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When Bai Bin (白斌), a Chinese man from Guizhou Province, decided to run a one-man marathon from the South Pole to the North Pole, he was 47.
On March 2, 2018, he left Chinese Antarctic Research Expedition Station, also known as the Station of the Great Wall, and began the journey that took him 433 days to complete.
Along the way, he travelled 219 cities and towns in 14 countries in the American continent, covered 24,110 km and passed a desert area.
Of course, he didn’t swim through the Strait of Magellan but took a ferry cruise.
He also spent 3 hours struggling between life and death. It was a day in November 2018 when he was in Mexico and about to reach the border to the United States. A sport utility vehicle stopped next to him, from which several men with tattoos and guns jumped off and demanded him to go with them.
With his head covered in clothes, he was brought into a house where his kidnapers communicated with him through translation software. When he was ordered to make phone calls to his family and friends, the bandits searched his smartphone and discovered he was undertaking the world’s first marathon challenge between the two poles.
The kidnappers decided to free him without ransom. They offered him a lift to the main road and gave him two bottles of drink as their parting gift, which ended his brief brush with the rebels in the Mexico Water Margin.
On May 6, 2019, he eventually arrived in the Arctic Ocean. Reportedly, when he became the first man in the world to complete the marathon from the South Pole to the North Pole, he celebrated his triumphant by lying on the frozen ocean surface facing the sky.
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It was not the first time he took a long, and a very long, distance marathon. Eight years ago in 2011, he successfully ran from Istanbul in Turkey to Xi’an in northern China, which was a 10,000 km journey.
At the age of around 50, Bai Bin’s next goal is to ascend the Mount Everest from Everest North Base Camp, 5,150 metres above sea level, within 24 hours.