Warming Up for an Icy Run on Bottom of World

Because Laurie Kulchin and Suzie Porter-Hambrecht like to have fun, they go to the track at John Burroughs High twice a week and sprint and jog for 2 1/2 hours.

Because they really like to have fun, they flog themselves to lope 18 miles on Saturdays.

And because they deeply, desperately, wantonly like to have fun, they’ve left this weekend to run a marathon in one of the very funnest places on earth, the Antarctic.

This is assuming your idea of fun includes slogging up a melting glacier, staggering across lakes of foot-sucking mud, sloshing through streams of rushing ice water--and enduring 60 hours of the world’s most tempestuous seas on a Russian research ship just to get to and from the really good stuff.

“With this, I will have run on all seven continents,” explains Porter-Hambrecht, a United Airlines flight attendant who lives in Toluca Lake. “This is my purpose for going. As someone who’s 50, which is getting older, I thought it would be fun to be able to say that in your life you actually ran on every continent.”

Kulchin, a 37-year-old teacher who lives in Sherman Oaks, says Antarctica is “one of [the] places in the world I’ve always wanted to go to.” When Porter-Hambrecht, a fellow member of the San Fernando Valley Track Club, mentioned the possibility, Kulchin couldn’t resist, even at a total cost of about $5,500.

“It’s not just a fun run,” Kulchin says, “but a fabulous trip, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Besides, she says, what terrific fare it will make for the hungry minds of her fifth-graders at Emerson Elementary School in Burbank.

Porter-Hambrecht and Kulchin will be among 91 enthusiasts, or masochists, depending on your point of view, participating in the slightly contradictory second running of the Last Marathon. The race will take place Feb. 18 on King George Island, one of Antarctica’s northernmost points, about 1,500 miles from the South Pole.

The Last Marathon, billed as “the only sporting event in Antarctica,” is the brainchild of Thom Gilligan, president of Marathon Tours Inc., of Charlestown, Mass. The travel agency hauls marathoners to races in places from Boston to Athens to South Africa, “but this has got to rank as anybody’s most exotic,” Gilligan says.

Because of the delicateness of the Antarctic environment, Marathon Tours must strictly limit the number of runners. Those who go must prepare for a wide range of climatic conditions, even now in Antarctica’s high summer, when the sun sets in the coastal areas at 10:30 p.m. and rises ready for business about four hours later.

Gilligan has alerted participants that they may have “delightful conditions”--between 25 and 38 degrees with 15-20 mph winds. Or, they may have temperatures of 15 degrees and a wind-chill factor of zero.

“There are no weather forecasts for Antarctica,” Gilligan says. “The weather varies dramatically from hour to hour. All the world’s weather actually originates down there. All of the ocean currents do, too. The run is scheduled for 9 a.m., but we’ll see how the weather is. It’s not like the rest of the world’s going to get too upset about it if we don’t start exactly at 9.”

No other marathon in the world can list among its potential hazards icebergs, deep ice fissures called crevasses, glaciers, boulder fields and skuas--aggressive Antarctic seabirds that dive-bombed some of the runners in the first Last Marathon in 1995.

Participants will gather Monday in Buenos Aires, then travel the next day to Ushuaia, the Argentine city that is the world’s southernmost. Two days later, half the group, including Porter-Hambrecht and Kulchin, will embark on the Ioffe, a refitted, ice-rated Russian research vessel, for the day-and-a-half voyage over the Drake Passage. The rest of the group will follow two days later on the Ioffe’s sister ship, the Sergey Vavilov.

Sailors long have regarded the waters of the Drake Passage as the most treacherous on Earth.

“I’ve taken two trips there, and crossed it four times,” says Gilligan. “It’s rough. We had 30-foot waves coming every 15 to 20 seconds. It’s rocking and rolling, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re in the Drake for about 30 hours each way.”

The travelers, who will spend nights on shipboard, will cruise for a few days among the South Shetland Islands, visiting seal colonies and penguin rookeries. They’ll also hear lectures and watch films about the Antarctic habitat and wildlife.

On race day, they’ll put ashore on King George Island. The running course is a double loop that begins and ends at a Uruguayan research base and passes through Russian, Chilean and Chinese bases.

Runners have the option of doing the loop once--a half marathon--or twice for the full 26.2-mile course.

“Suzie’s dead-set on the full marathon, but I’m going to wait until I finish the first loop to decide whether I’m going to go on,” says Kulchin. “I mean, factors like hypothermia, wind, crevasses, glaciers--these will definitely play a role in my decision.”

Kulchin already has run 10 marathons, including Boston three times and New York twice. Porter-Hambrecht has half a dozen marathons, including the Reunification Marathon in Berlin in 1991, and the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. under her belt.

Kulchin’s best time for a marathon was just shy of 3 1/2 hours, though she’s always yearned to finish in three hours flat. Porter-Hambrecht says she tends to run marathons in about four hours.

A runner’s performance history, however, is unlikely to be very predictive at the Last Marathon. The winner of the first Last Marathon finished in about 3 hours and 15 minutes. Of the 84 who completed the course, only a handful broke the four-hour mark, and two required 7 1/2 hours to finish. Most runners required from 1 to 1 1/2 hours longer than their usual times to make an end of it.

For the second Last Marathon, Gilligan has been humorously adamant in instructing participants to jettison any thoughts of setting records for themselves, or even of finishing first among their age peers.

“Forget running a sub 2:06:51 down there,” he wrote to participants. “Many of you can forget 5 hours. Finish on your feet and with a smile. Go the distance and look good in the finish line photo. Otherwise, you will be left for the skuas . . . . I can’t believe that some of you are worried about winning your age category. Someone will poison your borscht if they discover that attitude.”

All of which jibes perfectly with how Kulchin and Porter-Hambrecht have been approaching the arduousness of long-distance running of late, anyway.

“I’m moving away from hard training and competition,” Kulchin says. “I used to eat, sleep and drink running, making sure I could run 20 miles at seven minutes a mile. Now, I relax and enjoy it more. With this run, my goal will be to finish. Safely.”