running. Training hip flexors is key and the best way to do this is to get on the snowshoes as early as you can in season.  Another way is to train with Power Cranks on a bike.
• If you started training in the fall you should be good. Some of the best snowshoers in USA are coming out of Colorado. There are usually several big races in Colorado each winter and I would definitely check these out as you will get practice running in shoes and meet other people into this.
• The advantage of snowshoes, even on light powder, is that they help keep each step consistent. With sneakers sometimes you’re staying on top of snow for 3 or 4 steps, then punching through and this disrupts your rhythm or can lead to injury.

If any of you have information or experience running in snowshoes, I’m all ears.

On April 7, 2007 I’m going to run the North Pole Marathon.  I’ve increased my marathon in every state goal to include the Marathon Grand Slam Club which is a marathon on every continent and on the Arctic Ocean in the North Pole Marathon.  I’m super excited – in my “you only get one shot at this life thing” philosophy, this is a trip.

Tom Heinrichs, the Associate Director of the GINA Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is the instigator of this madness.  I met Tom last year on my trip to Fairbanks to talk about venture capital and entrepreneurship.  He’s been a regular reader of my blog and we’ve corresponded by email over the past year about a variety of things.  A week ago Tom asked me if I was interested in having the University of Alaska Fairbanks send me to the North Pole to run this marathon as part of International Polar Year.  After doing a little research, I determined that IPY is a huge deal in research for the issues surrounding the Earth’s climate and – given all the focus on global warming (scientific, political, entrepreneurial, and otherwise) – it’d be fun to dig into, learn about, and participate in the real research side of things.  In addition to UAF, a number of research groups in Boulder are going to be involved in IPY, which makes it all the more exciting and relevant for me. Today, Tom sent me a note saying that UAF has approved doing this and I said I “game on.”

I get to exercise three parts of me with this experience.  The physical is obvious – this is not a trivial marathon.  However, I’m a good cold weather runner and I like running in / on snow.  The intellectual is – in some ways – even more powerful.  I’ve been looking for an intellectual connection to global climate issues – beyond the mainstream global warming rhetoric.  While I’ve been impacted by a lot of what I’ve read, I’m still struggling with the lack of critical thinking in many aspects of the discussion – both regarding the problem, but more importantly – the proposed solutions.  International Polar Year has an extensive reach, over several years, which gives me a lot of different ways to exercise my brain and engage in these topics in non-mainstream ways.  Finally, the experiential part - especially as I sit here typing in Homer, Alaska – cannot be denied.

I’ll be talking a lot more about this over the next nine months, including what I’m learning through my involvement with International Polar Year.  We’re starting to line up sponsors – while UAF is making this happen – we plan to have a variety of interesting people and companies involved.  Of course, I’ll be blogging regularly about the experience (and maybe even doing a podcast or two.)  If you want to be involved – in any way – drop me an email.