ellen piangerelli trains for the Polar Challenge, to be held at the North Pole in March.

Photo courtesy of ellen piangerelli

I was driving up Olney Street in Providence the other day, heading toward Hope High School, when I saw a woman trudging up the hill with ski poles (but no skis), pulling two tires behind her.

I did a double take and nearly crashed when the car ahead of me stopped suddenly. I had places to go and people to see, but curiosity prompted me to pull over and ask the woman a question she has heard many times: What the heck are you doing?

I wondered if she’d lost a bet, joined a cult or received a bizarre punishment from a rogue judge.

As it turned out, she was training to ski 368 miles to the North Pole in temperatures as low as minus-85 degrees.

I wouldn’t have guessed that.

The woman is ellen piangerelli, a 29-year-old Providence resident who does not use capital letters in her name. She is one of 3 Americans, chosen from hundreds of applicants and 36 finalists, who will be participating in next year’s Polar Challenge, billed as “one of the most extreme challenges on the planet.”

Working in teams of three, the participants will pull sleds weighing up to 265 pounds, ski for 14 to 18 hours per day and sleep only 4 hours per night. “It is sunny all the time, so that might help,” piangerelli said.

The sleds will be loaded with food and supplies, a tent and a stove. “We carry what we need to survive,” she said.

Each team will carry a rifle. “It’s not if you’ll see polar bears, it’s when,” she said.

The map on the event Web site (polar-challenge.com) shows the course heads right through Polar Bear Pass. She said the rifle isn’t for shooting the bears; it’s for scaring them off. “They don’t really bother you, but they can be dangerous,” she said. “We look like big upright seals. My favorite fact that I’ve learned is that polar bears can smell men from 45 miles away and women from 55 miles away.”

In January, she will join other competitors in Norway for a week of training, which will include jumping into frigid water, navigating with a global positioning system device and learning how to survive in a tent when everything freezes, including your breath.

On March 10, the competitors begin a 100-mile trek — just to get to the starting line. The race itself is 320 nautical miles, which is the equivalent of 368 miles. The first Polar Challenge took place in 2004, and piangerelli said the fastest time ever recorded was 11½ days. The slowest was 3½ weeks. “If we could do it in 14 days, there’s an actual chance that we could win,” she said.

So what do you get if you win? She laughed, saying, “You get a trophy and some notoriety, I guess.”

But she feels like she’s already won something. “I get this opportunity,” she said.

For her, the opportunity looks like it’s going to come at a steep price. She works as a data and evaluation specialist at Ready to Learn Providence. She said she had received approval to take an unpaid leave of absence to participate in the Polar Challenge, but she said that earlier this month she was told she wouldn’t be allowed to take the time off after all.

That left her facing a difficult decision, and this is what she concluded: “I’m pretty sure there will be more jobs,” she said. “But I’m not sure that there will be another opportunity to go to the North Pole in my life.”

So she plans to head north, despite the fact that she expects to lose her job, despite the fact that she’s never been farther north than Montreal and despite the fact that she’s cross-country skied all of five times in her life.

“It’s not a prerequisite that you need to know how to ski,” she said. “We’ll have 100 miles to figure it out. You’re in survival mode. You don’t need to be great. You need to keep going.”

piangerelli is a cyclist who has run a half-marathon and done a sprint triathlon. “I kind of consider myself an amateur athlete,” she said.

Also, she has been training for months. Originally, she was supposed to take part in the Polar Challenge in 2009, but it was postponed for a year, she said. She has lifted weights, worked out on a Nordic Track and put in many miles with her “contraption,” which consists of a weight belt, wire cable and a pair of tires taken from her Toyota RAV4 sport utility vehicle.

Sometimes, she pulls the contraption to and from work in downtown Providence (3.5 miles each way). Sometimes, she takes it down Blackstone Boulevard. “My favorite thing about it is the reactions,” she said. A lot of people ask what she is doing. Some make jokes about broken cars or wanting to hop on.

On her blog (thefrozenbanana.blogspot.com), piangerelli recalls that, “A large, gruff-looking man carrying a stuffed plastic bag stopped me to announce ‘You know, that’s going to make your legs bigger.’ ” She wondered if that was a compliment or an insult. “Granted, I look like an idiot pulling this contraption made of wheels, but did he think this was actually informative?” she says. “You mean these here tires, and this here three-mile uphill stretch is going to make my legs bigger? Well, you better take these from me now.”

But piangerelli — who faced physical and mental challenges along with 35 other finalists at a wilderness facility in Colorado — said she wasn’t chosen because of her physical strength.

The finalists included men who were “ripped, jacked and could kick my [butt] by looking at me,” she said. “I was told I was picked because of my mental fortitude and my sense of humor. They look for people who are not going to perish.”

On the Polar Challenge Web site, piangerelli says the main reason she’d make a great teammate is that she doesn’t complain. “I don’t like complainers,” she says. “No one does.”

Also on the Web site, she reveals that she has faced a choice involving employment or adventure before.

“In 2003, I quit my job to travel cross-country with two of my closest friends — in costume,” she says. “I made a banana costume that to this day has seen more mileage than any vehicle I’ve owned. We stopped in major cities around the country, traveling a total of 11,336 miles in an idealistic attempt to perform street theater and sell Polaroids to the passersby.”

They didn’t make much money, she says, but it was worth it.

“I ate a lot of macaroni-and-cheese. I shaved my head. I didn’t shower for two weeks (the trip was seven weeks long). I lived like I’ve never lived,” she says. “I think quitting a job — a good job even — in the name of happiness and exploration has to be my proudest achievement because I was terrified. Because it’s important to the construct of my character to do seemingly impossible and improbable things.”

Now, the North Pole awaits.

“It wasn’t a childhood dream of mine, but in the time I’ve had to think about it, it has become a dream to me,” piangerelli said. “This is so me that I didn’t know it was me. I’m a pretty extreme person, for better or for worse. It’s no wonder I would want to do something extreme on the extreme end of the earth.”

If this dream does come true and she does pull a sled 368 miles and she does make it through Polar Bear Pass, she knows what she wants to be wearing when she crosses that frozen finish line: The banana suit.

efitzpat@projo.com