How two Hong Kong runners, one blind, ran North Pole Marathon – and only slipped over once on the ice
Businessman Andy Chik helped his friend Gary Leung become the first blind person to run both the North Pole and Antarctic marathons. Now he has some tough goals of his own to start training for
Andy Chik Wing-keung, 47, the Hong Kong regional director for insurance company FWD, originally started running to burn off the calories from the alcohol he was drinking during business dinners. More recently he returned to work after running the North Pole Marathon – 10 loops of a 4.2km (2.6 mile) Arctic sea ice track where temperatures can fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius and armed guards are positioned to keep an eye out for polar bears. And he wasn’t even doing the run for himself.
Chik and the North Pole Marathon have a bit of a history. Last year he successfully completed the race – an annual event held next to a Russian Arctic research station which can only be reached by plane – but his 2016 attempt had been frustrated by flight delays in the Arctic, and he had to return to work without getting to the race start.
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This year he returned to the North Pole, but as a guide for blind runner Gary Leung Siu-wai. In 2014, tethered together by an elastic band for 19 days, the pair had, impressively, covered 1,000km running across Taiwan. But according to Chik, running together on Arctic snow was a lot more testing despite the much shorter distance.
“If you are guiding a blind runner on a road it is quite easy, you just say: there are steps ahead, there are stones, or there is a hole. Simple things, because the road is the same. At the North Pole every step is different. There is soft snow, hard snow and also there are different layers of it. I had to speak to Gary all the way and I lost my voice in the cold air. After 30km I did not want to talk any more.”
The mental and physical stress of the situation was exhausting for Leung, but it was Chik who was responsible for their only fall. “On the last 6km, my foot got stuck in the snow, I fell, and Gary fell on me.”