The Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers will play an NFL playoff game several degrees below zero Sunday.
That’s balmy sports weather for Boris Fyodorov.
The Siberian man ran a marathon in minus-36 degrees to and from Oymyakon, Russia, one of the coldest settlements on the planet. He was hoping for colder and would like to try minus-76 degrees.
The Siberian Times reported it was the world’s coldest marathon.
He completed the 26.2 miles in 5 hours, 8 minutes, starting shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day and said it was his first marathon. He was 33 minutes quicker than Pamela Anderson‘s time from the New York City Marathon in November.
“I came to Oymyakon several days ahead of the start and was lucky to catch a nice steady minus-45 [Celsius],” Fyodorov, 37 and a jeweler, told the Siberian Times. “I did my last pre-marathon run at this temperature and felt great and ready to go. There were issues with getting the right kind of clothes. When you run in extreme heat there is a way to find shade and stop. When you are running at minus-40 [Celsius], sweating, there is a certain danger in stopping.”
Fyodorov said there were risks. You know, the usual marathon dangers such as wolves and bears.
“But wolves do not usually attack healthy people, and tend to keep close by the reindeer herds, so the chances as I estimated them were minimal,” he told the publication. “Bears were even a smaller risk since they should be hibernating, so I was pretty confident of the risk being low.”
He trained in similar temperatures for 2 1/2 months before embarking on the marathon, noting it was about 10 degrees warmer than in most years.
When he finished, he sipped some champagne and quickly ran indoors.
“My legs were hurting, and my body was quite tired,” Fyodorov said. “By the end of it, I was getting really cold. But I kept saying to myself, that must go all the way, I’ve got to finish, I must not give up. And there was the finish!”
(h/t @OlympicStatman)
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