Crossfit Antarctica

Working out on the road can be challenging. I’ve found two great lists of bodyweight workouts for those days when I can’t get to a gym. Like, say, on Deception Island in Antarctica. :)



Here’s the first list, and here’s a great bodyweight workouts blog.

Also, I was stoked that this video was posted on the Crossfit.com blog yesterday!

Antarctica, The Final Episode

Read part one and part two about visiting Antarctica.

BREAKING THE ICE

One of the coolest parts of the trip for me was seeing the ice. It was still early in the summer, and a lot of the ice hadn’t yet melted. In fact, none of the expedition staff had ever seen that much ice. The Vavilov had a reinforced hull, and plowed through the brash ice like a hot knife through butter:



The other amazing thing about the ice were the colors! I got a taste of the amazing blues I’d see when I hiked the Perito Moreno glacier in Calafate, but some of the blues and whites were absolutely stunning.

WHO LIVES IN ANTARCTICA

We stopped at two bases. Vernadsky Station is a Ukrainian research base with 13 guys. They hadn’t seen anybody else since the last boats came through there in March. They were stoked to see us, and particularly stoked to see the women on our trip. This was the place where the intrepid scientists there first noticed global warming. The guys here were super friendly, even making surprisingly good homebrew and doing vodka shots with us at their bar.


Shooting Ukrainian homebrew

The second base was called Port Lockroy. It’s a British station with four people stationed there for six months at a time. I couldn’t believe people actually lived there - it looked more like a museum showing how people lived there back in the day. It had a gift shop, several museumy-like rooms, and one big room where all four people slept. There were no showers - people showered on passing ships (and there are none in the winter). I asked them what they did during the day, and their tasks were:

• counting penguins
• counting penguins’ eggs
• shoveling snow to keep it from covering the windows
• doing maintenance on the building
• running the gift shop

Port Lockroy was old school

Seemed like it would be a fascinating experience, but it also seemed like there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do!

DECEPTION ISLAND

We hit Deception Island on the last day before heading back across the Drake to Argentina. Deception Island was an abandoned sealing and whaling base that was run by Norwegians. It was my favorite excursion for several reasons.


Abandoned whaling boat

First, we landed in the driving snow. The sky was overcast but the sun was barely shining through the haze. Everybody was bundled up, and the uniformity of the rented pants and jackets made it seem like everybody was wearing a space suit. The combination of obscured sun, the snow, the spacesuits, the abandoned buildings and boats, and the absence of tons of penguins made Deception Island seem like another planet.


Another planet

Second, there was a lot of talk about the natural hot springs at Deception Island. A couple of staff members dug a hole down to the hot springs, and a few of us brave (or crazy) passengers geared down and jumped in. The water was actually quite warm compared to how cold it felt when standing in my boxers in the driving wind and snow!



And finally, before the swim, I completed a Crossfit workout in Antarctica. The nerdiest video I’ve made in my life (of said workout) is forthcoming :)

ROUNDING CAPE HORN

On our way back, the Drake was pretty mild, though the second was the roughest of them all. A few guests prayed to the porcelain gods, but I just slept for much of the time.

We rounded Cape Horn, getting within three nautical miles thanks to some deft negotiations with the Chileans by Carolina, an Argentine staff member. This was closer than any of the staff had ever been, which was pretty awesome. The Horn is the southernmost part of South America and was a major trade route until the Panama Canal opened. The winds, waves, currents, and icebergs make it treacherous, and many ships were wrecked here. Though, as usual, it was fairly calm when we rounded it.


Three nautical miles from Cape Horn

FOOD

A couple of people have asked me about the food on the ship. Here’s what it was: pretty tasty, and friggin plentiful. There were 5 meals: breakfast, lunch, tea time, happy hour, and dinner. Cakes, pies, cookies, etc were served at all but breakfast. At lunch and dinner there were always veggie, fish, and meat options. Being vegan on the ship would’ve involved bringing a lot of one’s own food. But if you weren’t vegan, you definitely wouldn’t go hungry.

ONE MORE THING…

There was an amazing photographer named Jordan Manley on the ship, who took some incredible time lapse videos on the ship. You can check the Antarctica timelapse video out here.

Antarctica, Part Two

Read Part 1 about visiting Antarctica. Part three is here.

GETTING THERE AND BACK: THE DRAKE PASSAGE

To get to Antarctica by boat requires crossing the Drake Passage, an 800 km stretch of open ocean that is often rough. How rough? 50 foot waves in bad conditions:



Many people consider crossing the Drake to be a right of passage getting to Antarctica. I think those people are nuts. I’d resigned myself to staying in bed for 2 days each way as my stomach is like a delicate flower in rough seas. But we were lucky - the 2 days getting to Antarctica were not quite as calm as the “Drake Lake” which is what the crew called the calmest passages. But it was close enough that I kept the delicious and frequent meals down and felt pretty good.


En route to Antarctica

During the passage, we were kept busy with seminars on topics like birding and the history of Antarctica. I skipped most of these as the dramamine I was taking coupled with the gently rocking boat made me drowsy (but not sick) for good chunks of the day. We sighted the Antarctica Peninsula early morning on Monday Nov 10. There was a sense of giddy anticipation amongst the guests and crew as we got closer to land!

