Mandelkern completes triathlon challenge

“I wasn’t even sure there were triathlons in all 50 states,” Mandelkern said.

Mandelkern, a Hillsborough resident, started competing in triathlons at the age of 40, as a way of getting into shape and raising money for cancer foundations.

“Mid-life crisis,” Mandelkern said. “Being a typical Silicon Valley guy, spending all my time sitting in front of a computer and with a family history of heart disease, I figured I better get moving.”

Having competed in 200 triathlons, Mandelkern needed a new challenge.

“The triathlon is the poor, little brother of the marathon. That’s where I got the idea (of competing in all 50 states),” said Mandelkern, now 67. “Then [marathoners] moved on to (competing) in all the world capitals.

“Then I started to wonder if there was a triathlon thing to do?”

That’s when he came up with the idea of competing in a triathlon on all seven continents of the world. The first five were pretty straight forward; the South America leg of the challenge is a story in and of itself, leaving just Antarctica left on the list.

Problem was, there was no official triathlon event on the continent on the bottom of the world. While there have been athletes who have swam, rode a bike and run on their own in Antarctica, there had never been an officially sanctioned triathlon competition.

This past December, Mandelkern joined five other competitors to participate in the inaugural White Continent Triathlon.

Not only did Mandelkern complete his challenge, he became the first man to compete in a triathlon on all seven continents.

“I wanted to show that this could be done as a real triathlon competition,” Mandelkern said.

Technically, the event fell under the “sprint triathlon” format. It featured a 400-meter swim, 20-kilometer bike ride and 5-kilometer run.

But this was way more than just going online and registering to participate. Mandelkern was intimately involved in nearly every aspect of the event, which included dealing with multiple governments to obtain permits, extreme weather training and the revamping of the race course once they were in Antarctica.

But the first order of business, however, was to find out if holding a triathlon on Antarctica was even possible. He contacted a couple of race organizers and the first two essentially laughed in his face before hanging up the phone.

But the last one, Steve Hibbs of Marathon Adventures in Minnesota, listened to Mandelkern’s pitch.

“I sent him an email. ‘I have this idea that it might be possible to do a triathlon (in Antarctica)?’” Mandelkern said.

“I told him I was definitely interested,” Hibbs said. He had already successfully run marathons on Antarctica.

“I don’t know if I was necessarily surprised (when Mandelkern reached out). To me, it was the next logical step.”

The two started planning in 2018 and looked poised to get it done in 2020, but COVID-19 changed those plans and, in 2023, their attempt was thwarted by the avian flu.

Hibbs said the event finally got approval, again, in September of 2025, with Dec. 8 being the day — and there was no wavering off that.

But Mandelkern had a slight problem. He was recovering from shoulder surgery when he got the green light from Hibbs. Mandelkern’s orthopedic doctor, was still putting up the yellow, caution, light.

It took some convincing, but he got uneasy approval from his doctor and the event was a go.

“I spent six and a half years planning this. I wasn’t going to say, ‘no,’” Mandelkern said.

But the permits and approval were only half the battle. The biggest concern was the swim portion of the competition. Mandelkern said he reached out to ice-water swimming experts to find out how long they competitors could survive in Antarctic waters safely.

“We were not willing to commit to a year of training. Wearing the thickest wetsuits, what is feasible so we don’t kill ourselves,” Mandelkern said. “We concluded the safety cutoff time was 15, 20 minutes.”

The group then tested that theory with a swim in Lake Michigan in the middle of a Chicago winter. This after Mandelkern had competed in a winter triathlon in Alaska — with cross country skiing replacing swimming.

With the swim portion of the race settled, the attention turned to the bike and running portion. The road they had planned to use for both portions of the race — between the Chilean and Russian scientific posts — was covered in 10 feet of snow.

So they hacked out a 1 kilometer track around the Chilean scientific campus.

There was also the issues of what bikes to use and how to get them to Antarctica. They were limited to what could fit through the door of the antique jet plane they were using for transport.

Mandelkern found that one of those commuter, foldable bikes was the best option. But the 20-inch wheels, as opposed to the standard 26- to 29-inch wheel on a standard mountain bike, made the bike portion of the event that much harder.

Not that it was easy to begin with.

“That was the most difficult because of the terrain — hilly, muddy, icy and windy,” Mandelkern said. “It was a slog.”

Fighting through temperatures between 30 and 35 degrees, with winds gusting to 35 mph, nothing about the event was easy. Not even the return trip, as the triathletes and marathoners had to spend an extra two days huddled in shipping containers serving as barracks because of inclement weather.

In the end, however, it was all worth it. In addition to completing the physical challenge, he also managed to raise $60,000 that was given to Blood Cancer United, formerly known as the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

“Six people started (including Menlo Park’s Michele Santilhano). I wouldn’t have bet money we all would have finished this,” Mandelkern said. “It was an amazing journey. Probably the most adventurous thing I’ve ever done.”