Cyclist conquered her fears to reach the South Pole

AS AVALANCHE after avalanche crashed down the mountains before her, polar cyclist Maria Leijerstam realised the danger she was in.

She was heading for the South Pole’s “dreaded” Leverett Glacier. The 39-year-old, from the Vale of Glamorgan, was desperately trying not to imagine suffocating beneath hardening snow.

Maria became the first person to cycle from the edge of the Antarctic to the South Pole in 2013. But the athlete was plagued by fears she would not complete her terrifying journey.

As she pushed on she was determined to reach the base of the glacier before pitching her tent for the night.

“I was travelling in a wonderland,” she said in her new book, Cycling to the South Pole. “It was overwhelming and surreal and I could hardly comprehend where I was.”

She thought of Captain Scott arriving at the Beardmore glacier and Roald Amundsen tackling the Axel Heinberg.

“They would have arrived at the mountain base with dogs and ponies. I was soon to arrive with my unusuallooking, untested, polarcycle.”

Maria had chosen a route barely touched by modern explorers.

“I was petrified,” she said. “For the first time on my journey I began to doubt the strength in my thighs.”

Distracted by the mountains, Maria was not watching her GPS. She became confused. Tears of frustration streamed down her cheeks. They froze instantly. Finally the glacier came into view.

“There was no other way to turn,” she said.

“If I was to reach the South Pole I had to climb it. I had studied the gradients of the glacier, metre by metre, and I knew that there were five very steep sections of up to 25% gradient.”

The snow made it difficult to tell whether she was on the glacier or not. She glanced at her GPS. She was at the base. The vast wilderness made her feel tiny.

“One moment the glacier seemed to tower down on me as angry as it had been in my nightmares, and in another moment the ice looked smooth and the gradient shallow,” Maria said.

“My vision was deceiving me and my ability to calculate depth was impaired. The glacier stretched 3,000 metres above sea level in an endless tail of ice that disappeared into the sky above. I couldn’t visualise the height, the incline or the top of the glacier, which I so desperately wanted to reach.”

She closed her eyes and thought: “I’ll never be able to do this.”

“The enormity of the mountain range that surrounded me was mind-blowing, indescribable — too vast for my mind to handle. It prompted demons to pop into my mind and I had to make a constant effort to chase them away, as I pedalled on.”

Maria had so far avoided using her lowest gear. Having it in reserve gave her hope. With 1,400 metres to go and the glacier getting steeper, she was forced to use it, but was forced to stop, and pitched her tent, weighing it down with ice blocks.

Alone in the bleak landscape she tweeted from her satellite phone.

“All I want for Christmas is to get to the top of this glacier,” she wrote.

Overnight the wind rose and dropped. Maria worried about slipping into a crevasse near her tent.

“My fears kept me awake for most of the night,” she said.

The sun returned to its morning position but visibility had dropped to almost nothing.

Under these conditions Maria had to cross one of the steepest sections of the glacier.

“I prayed that I would be able to stay on track and avoid the dangers. I began pedalling in my lowest gear, which was an unnerving start to the day. It was my only option.

Her speed was down to one kilometre per hour.

“Flashes of possible disasters ran through my mind and nothing made sense,” Maria said.

“With visibility down to almost nothing, I sensed I was back on the traverse,” she said.

“It was far from over. I tried to calm myself by counting the pedal strokes as a form of meditation.

“As my game faded, I was transported promptly back into the world of pain.” Maria was desperate and alone on the bottom of the world.

“I was out of options,” she said. “And I was only halfway up the glacier.”

But she managed to conquer it, completing the almost 650km route in just over 10 days.