THE PASSENGERS

The people were a big part of what made this trip unique. Our voyage skewed younger than usual. I didn’t meet anybody younger than 23, and there were no kids. The oldest woman on board was 83, was traveling by herself, and had more energy than half of the other guests.


Elizabeth was often the life of the party

There were also some skiers on board from a previous trip that had been cancelled. That trip was the first commercial backcountry skiing trip to Antarctica, and had a bunch of sponsored athletes on board.



Off the top of my head, these were three people from the ship that I met: one guy who had summitted the tallest peaks on each continent… 3 times. One guy who in one year had climbed all 54 of Colorado’s peaks over 14,000 feet. And one guy who had been to Antarctica twice to rock climb - two days from the nearest base - once with a friend, and once by himself. He also did a slideshow on how he spent 45 days climbing by himself in Greenland.

And me? It was my first time in a kayak.



The crew I mostly hung with consisted of Swedish Maria, Irish Cormac, Dutch Wichert, Americans Will, Raman, and Emily, and Israeli Amit. We formed a solid crew that shot the shit, drank, ate, and kayaked. Will, Raman, Maria and I also hung out post-trip in Buenos Aires.

WILDLIFE

I’m not really a bird guy, so the wildlife in Antarctica wasn’t super exciting for me, especially since whales are still migrating south. Later in the season you are more likely to see orcas, humpbacks, and tons of other kinds of whales (though we did see two humpbacks at one point - they were spotted behind us and the captain unhesitatingly turned the ship around to go check them out, itinerary be damned).

The bird exception were the penguins, which were rad. We visited several gentoo rookeries (where they live, mate, etc) and even saw some rogue chinstrap and adelie penguins.


L-R: Gentoo, Adelie, and Chinstrap

A few things about penguins:

• They wallow in their own poop. Seriously, they poop indiscriminately and their nests are often amid heaps of crap
• Consequently, penguin rookeries smell. bad.
• They look super awkward on land. They make up for this in the water, zipping around like “velvet torpedos” (a description from one of the quark staff). They often breach the surface of the water to catch several feet of air before diving back in, which looks like amazing fun.
• We were early on in mating season, so there were few eggs. Which meant few hungry leopard seals. Apparently the hatching season and resulting bloodbath occurs in February

Leopard seals will kill a penguin by shaking it until its insides come out (video not for the squeamish, skip past the dumb intro slides):



The other cool fact I learned about birds is that an albatross will spend the first 10 years of its life at sea. Crazy.

We saw a bunch of Leopard and Weddell seals too, lounging on icebergs, chilling on land, and swimming (including one that came right up to our zodiac). Cute little (and sometimes huge) guys. We didn’t see any penguin-munching, though, so I can’t fully give it up for the seals.

KAYAKING

Before I left, I was contemplating whether I should do this for an additional $700. My friends set me straight, asking whether I would be in Antarctica again (who knows) and whether I had the money (yes). So, never having been in a kayak before, I signed up.

The guides, Chad and Solan, were young, entertaining, and experienced kayakers. The group comprised 16 people who were young and old.

When we were in Antarctica, there were excursions twice a day. The rest of the passengers would either land on shore or zip around the icebergs in zodiacs. Depending on weather conditions, the kayakers would also have an option to kayak. There ended up being five kayaking excursions, and I went on four.



We wore airtight dry suits, life jackets, and kayaking skirts, so if anybody fell in the drink (and one guy did), we wouldn’t get soaked. Wearing that gear gave us the added benefit of looking sexier than anybody on the ship.



Kayaking was what made the trip for me. We were able to get away from the ship, from the noise, from people, and see things from a different vantage point.



We played mini-icebreaker and paddled through fields of brash ice (where my paddle was literally smacking small icebergs).

We watched leopard seals lounge on icebergs from 10 feet away.

We had penguin leaping out of the water around our kayaks.



We got a sense of scale of the continent as we paddled up close to the huge walls of ice that rose from the sea.



We (probably) induced a glacier to calve by screaming, hearing the echo bounce around, and feeling the glacier crack and the resulting wave under our kayaks. Sometimes the only sound was paddles slapping the water; sometimes, it was the overpowering silence of the white continent.



The first day we went out was brilliantly sunny, the skies were clear blue, and the waters were super calm. It was an unreal experience kayaking in those conditions, and Solan said it was even for him a day to remember. For me too, as the rest of the time we were there it was grey and overcast.


Day one in a kayak

On my favorite kayak excursion, we were circumnavigating Cuverville island. We got halfway around and reached a bottleneck that was jammed with ice. Since we couldn’t proceed, we turned around to kayak back around the island to the ship. The weather turned with us, and all of a sudden we were paddling into a mild snowstorm. It was a good, hard, 20-30 minute paddle into the driving snow, which blocked out my sunglasses and made it difficult to see. Icebergs, brash ice, and land zipped by as we paddled, and few words were said as the group focused on getting to the ship. At one point I started laughing out loud - I was friggin paddling a kayak in the middle of a snowstorm in Antarctica! It doesn’t get much better than that!

