It’s not glamorous being an explorer, says Eric Larsen. After all, he says: I’m not jumping off cliffs or anything.
But perusing — from snow biking in Antarctica to skiing to the North Pole, during his most recent trek — it’s clear that he’s not after glamour. He’s going after silent, chilling beauty in the planet’s farthest-flung places.
Earlier this year, Larsen, 43, and fellow explorer Ryan Waters, 41, completed a 53-day, unassisted and unsupported (no resupplies, and no help from snowmobiles, sled dogs or kites) trip from land to the North Pole, on May 6. That day, Waters became the first American to complete the adventurer’s grand slam, sometimes called the explorer’s grand slam — he’s been to both poles (unsupported) and has reached all of the Seven Summits, the highest peak on each continent. For Larsen, it was his third trip to the North Pole, and another chance to see the changing landscape there for .
The expedition required them to ski and even swim in open water as the ice started breaking up, all the while pulling heavy sleds (which float), sometimes in whiteout conditions.
Tom Sjogren, who founded the adventure news site explorers-web.com with his wife, Tina, noted the staggering difficulty of their journey.
“I did Everest, South Pole and North Pole, and I have to say this expedition is exceptionally tough and hard,” Sjogren says. (When asked how many times he’d been to the North Pole, Sjogren replied, “Once, and I’m not going back. It was really cold.”)
It takes a long time to prepare for these kinds of trips. Larsen and Waters, both Boulder residents, planned and trained for more than a year before a tiny Twin Otter airplane dropped them off on the edge of Canada’s Ellesmere Island in mid-March.
It’s a long journey, tortoise versus snail, Larsen says, and he plans his physical preparation accordingly.
“I call my training focus ‘strength endurance,’ ” Larsen says. “That’s what I’m going for. Because on these trips, we’re really slow.”
At the start of the expedition, Waters and Larsen were pulling 325-pound sleds across rough and sometimes sludgy ocean ice.
“You’re skiing on these big planes of ice that are floating, melting and refreezing, and it creates hard conditions to ski across,” Waters says. “There’s open water, there’s pressure ridges, there’s broken ice everywhere.”
To manage such heavy sleds as they ate into their food supply, thus lightening their load, Waters and Larsen would relay them, dropping one sled and hauling the other together, then going back for the first.
“Those first weeks were brutal,” Larsen says. “You’d travel a mile, two miles, and that’s how much forward progress you’d make. …There was a day where we made nine-tenths of a mile. It’s 35 degrees below zero … it’s disheartening to make that kind of progress, and you’re not going fast enough, you have limited supplies, and you have so far to go.”
Whether they’re covering less than a mile a day or 17 miles, there are no easy days on an expedition like this one, Waters says.
“Every day, even if you have the perfect conditions out — nice weather, lots of good terrain on that specific day — still, you can’t ever let up your focus. Because these other factors: You’re in a remote place that you can’t get rescued from, your gear is often breaking, you have to fix things, your body might be hurting physically, and mentally, and there was no day when it let up.”
And then, there were the predators on the ice.
“At one point, we went back to get the other sled, there were a couple of polar bears, they were about 15 feet away from us, a mom and a yearling, they were right in our tracks,” Larsen says. They scared them off with noise, by shooting bear-scare shells.
Getting “burly,” not lean
So how does one prepare for these kinds of challenges?
“With these big expeditions, there are a lot of facets that go into being successful,” Larsen says. “Focusing on the physical training can also be something you want to push aside. If I don’t have any money, if I don’t fundraise, we can’t do the trip, anyway. Or if I don’t have the gear. So it’s easy to say, oh, I’m just going to put that aside.
“But I feel like all of those things have equal importance.”
So they train.
Larsen and Waters approach it in a way that’s part functional-fitness athlete, part ultramarathoner, part mountaineer. (Waters is a mountain guide who leads clients up peaks around the world, so some of his training happens just by constantly being on a mountain.) Most of their expedition training involves cardio, like long bike rides and trail runs, and picking up, dragging or .
That’s right: When preparing for an expedition, they head to Larsen’s North Boulder storage unit to grab some old truck tires and take them to a dirt road just north of town, where they pull them from a harness, just like they’d pull a sled.
Larsen calls it “one of the dumbest things in the world to do” but adds, “I love it.” Because every step pulling those tires under the Colorado sun is a step toward success on an expedition.
After 40 minutes or so of pulling a tire or two, it’s on to their functional-fitness workout.
“I kind of made up a bunch of CrossFit stuff with the tires,” Larsen says.
“I don’t know how much they weigh, they have to be 50 or 60 pounds,” he adds as an aside.
“We throw them, we throw them over our shoulder, we flip them, we hit them with sledge hammers. It’s a lot of core workout, just trying to build overall fitness, since we have them there,” Larsen says. “We sprint with them.”
Larsen also loads a backpack with 50 pounds and hikes the 1,300 vertical feet from the trailhead to the summit of Mount Sanitas near Boulder. Waters gets in his workouts as he’s guiding clients up mountains.
Their aim, Waters says, is to be all-around strong.
“You’re just, like, burly. You can carry heavy stuff, you can throw heavy junk around. It’s this unwritten hard-man-ship, throwing tires around, you’re not training for getting lean and wearing spandex, it’s more carrying rocks up mountains.”
Waters was quick to point out that dragging tires is expedition-specific; he also does fun things, like mountain biking and rock climbing. But both men will be pulling tires again ahead of their next expedition, crossing the southern Patagonia ice cap.
Both are often asked how they maintain their motivation.
“With this polar stuff, you’re focused on this stuff for a really long time,” Larsen says. “And I like this, because it helps you stay focused, you know, ‘should I go have a beer with my friends? No, I have to train.’ “
Waters echoed that sentiment.
“You know the physical parts are going to be hard: there’s the weather, it’s going be dangerous. But there’s also the financial part … all the aspects are hard. But that’s actually a good motivator when it comes to training. You feel the pressure of so much stuff you’re putting into this trip, so you say, ‘You know what, I’m going out and training hard for this trip.’ ”
Jenn Fields: 303-954-1599, jfields@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jennfields
