This Ontario Man Nearly Died in an Arctic Race at 62. It Changed His Life Forever

Raymond Aaron at the North Pole in April 2007 during the Polar Race, with sunburned eyes and frostbite on his face under the ice. (Courtesy of Raymond Aaron)

After nearly freezing to death and experiencing snow blindness in Canada’s Arctic, Raymond Aaron doesn’t sweat the small stuff anymore.

Now 79, the well-known author and public speaker in 2007 participated in the Polar Race, a biennial race from Resolute, Nunavut, to the North Magnetic Pole.

It was a gruelling 17 days, 20 hours, 43 minutes, and 51 seconds that he’ll never forget, but it was also an experience of a lifetime for the then 62-year-old—one that he is “wildly, wildly happy” to have been a part of.

The 12-hour days of skiing in minus 40-degree weather while pulling a sled loaded with 100 pounds (45 kilos) of supplies not only helped Mr. Aaron to get into the best physical shape of his life, but it also radically changed his outlook.

Now, he says, he enjoys all life has to offer and doesn’t worry about the small details. Difficulties and physical discomfort no longer faze him either.

“I spent a month so far out of my comfort zone that there is no comfort zone for me any longer,” he told The Epoch Times. “I have a rule now: Never use the elevator. Even 10 stories or 20 stories, I just walk it. Nothing is out of the way. Nothing. No temperature is too hot, no temperature is too cold.”

Preparing for the Race

Mr. Aaron is no stranger to adventure. He has always enjoyed mastering new skills and challenging himself both physically and mentally. Prior to participating in the Polar Race, he ran marathons and was an avid rock climber and cave explorer. He even learned how to ride the unicycle when he was 40 years old.

“I think of myself as Peter Pan, that I can do anything, that nothing’s an obstacle,” he said.

So when a friend told him of her plans to enter the race with her son, Mr. Aaron decided it was too good a challenge to pass up.

Once he signed up, the 60-year-old father of two had two years to prepare. That involved regularly flying from his home in Toronto to England for training sessions. Participants were taught key survival and navigation tips as well as practical skills like putting up and taking down their tents in sub-zero temperatures.

Raymond Aaron is all bundled up at a Polar Race checkpoint, with competitors’ tents in background. (Courtesy of Raymond Aaron)

In his spare time, Mr. Aaron started a rigorous physical training regimen. As part of that, one task he set for himself was stair climbing. The luxury condo he lived in at the time had 10 flights of stairs from the parking garage to the penthouse. The first time he attempted to run up all 10 floors he made it only one-and-a-half flights up before needing a break.

After six months of training, he had worked up to climbing and ascending 100 flights of stairs in just 30 minutes. A few months later, he was able to complete 300 flights in two hours and one minute, but he still was not convinced his training regime was up to par, so he decided to up the ante to 1,000 flights.

He timed how many minutes it took for each trip up and down the 10 flights. After many attempts, he finally pared down his time to a number he was pleased with.

“My fear was that I would die and nobody would find me for months because in a luxury condo nobody uses the stairs,” he said. “But I did it and it took nine hours and 51 minutes.”

That’s when Mr. Aaron knew he was ready.

Dealing With the Cold

With two years of intense training under his belt, Mr. Aaron was off to Nunavut, the start-point of the race.

Up against racers in their 20s and 30s, he knew he did not have the advantage physically, so he and his race partner committed to skiing for 12 hours each day.

His partner, who he didn’t know prior to the race, was not happy about being paired with a 62-year-old, Mr. Aaron said.

“He thought I wouldn’t ever do it,” he said, referring to completing the trek, which is as much about mental toughness as it is about stamina and speed.

The goal of the race, which began on April 9, 2007, was for each team to ski 350 nautical miles as quickly as possible while pulling supply-laden sleds.

Even in April, the weather was unbearably cold, Mr. Aaron said. The racers wore a multi-layered jumpsuit in addition to three layers of hand protection, and a hat that covered everything except the mouth and eyes as well as special goggles.

