She’s dragging tires to get ready for a South Pole ski

Her name isMonet Eliastam and what she is doing is training to try to do something no American woman has done before.
In November, the 36-year-old will set off to attempt to cross-country ski to the South Pole, solo and unsupported. That means she’s got to lug 250 pounds of food and gear behind her on a sled for 700 miles, a journey that should take her about 50 days.
And she’s been dragging those two Jeep tires across beaches and through the woods all over the place, for several hours each day, for nearly three years.
So that’s what she’s doing.
But that always leads to the follow-up question, one she just got hit with by a woman in the Singing Beach parking lot as she was unloading the tires: Why?
The answer to that is more unexpected. It began a decade ago when she received a strange message on Facebook, from someone who said they were affiliated with the British military. The message stated that her great uncle’s plane had been located on Mount Kenya in Africa, and the military was just about to launch an expedition to the crash site and needed permission from next of kin to bring down any remains.
“I thought it was a scam,” she recalled, but after speaking with her father, who is from South Africa, she discovered that he had an uncle who had gone missing in World War II flying for the South African Air Force. “And my dad, who has always been my biggest fan, was like ‘You have to ask them if you can go with them.’”
At the time, Eliastam, who grew up in Weston, was 26 and “had done nothing,” she said. “There was no way they were going to say yes.”
But she was interested in documentary filmmaking, and was making videos for nonprofits at the time, and so she got up the courage to ask the British military if she could come along and film. To her surprise, they said yes.
The expedition was rough. She was the only woman on the 12-person team, and they didn’t fully know where they were going on Africa’s second-tallest mountain. They found the plane but couldn’t find any remains, and then got lost and ran out of food and water.
“It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It was terrifying and scary. And at the end of it, I was like, I don’t know what that was, but whatever that was, I want to try to do that for the rest of my life.”
So that is why. That’s what she’s been chasing ever since, which has taken her on dogsleds across Greenland and motorbikes across Vietnam, launched a career leading adventure travel — she lives part-time in Nepal, and part-time in Sicily, leading group trips — but she was looking for something more.
“I was pushing my comfort level with each thing I was doing, but even when I did the plane crash expedition, I was with the army, I had all this support,” Eliastam said. “What I really wanted was to do something where I was really solo and alone and the only person I could rely on, and then learn how to be in those situations.”
When she learned about Preet Chandi, a British army officer who became the first woman of color to ski solo and unsupported to the South Pole, she found her inspiration, especially after she read an interview with Chandi, who said she didn’t know anything about Antarctica or how to ski, but said she trained for it, and you too can train for this.
“I could not get it out of my mind,” Eliastam said, “until finally I said I just ‘I have to try this. I have to train.’”
Hence, the tires. Oh, the tires.
It’s hard for Eliastam to describe her relationships with the tires after all the miles she’s put in with them. She has a set of tires in Nepal, and another set in Italy, but she’s mostly been staying at her mother’s house in South Hamilton. So she will load those tires into her battered Subaru, then head off to the Chebacco Woods or a North Shore beach, strap a harness to her waist, and set off at a snail’s pace.
She’s been documenting her progress online — where she has built up a following under her middle name, Monet Izabeth — while getting stopped by countless people in person, who want to know if this is some new fitness craze, the next evolution of those weighted vests everyone seems to be wearing. She’s had to start carrying business cards in her fanny pack for people who want more information.
For two and a half years, she’s been building up her lower body to handle the rigors, step-by-very-slow-step, but at this point her thighs are so strong her mother calls them her “cables.” She’s done a 30-day training run skiing across Greenland with a group, and now all that’s left to do is clip into her skis and go. And, to her surprise, she feels ready.
“I like to say I’m the laziest active person I know,” she said. “But I’ve loved the training process, as difficult as it has been, to get to where I am now.”
What she’s found in her training is a form of meditationmediation, of solitude inside herself.
“I’ve got my concentration back like it was before phones,” she said. “I saw my goals, I knew what to do to achieve them, and it was so simple.”
And so in a few weeks, she will set off on a simple goal — just ski, for 10 hours each day, across some of the most unforgiving terrain on earth, through horrific temperatures, in white-out blizzards. Alone, at the bottom of the earth, to prove to herself that she, that anyone, can keep putting one foot in front of the other.