'You don't want to miss a second': Cork woman who almost died after accident completes Arctic trek

“I lay at the bottom of the slope, asking myself why can’t I go to Spain, the Maldives, or to a spa like normal people.”

Those are the words of Cork woman Olivia Keating, an adventurer and extreme marathon challenges addict, reflecting on her decision to walk the remote Lapland Kungsleden Trail in Arctic Sweden recently.

She was battling appalling weather conditions and exhaustion, and laying down reflecting on her plight.

Shakily picking herself up, Olivia shouted into the arctic sky: “Why do I keep signing up for stuff like this?”

She cursed the sled carrying her tent and food, that relentlessly crashed into her as they laboured through the unforgiving territory together.

A veteran of ultra-tough Arctic marathons, the Kinsale woman has tested the limits of human endurance across the globe.

Olivia has completed a 250km marathon in Namibia in temperatures that reached 40 degrees in 2022, done a gruelling long distance Amazon marathon adventure, and twice tackled the mountainous Kyrgyzstan terrain, getting lost once and crawling up out of a deep ravine she had fallen into to re-establish reception on her tracker.

After that near-death experience, Olivia returned last year to complete the race, only to suffer from an aggressive stomach infection like her fellow competitors.

“I still got to day four, but then hypothermia at 4,000m high struck, so that’s another race to finish one day,” laughs Olivia.

“I can’t stop, that’s my problem; anything unfinished has to be tried again.”

And so to her most recent escapade: the Lapland Kungsleden Trail, which is called ‘The King of all Trails’, and runs through Sweden’s most beautiful mountain scenery, providing more than 400km worth of hiking adventure.

Olivia was taking part in the Montane Arctic spine challenger non-stop expedition race (www.thespinerace.com) here - one of the toughest endurance challenges undertaken by extreme sports junkies.

She had signed up for the 210km trail, but on doctors’ advice, following a bout of asthma brought on by a chest infection, opted for the shorter three-day challenge instead, over 104km.

On day two of her trek across the frozen Tundra, the plucky 46-year-old soldiered on, pulling a 35 kg sled, called a pulk (Puhlke in the language of the Laplander Sami people) behind her.

At base camp, preparing for the race, she had learnt survival skills, how to put up her small tent and light the stove in a raging storm, boil snow for water, and use expedition skis to cross the hostile mountains and snow-clad valleys

Ireland’s best known modern day explorer, Pat Falvey, from Co Kerry, gave her a pair of his ski poles along with “invaluable tips and support”, before her latest challenge.

She was also warned about the wildlife that roams the wilderness, including wolverines and black bears. The chance of encountering wolves was minimal, Olivia learnt, and the bears would be hibernating, whilst herds of wild reindeer were a familiar sight.

According to the local Sami (Laplander reindeer herders), this year’s conditions were among the harshest they have seen because of rising temperatures blamed on climate change.

February suddenly saw raised temperatures that melted snow and refroze it into ice, making progress across mountain and lakes extremely treacherous amid storm force eight howling gales.

“Instead of gliding across the snow, I found myself having to drag myself and the sled over rocks and grassy vegetation in places,” said Olivia. “In other places, soft snow was turned into ice like glass under foot.

“Conditions were horrendous, the terrain was so unforgiving, and after falling so much my knees, elbows, hips, feet, and hands were cut, blistered black and blue, but I bandaged myself up as best I could.

“Mother Nature also smiled down at times, and on the first night, moonlight lit parts of the mountain peaks in a fluorescent light; all you could hear was the music of the wind battling with the mountain; it was breathtakingly beautiful.

“After the wind battered the living daylights out of me, I watched the Northern Lights come out to play and that was another moment I’ll never forget.”

Olivia grabbed only three hours of sleep in the 72-hour trek in total, huddled into a small tent in the wilderness on that “beautiful but unforgiving trail”.

Arriving at the finish, she was “black and blue, lifted metres into the air by gale force eight winds, thrown against rocks and falling onto a frozen lake”.

“After the top layer of the ice broke due to rising temperatures, I ended up in the water up to my knees and that was terrifying but there was no going back,” she explained.

She got her medal - and intends to return to do the 210km event next year!

Why does this remarkable woman put herself through this. A clue lies in her recent past.

In 2016, it was feared that Olivia might never walk again, let alone participate in any sport or do another marathon.

She almost died after being knocked off her bicycle by a car while out training before the Cork City Marathon near Clonakilty.

She suffered multiple injuries to her body and face and hit a road sign with her head in the impact.

As a result of traumatic brain injury, Olivia had to be kept in an induced coma and many months followed where she had to slowly learn to move and walk again at the Central Remedial Clinic.

It was two years before this remarkable Cork woman could walk again, at first using a walking frame and pool walking.

Olivia has since completed more than 60 marathons, both normal ones and extreme types, because coming so close to death was a powerful motivator - “you don’t want to miss a second, you want to do everything”, she explains,

A member of the volunteer lifeboats crew of the RNLI in Kinsale, Olivia began training for the Lapland expedition race in September of last year, helped by her “astonishing” Kinsale- based sports coach Siobhan Devlin.

A few times a week, she pulled a weighed down 20 kilo fire brigade truck tyre - her make-believe sled - behind her, to the astonishment of walkers out for their afternoon stroll on Garrylucas beach at Garretstown.

“While I was pulling that tyre for up to four hours up and down the beach, curious people came up all the time to ask me what I was doing. Was it a race or alpine or Arctic training?

“It was a lovely break, just taking a breather to explain, and I was so thankful for people’s support. I thought about that during the race and smiled to myself; by their faces, some of those who watched me might have been trying to figure out should they call the guards, and who’d blame them!”

The motto for this year’s International Women’s Day on March 8 is ‘Accelerate Action’, and if ever a woman epitomised that, it’s Olivia Keating, who brought her medal home from Lapland to show her proud elderly mother who is in care.