“We were told, counterintuitively, that we were never, ever to get warm,” he said of the instructions given to them by the race organizers.

The High Arctic has practically zero precipitation and zero humidity. In such dryness, the skin on Raymond Aaron's thumb cracked open. The correct procedure is gluing the skin together with Krazy Glue. (Courtesy of Raymond Aaron)

Sweating, they were told, could lead to dehydration, a potentially life-threatening condition when water is limited. The instant racers became too warm, they were instructed to unzip layers on their jumpsuits to cool down.

Having almost his entire head covered meant his goggles fogged up periodically, another situation that was potentially hazardous.

“You can’t move forward unless you can see clearly the undulations of the ice, because if you can’t see it, you can trip, fall, break a knee, break an ankle, and you’re out in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “There’s no hospitals. There’s no helicopters.”

Skiing on the flat ice was relatively easy, but the ice was also interspersed with ice rubble which slowed their progress. Some ice chunks were as big as “broken Volkswagens,” Mr. Aaron said, making it necessary to go around them. But sometimes the rubble couldn’t be avoided.

“We would have to climb ourselves over a lump of ice rubble, maybe three feet tall, and let ourselves down gently, because if you jump down, you might break an ankle, and then we had to haul a 100-pound sled up to the balance point and then let it down,” he said.

“When you’ve just raced 10 hours, eight hours, you’re completely exhausted, and to haul a 100-pound sled up is very difficult, but to let it down slowly is excruciatingly difficult, because if we just let it bang down, it could break the sled or break our leg bones.”

‘Very Scary Moment’

While Mr. Aaron suffered no injuries from clambering over ice rubble, one of his greatest victories—completing a 20-mile day—put his life in jeopardy.

“Instead of celebrating, I started convulsing,” he said, explaining that the first sign the body is too cold is shivering, followed by shuddering, and then convulsing.

“I was already convulsing. At convulsing, your body is close to death, and so I had to get into the tent and warm up immediately, or I would die.”

Raymond Aaron in long underwear, a hat, and neck protector with gear hanging from the ceiling of the tent, preparing for sleep. (Courtesy of Raymond Aaron)

He was shaking so badly that he was little help in setting up the tent that day. His partner finally yelled at him that if he didn’t hold the tent in place, he wouldn’t survive.

“I grabbed the side of the tent, and I didn’t look at what he was doing,” he said. “I knew he was setting up the tent. I said [to myself] ‘Hold the tent. Hold the tent.’ I just didn’t know anything except hold the tent.”

Once the tent was erected, Mr. Aaron thought about crawling into the sleeping bag, but then realized a fire would be better. He managed to get the fire going, warmed up some water, and made hot chocolate.

After drinking several mugs of hot chocolate he finally started to warm up and stopped convulsing, but until then, “that was a very scary moment.”

Double Dinners and Early Starts

Finding the right place to set up camp each night was a vital part of each team’s survival.

After finishing their daily 12-hour trek, Mr. Aaron and his race partner would find a flat surface to erect their tent. Once the tent was secure, they would divide the remaining responsibilities. Mr. Aaron was the “inside guy.” His partner, “the outside guy,” would chop ice to be melted down for water.

Once enough water was melted, Mr. Aaron would make tea, hot chocolate, and a “double dinner … because we were ravenously hungry.”

“And then, after a double dinner, we had a double dessert and lots and lots of liquid,” he said.

Before going to sleep for the night, they would make an 8:30 p.m. call on a satellite phone to let the race organizers know how many miles they had travelled that day, whether there were any injuries, if they had passed any other racers, and what their plan was for the following day’s journey.

The day always started early, usually at 5 a.m. Mr. Aaron would make a “double breakfast” and, after eating, they would break camp.

“We were on the trail an hour later, an hour after wake-up, because we couldn’t waste any time, we had to keep forcing ourselves,” he said. “The race organizer told us, if you don’t constantly push yourself, you'll find that suddenly it’s three hours from the time you wake up to the time you’re on the trail. So we pushed ourselves constantly.”

