Tops on both top and bottom of the world

Charlotte’s Hafferty holds marathon records for both poles

Amidst the plethora of records being set daily by athletes from all around the world in Paris at the Olympics, let’s pause to recognize a record set recently by a Charlotte athlete at the North Pole.

On July 31, Billy Hafferty set the record for the fastest marathon ever run at the North Pole. Competing in the North Pole Marathon, Hafferty set a new record of 3 hours, 14 minutes, shaving 20 minutes off the time he ran when he set the record for the Antarctic in December 2019 with a time 3:34:10 in the Antarctic Ice Marathon.

In addition to being a running coach to a group in Massachusetts, he ran the Boston Marathon this past year. Over the years, he’s run more than 50 similar, normal marathons, like Chicago or London, but none so extreme or “super, super crazy” like his two polar exploits.

“I feel it’s like a lifestyle at this point,” Hafferty said of the run-of-the-mill runs.

He and his partner moved to Charlotte about a year and half ago. Besides being a great place to live, it’s a great location to live for them. Their home is about equally located from his partner’s work at Collins Aerospace in Vergennes and his Burlington massage therapy practice, Green Mountain Massage and Bodywork, on College Street.

Although they are both runners, she did not run with him in the Artic, nor go on the trip.

Hafferty ran the 26.2 miles in the Boston Marathon this year in just over three hours. It wasn’t his fastest time, but it wasn’t his slowest.

Besides his full-time massage therapy, he coaches his Massachusetts club about 10-15 hours a week. Much of his coaching happens by Zoom, although he goes down to the Bay State about once a month to do personal training. His athletic protégés cover the gamut — runners of all different abilities and triathletes and cyclists.

Just getting to the polar marathons was an ordeal both times.

In 2019, he was one of 60 runners from around the world who met in Chile, then flew into Antarctica on a 50-year-old, Russian plane.

“Landing on this ice runway, there’s no brakes because you’re just skidding across the ice. The second you touch down, they thrust in reverse, and you’re like, ‘Oh here we go,’” Hafferty told Boston25 TV at the time.

Antarctic Ice Marathon introduced Hafferty to the challenge of running on ice and in snowdrifts, but he persevered and bettered the course record, coming in at 3:34:12, which was 35 seconds before his nearest competitor.

Hafferty said the experience was otherworldly, “like running on a Game of Thrones stage.”

Afterward, he didn’t think about it more than other runs he had done, until he was contacted The Guinness Book of World Records. He ended up with his picture in the book.

“I didn’t really think it was a huge deal,” Hafferty said.

Getting to this July’s Artic run was also an experience. They traveled on an icebreaker searching for ice thick enough to support the marathon run.

“The ship’s navigation crew uses an ice radar to identify a place where the ice is thick enough to set up a track to run on,” Hafferty said.

When a good place for a marathon run is found, the crew pulls the ship up and places flags along the course. The course was 352 meters, which meant the runners had to do 120 laps around a piece of ice.

However, it was a gorgeous day, he said. A rainbow came out.

Hafferty thinks they started running around 8 a.m., but it’s hard to be sure because the sun never sets at this time of year in the Artic. And his biological clock was set to two time zones. The ship’s clock may have read 8 a.m., but a portion of his circadian watch was set to the eastern standard time zone of 2 a.m. he left only days before

“There’s no time up here,” he said, talking from the icebreaker this past Saturday, Aug 3. It was just past 11 a.m. in Vermont during the interview. Who knows what time of day it was there?

The run was hard because the footing was super icy and deep, so it was like running through a thick slush, so it was hard on the ankles, Hafferty said. To top it off, much of the running was on jagged chunks of ice.

Of all the races he’s run, he said the North Pole Marathon is the hardest, and he’s going to take a break. He’s been training hard, looking forward to the run. Now, he’s ready for a breather.

“I’m happy to get the job done and just kind of relax,” Hafferty said. While he is chilling from his chilling run, he plans to focus on his massage business.

Although sometimes he came close to falling during the run, he thinks what may have saved him was his experience running on Vermont trails.

“It was a lot like running in Vermont, because the trails are so technical,” Hafferty said. “I think the trail running in Vermont definitely helped a lot.”

He set an early lead in the run and kept it. The second-place runner was about four minutes behind him at the end.

The boat trip from Svalbard, Norway, an island north of Norway, halfway to the North Pole, was difficult. His biological clock was confused and the boat did not lend itself to refreshing sleep.

“When the ship’s breaking through the ice, you can feel it, the whole thing shakes,” Hafferty said. “It’s really, really hard to sleep. My whole room is rumbling.”

Even with his experiences from years before, working on research vessels or oil tankers in the Merchant Marine didn’t prepare him for the sound and the feeling of the boat slamming into thick ice.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before,” he said.

Which is saying something, coming from a guy who’s set marathon records running on opposite ends of the globe.