Australia's marathon man just runs and runs

By Sid Astbury Jan 20, 2012, 6:07 GMT

Sydney - Pat Farmer quit the Australian Parliament to suffer through the mother of all charity runs - a 21,000-kilometre slog from the Arctic to Antarctica.

The hard bits are over and the former motor mechanic has less than 2,000 kilometres left to go.

'If I'm prepared to hurt for a worthy cause, then surely other people are prepared to get by and support me with it,' Farmer said when he left Sydney in April to begin his top-to-bottom trek.

Donations to the International Red Cross have not flooded in. They are nowhere near the millions he had hoped for - and nowhere near commensurate with the battering his 48-year-old body has taken over the past 10 months.

'My feet are a mess, they're missing a number of toenails and they're black and bruised,' Farmer said in a satellite phone call to national broadcaster ABC after reaching the South Pole.

'I've had to squeeze my toes into my boots every morning because my feet are swollen. They're pretty ugly to be quite honest.'

Fellow ultramarathoners scoffed when Farmer said he would be averaging 80 kilometres a day and not be taking a day off. But that is exactly what he has done, picking up claims to world records along the way.

'The first five days I hit the Antarctic I did 70 kilometres a day,' he said. 'I took five days off an existing record that was set by a Norwegian on skis. And I'm now the fastest man across the Antarctic.'

Farmer was forced by the weather to run the Antarctic leg before returning to South America to complete the requisite distance with a jog to Argentina's Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world.

He expects to be back in Australia next month.

The doubters should have looked at Farmer's pedigree. He has run across the continental United States twice, finishing second in the Trans America Road Race in 1993 and fourth two years later.

In 1999, the year before he entered politics, Farmer ran the 14,662 kilometres around Australia in an astonishing 191 days. The father-of-two has run up and down the stairs of a Sydney skyscraper for 24 hours straight, setting a world record for vertical long-distance running.

The worst of the pole-to-pole run has been Antarctica.

'It's been hell to go through,' he said. 'You have to live it to understand what it's like.'

The tent he slept in was never warm enough to melt the ice on his clothing. On some days it was minus 45 degrees Celsius and he was still cold despite running in layer upon layer of clothing, hiking boots and two pairs of socks.

The wind and the blinding snow made Antarctica harder than the Arctic; not that the Arctic itself was a doddle.

'The North Pole had polar bears, the ice cracking in front of you and you sometimes had to put on a dry suit and swim across the water in front of you,' he recalled. 'You had to climb over compressed ice, sometimes as high as a two-storey building.'

Farmer admits he might not fully recover. He has lost cartilage from his knees and his hands are swollen from the cold.

What keeps him going is the notion that 'whatever I face, people in the Third World face much worse - no safe drinking water, no proper sanitation.'

Farmer, in the Canberra parliament for two terms, left because he reckons making marathon running a message business is his special gift.

'You can do a certain amount here in parliament in terms of highlighting issues, but I'm very much a hands-on person,' he told fellow politicians in his valedictory speech.