Chocolate Bars and Polar Bears

There were no meals during the 12-hour skiing sessions. To keep their bodies fuelled, Mr. Aaron and his partner would consume chocolate bars that were frozen rock-solid. They would pull out their respective bags of broken up chocolate bars and would shove a handful of the concrete-like pieces into their mouths to soften.

“Finally, at the seven-and-a-half-minute mark, we were able to chew it completely and swallow it,” he said. “And then we took the next 30 seconds to throw as many more chocolate bar pieces into our mouths as possible. And then we chewed them for the next half hour as we were racing.”

Aside from their chocolate breaks, the pair would stop to do a “polar bear 360” every 15 minutes. That meant checking for the large mammals by doing a 180-degree check to the right and a 180-degree check to the left.

“It was somewhat futile because everything in the high Arctic is white, every single thing,” Mr. Aaron said. “The sky is white, the snow is white. Everything is white, and polar bears are white. So we didn’t know what we’re looking for.”

Luckily, the pair didn’t run into any of polar bears—at least, not while they were skiing. They did, however, have a run-in with one of the apex predators, although they didn’t know it at the time.

One night, a polar bear helped itself to some of the rations from one of their packs, which was just 30 paces away from where they slept inside their tent. Although the burly thief made off with some of their food, it was not enough to make them go hungry for the remainder of the journey.

“This polar bear put his big claw into the [zipper] hole and politely unzipped the bag” rather than ripping it, Mr. Aaron said, adding that the racers all had a laugh about “how polite Canadian polar bears were” when he told the story later.

Snow Blind at the Finish Line

With a couple of days to go before reaching the North Magnetic Pole, the end of the race, Mr. Aaron’s sunglasses became so fogged up that he removed them.

“I said, ‘What do I need sunglasses for?’ I was so exhausted that I couldn’t think straight, and I left my sunglasses off,” he said. “Immediately I felt a tingling in my eyes. And what happened was that I was blind, but my body wouldn’t allow me to be blind, so I could see perfectly.”

As he and his teammate neared their destination, they watched the GPS slowly tick down to 10 miles, then one mile, then 1,000 yards, then 10 feet.

“The instant it hit zero, I felt like two daggers had just pierced my eyeballs, and I screamed and screamed,” he said. “My body had held off the pain and held off the blindness for two days so that I could get to the North Pole. It was a miracle.”

Raymond Aaron stands at the point of the North Pole in April 2007. (Courtesy of Raymond Aaron)

He was told by race staff that he could not touch his eyes, despite the intense itchiness that accompanies the condition.

The severe discomfort of his snow blindness robbed him of any joy he may have felt about being the fourth team out of six to successfully reach the North Magnetic Pole.

He spent the next day-and-a-half in darkness and was forced to keep his eyes closed on the plane ride home, as well as for “the next day or so” afterward.

“I just had my eyes shut and had to be helped around like an old guy,” he said with a laugh.

Life’s Lessons

Looking back on it now, 17 years later, Mr. Aaron said he has never once regretted his decision to participate in the Polar Race, despite its many hardships.

Completing the race not only taught him to view physical discomfort differently, it helped him learn “some lessons that have helped me gigantically in the rest of my life.”

The key to life, the grandfather of two said, is not settling for the same-old same-old day in and day out. He once saw a sign over an airport bookstore that illustrates his new take on life perfectly.

“It said, ‘If you never travel, it’s like reading the same chapter over and over again,’” he said.

Not everyone has to do something as extreme as participating in a race through the Arctic, he said. Even small things can change one’s perspective.

“If you’re in a multi-screen movie theatre and you never go to horror movies, go to a horror movie. If you’re in a restaurant, choose something you’ve never ordered,” he said, adding the key is to do something different, even if the change is small.

“Sometimes it‘ll fail, but so what? Sometimes you’ll get a great new experience.”