Page 16 - 2023 AMA Spring

GUESTWRITER
FROZEN DAGGER Sam Cox
Blog #1
The drudgery of lockdown left many vegetating in their homes, wondering what to do with themselves. For Sam Cox, it was the spark for something much bigger. In a series of blogs, available through Army Mountaineer, LinkedIn and fro- zendagger.co.uk, Sam leads us to his record-breaking crossing of Antarctica
Welcome to the first-ever Frozen Dagger blog! Part of me still feels that this is rather self-indulgent but hopefully over the coming weeks the blog will provide some clarity about the ins and outs of polar expeditions, the training pipeline, techniques used, equipment involved, the history of Antarctic expeditions from the recent to those from the heroic age, and pretty much anything anyone asks me. So, to kick off the first blog I thought I’d provide some background about the origins of my record-breaking Antarctic crossing and where the idea came from.
THE ANTARCTIC
EXPEDITION IDEA
This whole concept came from an April 2020 lockdown daydream whilst I was out running the dog in our permitted hour of exercise of the day. I’d just unexpectedly come back from a pretty hectic military exercise. When we left for South East Asia at the beginning of February Covid was a relatively small news story. However, after being away, with no internet for six weeks, we were pulled from the depths of the Brunei jungle and back to the UK within 24 hours. The reason for this haste was to return home before the international borders shut and we were back only a couple of days before Britain was put into the first lockdown.
And there I was, from being 100mph in the tropics to being sat on my sofa watching Tiger King. A very quick turnaround mentally. At first, I enjoyed the solace and the chance to vegetate at home, the opportunity to recover from a full-on couple of months away and the ability to enjoy the decent weather spring 2020 gave the UK.
The Record-Breaking Route
However, after a few weeks of this lifestyle, my mind began to wander towards the future and what I could try and get my teeth into.
Following this dog jog, I ended up jumping on a Zoom call with a friend of mine who was in a similar boat. We discussed plans for the future, where our career was heading and a simple deconstruction of our time in the Royal Marines. A military career can be consuming, not only for the long months away but also when back in a semi-normal routine. There is pressure from the off to compete with your peers, albeit friendly in most cases, especially if you have aspirations. You are annually ranked in comparison to your colleagues and it can become quite intense if you desire to take on certain popular roles. This leads to a lot of professional-specific goals letting your personal aims fall by the wayside. For balance, many people often set personal goals, which for all intents and purposes are also professional.
I wanted a new challenge that was for me and not based on achieving something specifically on the professional front.
THE RESEARCH
I knew I wanted to try and complete something out of the ordinary as an adventure, but the question was what.
I’m an outdoorsy person, but with no real expertise in the classic adventures of climbing or rowing. The only thing I could think of was that I had thoroughly enjoyed and performed well during my time in Norway so I started to look into Arctic ultra- events. This train of thought began to ever increase in ambition and after doing some basic research my attention was turned to the other end of the world in Antarctica, specifically the Antarctic Ice Marathon. Being a 92kg, 6ft bloke with little legs. I’m in no way the most competitive runner and upon looking at the top times over the previous years (2022’s winner with a time of 2hrs 53mins) I knew I wouldn’t be able to do myself justice and would ultimately be disappointed.
This led to looking at skiing to the South Pole and all the various methods to get there (which I’ll talk through in a later blog). With a bit of Royal Marines’ ambition, I ended up escalating the plan to try an Antarctic crossing, and this progressed
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