By DONALD WITTKOWSKI
For a grueling seven hours, Dan McCann found himself running in an otherworldly landscape that was both breathtakingly beautiful and unforgivingly harsh.
He was surrounded by ice and epic mountains in an environment so remote and so quiet that the only sound he heard was that of his own footsteps crunching the snow.
“I thought I was on another planet,” he said in amazement.
He wasn’t on another planet. Rather, he was on the bottom of our planet.
Antarctica – the South Pole.
“It was the coldest, driest, windiest place on Earth to run a marathon,” McCann said.
Pushing himself to the limits of his mental and physical strength, the 35-year-old attorney and lifelong resident of Sea Isle City completed the 26.2-mile Antarctic Ice Marathon on Friday in ultra-dry conditions that left him severely dehydrated by the time he finished.
“Antarctica is a desert,” he said. “It’s one of the driest continents.”
McCann returned home to Sea Isle on Monday after two days of travel involving five separate flights from Antarctica, Punta Arenas, Chile, Santiago, Chile, Miami, Atlanta and then to Philadelphia.
He journeyed to Antarctica to use the marathon as a global platform to promote breast cancer awareness. Although he was inspired by all breast cancer patients, one woman in particular was his guiding force.
His mother, Annamarie McCann, was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year, but is doing well now. McCann called his mother and his father, Joe McCann, Sea Isle residents, right after he finished the marathon.
“My parents know that I’m an adventurer. I don’t think they ever thought I was going to quit,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “When I called them on the satellite phone, I said, ‘We did this together. We accomplished this together.’”
He also called his wife, Katelyn. Although Katelyn and McCann have run together in other marathons, this time she stayed home. She had good reason. She is expecting the couple’s first child in February, McCann revealed.
“She was thrilled,” he said of Katelyn’s reaction to him completing the marathon. “She coached me.”
To prepare for the marathon, McCann trained for 25 weeks – sometimes running in the dark of night. His last long run as part of his training regime was a 20-mile jaunt on Sea Isle’s oceanfront Promenade two weeks ago.
Antarctica was the sixth continent where McCann has run in marathons to raise awareness or money for charitable causes. He started eight years ago by running in the Ocean Drive Marathon between Cape May and Sea Isle.
Next, he ran in the Great Wall of China Marathon. In China, he donated money to a homeless family in Beijing. He also raised money for struggling parishes in Cork, Ireland, by running in a marathon there while accompanied by his family on the trip to Europe.
Along with Katelyn, McCann also ran a marathon in Tanzania in 2018 while raising money for homeless children to go to school and receive medical treatment.
The couple ran a marathon again in 2019 in the Caribbean island of Aruba, which is part of South America. They raised money in Aruba for the care of abandoned puppies and kittens.
McCann hopes to travel to Australia someday to complete his goal to run in a marathon in all seven continents.
Antarctica was by far his toughest marathon. At race time, the temperature was about 5 degrees, but the wind chill pushed it below zero.
Unlike a traditional marathon, McCann didn’t run the entire distance in one shot. He had to duck into tents for shelter along the way to avoid frostbite.
Normally, McCann runs marathons in less than four hours, but his time in Antarctica was seven hours and 15 minutes because of all the stops and the challenges with the weather.
Bundled up to protect himself from the extreme cold, he wore three top layers, two layers on his legs, two pairs of gloves and three pairs of socks. He also wore two layers to cover his face and a pair of sun goggles to shield his eyes from the snow’s blinding glare.
During his stops inside the tents, he had to change his outer gear because it became saturated with perspiration. Along the way, he faced other daunting challenges.
“I lost the feeling in my fingers at mile 12. At mile 16, I couldn’t feel my toes,” he said. “But the thought of giving up and quitting never crossed my mind. I had too much on the table to give up.”
McCann was determined to succeed in his goal to promote breast cancer awareness on an international scale. He hopes that the other marathon runners he met from different countries will spread the word to help him raise breast cancer awareness.
“I believe I made a positive impact on a global level. I’m grateful for the experience and believe that was what achieved was positive,” he said.
McCann considers himself lucky to even have made it to Antarctica. A massive storm that grounded his charter flight from Punta Arenas to Antarctica pushed back the start of the marathon from Tuesday to Friday.
“When you’re traveling to Antarctica, you give up all control of your life and schedule, because you’re at the mercy of Antarctica itself,” he said of the brutal weather.
Even before he flew to Antarctica, he had to clear a battery of safety protocols and travel restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Altogether, he had to take 14 COVID tests, each one coming up negative. One positive test would have forced him to miss the marathon.
Still, he found the trip to be a “wonderful, wonderful journey.”
“I just believe that I’m a better person from the whole experience,” he said.
In a parting gesture, McCann left a little bit of his hometown in Antarctica.
He signed a guest book with the inscription, “Daniel J. McCann, Sea Isle City, N.J., USA.”
