Hours of journey: 9h45' - Accumulative: 172h15
Km./Day: 25 - Accumulative: 334,4Km. Remaining to the South Pole: 810,6Km.
Days of progress: 21 (17 Solo) - Inactive Days: 15 (0 Solo) - Total Days: 36
With this header please do not think I've gone mad already (at least for the moment) and that I believe we are already in Christmas. What's happened is that today has been my first mileage of 25 Kilometres in this month of December... and I hope not to be the last and it turns into an average for the rest of the expedition.
Today has been a perfect day: sun, great visibility and no wind at all. Magnificent! The surface continued being very irregular and with Sastruguis zones, but there where more open flat and hard areas. With all that in mind, I have pushed hard and almost in 10 hours (9h45 to be precise), I have achieved for the very first time a very good number of Kilometres.
If tomorrow I can do, at least 23, I will have reached Parallel 83, within the 5 days period I set and planned.
It is curious how one can constantly become delusionated. I always say I will not do more than 9 hours per day as I want to upset my body state in general, and, in the last five days, I have gone well beyond those nine hours. And what I really fancy now is to go after more kilometres, as there are plenty more come. In fact, right now, I have 810,6 left from the total 1.145 that separates me from the South Pole following my route. Please note that from today onwards, I will be including this info at the beginning of the text. I should have done it days ago, but I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to include this data knowing that it was so evident that there are still so many km to go.
Right. I'm happy. I've done 25Km. But the effort to get there is brutal, honestly. It seems to me as if when we run an ultra-marathon for days, one gives his biggest push on the penultimate day, because he thinks that during the last day he will get to the end one way or the other. The problem here is that I am always pushing as if it was the penultimate day, but the following day is not the last one, nor the other, nor the other... .
I DEDICATE THIS JOURNEY TO:
Racetracker. Because it is them who makes the possibility to follow me on the web live. To whoever likes this things (my wife and Rafael are addicted to it), you can see with a 30 minutes frequency, my evolution in real time.
In this case, the Racetracker system receives the signal from www.yellowbrick-tracking.com, a gps based tracking beacon, and supplied by Fibertel-Iridium in Madrid.
I signed with Racetracker in 2008, when I was about to start the expedition in Papua New Guinea to climb the Carstensz Pyramid. They bet on me as I wasn't a mediatic character which would allow them to try and develop the system without much risk to their image at the beginning. Since then, I have not gone anywhere without this on-line tracking system developed in Barcelona. Now there are lots of adventurers, alpine mountaineers, sailors, who use Racetracker... Edurne Pasaban, for instance, has used it in her last three 8.000m.