At $74,760 per runner, is this the world’s most expensive marathon?

This year’s spring marathon had to be cancelled at the last minute because the runway split in half and drifted into a 12-metre gap. That’s the environment you’re dealing with.

Then there’s the business of actually running it. Temperatures vary dramatically – the April 2018 edition took place at minus 33 degrees, the August 2023 race in a balmy minus 2. Suffice to say, it’s never comfortable.

Runners are not on land, even ice-covered land, but on a moving floe that can be as little as one metre thick in the summer, with 3657 metres of the Arctic Ocean underneath it. (Participants in the summer event must run in a life vest, just in case the ice gives way.)

The race starts at geographic true north, but because of the drift of the floe, “the place you start won’t be the same as the place you stop,” explains Oliver Wang, the race organiser and, since 2019, its owner.

Incidentally, both the motion of the ice and the convergence of every line of latitude on Earth play havoc with the GPS, so forget about your Garmin. Drones tend to crash because the meeting of latitude lines makes them believe they are all over the world at once.

And the running track, such as it is, will be a loop that you might have to run 10 times or 50 depending on the size of the floe that happens to be over the Pole at the time. To put it another way, the loop might be as long as 4000 metres, or as short as 500 metres. “Depending on the condition of the ice, we don’t want to go too near the edge,” says Wang.

If the endurance is eye-watering, so is the price: the cheapest berths on the icebreaker bring an all-in cost of €44,900 ($74,760) for the summer edition. The spring marathon comes in at €21,900 given runners fly in.

“Considering what you get, it’s good value,” Wang says. “There are many Arctic expeditions that may be the same or a little cheaper, but they don’t bring you to the Pole, just the high Arctic.”

Only two icebreakers, the other Russian, can make it this far.

The North Pole Marathon began when a solo Irish runner, Richard Donovan, ran there in 2002. The following year, it was organised as an official event for the first time, conducted by Global Expedition Adventures.

Since 2003, it ran almost without interruption before COVID hit, and then last year Norwegian flight approval issues got in the way (an ongoing problem for the spring edition.)

A sense of the run’s rigour can be gleaned from the records. The fastest man, Thomas Maguire, logged 3 hours, 36 minutes and 10 seconds – more than an hour and a half slower than the winners of most road marathons.

The women’s record, at four hours 52 minutes and 45 seconds (Anne-Marie Flammersfeld), is more than double the women’s record for, say, London. Only 14 people have completed the run more than once.

But people aren’t here mainly to set records. “There’s a combination of people who are attracted to this, mainly endurance runners and polar adventurers,” Wang says.

Some are completists, who have already done a marathon on seven continents including Antarctica, in some cases in seven consecutive days: this is the World Marathon Challenge, which Wang’s company, Runbuk, also runs, along with the Antarctic Ice Marathon.

Three blind athletes and a wheelchair competitor (who did endless lengths of the ice runway) have completed it. A 78-year-old ran it in 2016; a 14-year-old, Wang’s son Nolan, ran a shorter version in 2023.

Irishman Paul Grealish has run it six times. It has attracted giants of polar exploration; Ranulph Fiennes quipped that it was “pleasantly different in that I didn’t have to haul a sled there”.

Most, but not all, have run many marathons before; remarkably, for some people the North Pole is their first marathon.

Training for such a challenge is extremely difficult. “There’s no way to imitate conditions like it ahead of time,” says Wang. “The biggest challenge is when you step down, you don’t know which direction your foot will go.”

This demands a softer landing of the foot to preserve the ankles. The best training environment for this is a beach, since sand gives underfoot, but it’s still not the same.

One thing you do know for sure is that it won’t go dark, no matter how long it takes. At the North Pole the sun rises on the Spring Equinox in late March and sets again in September; daylight is permanent between the two.

Summer offers the best polar bear sighting opportunities, and the event hires polar guards to look out for them. Nobody has ever seen one anywhere near a race, but in 2023, participants saw six while aboard the icebreaker on the journey there and back.

Ultimately, Wang believes the greatest draw is the sense of achievement. “It’s not only a physical journey but a mental process,” says Wang, who is originally from Beijing and is now a US citizen living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“It’s very rewarding, and it affects the way you think about the world.

“Many of our runners are successful businesspeople, scientists, experienced travellers, and they think life is under control until they go to the polar regions where we can’t take it for granted that things happen in the order they expect.

“It makes them review their life: maybe there are issues in your daily life, but after something like this you re-evaluate how you prioritise things.”

The August 2 run is fully booked. The next available North Pole Marathon is scheduled for mid-April 2025. See npmarathon.com for more information.