Rosie Swale Pope pulls her support cart, Ice Chick, during one of her long-distance running expeditions. The cart served as her mobile home and carried the supplies she needed on the road. Credits – Instagram/rosieswalepope, Wikipedia
One of the most remarkable endurance treks in recent memory began when a 57-year-old woman from Tenby, Wales, left her home in October 2003 and didn’t actually stop for five years. People go on unexpected paths when they are grieving. A small percentage of people conclude that the best way to deal with loss is to move on until the grief finds a new home, while others choose to retreat from society.
Temperatures in the Alaskan winter plunged to -60 degrees Celsius, and the cold often forced her to travel only a few hundred metres a day, inching her cart out of the snowdrifts. On 25 August 2008, she arrived home to a gathering of well-wishers and holiday visitors who had assembled to witness her finish a voyage of around 32,000 kilometres. Rosie Swale Pope had lost her husband, Clive, to prostate cancer the year before.
Instead of mourning in silence, she chose to run across the Northern Hemisphere to raise awareness of prostate cancer and support the Prostate Cancer Charity, which later became Prostate Cancer UK. She had no video crew, no support vehicle and no team following her, simply a little cart she called Icebird that carried her tent, food and camping supplies as she went. What Swale Pope set out to do was remarkable, even for top endurance racers. She was going to run around the Northern Hemisphere, covering as much land as possible before continuing across North America and back to Britain. She travelled through Europe and Russia, took a short flight from Siberia to Alaska (there is no road connecting the two), then continued through Canada and the United States before making the final leg home via Iceland and Scotland. she was hit by a bus, later broke ribs and injured her hip in a fall on ice, and also suffered frostbite and a possible tick-borne illness near Lake Baikal While in Siberia. Back home on crutches The last part of the journey home to Tenby, after five years on the road, proved almost as difficult as any of the others. Swale Pope had stress fractures in both legs and had to hobble the final few miles on crutches, not exactly the way she had envisioned her steady jog to be. A full description of the journey is kept in the archives of the Museum of Travel and Tourism.
