SKI ACROSS ANTARCTICA

MAJOR SANDY HENNIS

WHILE we were skiing, it got down to -56 degrees and you start to feel pretty chilly. It’s strange because it’s a very dry kind of cold; it’s different from Scottish cold air. I don’t think it’s anything you can ever get used to.

Life is completely different, even things like going to the toilet. The worst thing was probably that we didn’t get to shower for two months, which sounds quite shallow. I would rub snow on my feet to wash them, which was cold and horrible, but it was important to make sure your feet didn’t get any sort of infection. Once a week we would try to wash ourselves with a tiny bit of cloth and for water we would melt the snow.

Before I went to Antarctica I trained for about two years. I pulled tyres and had ski training in Norway. I had never skied before this. Initially I didn’t know any of the other women but now they are closer to me than some of the people who I have known my whole life because we have done so much together. We were six women who were together for two months, so there were quite a few arguments.

We did a lot of research while we were there about how the female body copes in an intense endurance environment. Those results showed that our bodies faired incredibly well; in fact in some areas better than the male bodies of the team that went the year before. We lost a lot of fat but no muscle tissue and it didn’t have any long-term effect on our hormonal or reproductive systems.

About a week into the expedition I became quite ill and I was struggling to carry my weight. So the girls had to take some of the weight off me and help me. I was very low mentally. The girls were able to keep me going and knew how to keep me motivated.

The thing I was most nervous about were the crevasses, which are big holes in the ice. Sometimes they get covered by the snow and it’s easy to fall through. We had done all the training to prepare for this, which was absolutely horrific because it involved falling into these things deliberately. Probably this and getting an injury scared me the most before I had even arrived at the Antarctic.

I had to pull the equipment behind me on a sledge and it wasn’t just a lot of pressure on your arms, but also your core. I was attached to a harness and it pulled the weight behind me. Some days if the ice is hard it’s not that heavy and glides easily but other days it can feel like you’re pulling a concrete wall.

I lost a lot of weight – around 12 kilos – but we were expecting that so we put the weight on beforehand. I suffered a little bit of fat loss in my hips and in my ankles just from constant use on all the joints. It’s taken a fair few months to fully recover. We were burning around 10,000 calories a day but we only really absorbed about 5,000. We were reaching 5,000 calories in dehydrated food, so we would have porridge with

milk and melt the snow to add water. During the day we didn’t stop for lunch or anything and we would eat snacks along the way – chocolate, biscuits, flapjacks and lots of nuts.

For days it felt like I was looking at the same flat white surroundings but other times I would look up at the sky and think, “It’s just so beautiful around here”. I was completely in my own head space, with nothing to think about apart from skiing. It’s so beautiful and your mind feels so free that you are almost moved to tears at times.

The Army is quite good for equal opportunities and I’ve never felt I was being judged because I was a woman. I started as a soldier and have now reached the rank of major.

Sandy Hennis is ambassador for the 2019 Cateran Yomp in Perthshire on June 8-9. She will be giving a talk about her Ice Maiden expedition at the Royal College Building in Glasgow on March 1. Visit soldierscharity.org