NEXT

Drinking with Ukrainians, playing icebreaker, rounding Cape Horn, and hot springs and Crossfit at Deception Island!

Antarctica, The Details

I went to Antarctica earlier this month. It was an amazing experience being so far away from civilization and seeing crazy foreign terrain.

QUICK FACTS

Antarctica:

• is the highest, driest, windiest, and coldest continent
• contains 70% of the world’s fresh water
• doubles in size in the winter
• can grow at 3 km per day as the surrounding water freezes in the winter
• has about 40k visitors per year in the summer months between November and March
• has been visited by less than a million people in the history of time

Amazing Landscapes

WHY GO

This was the third question asked when meeting new people on the boat (the first was “what’s your name”, the second; “where are you from” - we counted people from 21 countries). For me, I was intrigued by the landscapes after seeing a friend’s pictures of the Arctic. The blue and white landscapes were like nothing I’d seen before, and I suspected the remoteness and scale of the ice would make me feel small and give me perspective. The Antarctic was even more remote, further away, and more difficult to get to than the Arctic. So, of course, it made it more appealing to me. For others, the reasons were similar to mine… or to climb, honeymoon, ski, or as a last-minute “what the hell” trip while vacationing in Ushuaia.


Beautiful Ice

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?

In early October I bought my ticket through Quark Expeditions, who also operated this expedition. Based on this trip, I’d highly recommend them (more below). I paid $2500, which was discounted from $4400 or so. My room was a shared triple - only one of two, and the cheapest room on the ship - with two lower and one upper bunk, and shared bathrooms and showers. I also paid another $700 for the option to kayak (only 16 people were allowed to kayak). Cabins can get mighty expensive, and mighty nice too. The other way to get there is to head down to Ushuaia and wait for a last-minute berth. One of my cabin-mates did this, but I’m not sure how much he paid (the rumor was that Quark doesn’t discount last-minute tickets). That said, I have a friend who just paid $1800 for a last-minute berth on a ship not run by Quark. I didn’t have time to kill in Ushuaia waiting for last-minute fares to open up, and I wanted to camp and kayak, so I paid in advance (and lucked into a great deal announced on Quark’s mailing list).

USHUAIA, ARGENTINA

Almost all ships leave from Ushuaia. It’s a small town that rides its status as the southernmost city in the world. I had one full day there, but instead of opting to visit Tierra Del Fuego (an allegedly beautiful national park nearby), I decided to pick up last-minute supplies for the trip and see the town a bit. It’s quaint and hilly, and the most exciting thing I did there was enjoy a meal at the best restaurant in town, Kaupé. The food there was excellent - king crab is fished locally and is served up fresh and delicious. There were many tenedor libres (all you can eat meat places - literally “free fork”) serving up Patagonian lamb. I didn’t try it though, as I’d had enough meat in Buenos Aires to last a year, and I have a distaste for lamb after a bad incident in Shanghai in 2002.


The lamb was a no-go, though it looked warm and toasty

ABOUT THE TRIP

The trip consisted of 11 days at sea. We left Ushuaia on a Friday evening and hit the Antarctic peninsula on the following Monday morning. We visited multiple locations in Antarctica that week. We had two excursions a day from our ship, the Vavilov. We ended by visiting the South Shetland Islands on Friday. We headed back to Ushuaia on Friday night, and landed early Monday morning.


Leaving Ushuaia

The guides kept stressing that this was an adventure excursion. That meant that a lot of what we did was dependent on weather conditions. Indeed, we had some cancelled activities but they were always replaced with other things (i.e. we couldn’t get to land because of the ice or wind, so instead we’d cruise around the icebergs in zodiacs).

The staff were fantastic. It was comprised of mostly Aussies, with a few Canadians, Americans, and Others wrapped in for the heck of it. They were knowledgeable, accommodating, entertaining, and generally fun to be around. The crew was Russian and we didn’t interact much, short of being helped into and out of the Zodiacs en route to shore, seeing the Captain and his homies on the bridge, and working out with a Zangief-life character in the gym (his preferred music was Blondie, while mine was a burned CD in the weightroom entitled “Black Music”). There were about 50-60 staff and crew, and 90-100 passengers on board.

THE SHIP

The Akademik Sergei Vavilov is a Scandinavian-made Russian research vessel. I was expecting a fairly rough-around-the-edges vessel, but was super surprised to find it more than comfortable (lesson: never underestimate the pure awesomeness of Scandinavian design, I s’pose).


The Akademik Sergei Vavilov

The ship has six decks, with a gym, sauna + seawater (i.e. *cold*) plunge pool, library, internet room (which I never used), big bar and observation lounge, presentation room, and dining hall.

More pics of the ship:


Tomorrow… Antarctic wildlife, the passengers, kayaking, and the dreaded Drake Passage crossing!

Read part three: Drinking with Ukrainians, playing icebreaker, rounding Cape Horn, and hot springs and Crossfit on Deception Island!