For a man who has spent his entire life moving inexorably forward, Mark Pollock finds himself pausing, just a little, and checking the signposts. It’s taking a little getting used to.
Now 49, Co Down-born Mark has had a truly extraordinary life, where huge setbacks have been repurposed as challenges to be overcome.
He responded to the sudden onset of blindness in 1998 to become an adventure athlete competing in ultra-endurance races across deserts, mountains, and the polar ice caps, becoming the first blind person to race to the South Pole.
He won silver and bronze medals for rowing at the Commonwealth Games and set up an international motivational speaking business.
Then, he fell out of a window in 2010, breaking his back, damaging his spinal cord, and leaving him paralysed. A
fter more than a year of recuperation, he returned: beginning a continuing involvement in technological responses to paralysis, and founding the global running series, Run in the Dark.
But now that latter race is run. The 2024 iteration of Run in the Dark was its most successful yet, but after 14 years, the event — “a beast of an event”, according to Mark — has come to a close.
“It was huge, exciting, nerve wracking, and the most important thing is, it facilitated me to do the work that we’ve done over the last 14 years,” he says.
That work involved collaborating with scientists, technologists, and investors to co-create international neuromodulation and robotics research studies in Ireland and the US, as well as helping to establish an exoskeleton rehabilitation programme here and working alongside other organisations in an international network to pursue various responses, aids, and even cures for paralysis.
When asked how he came to this momentous decision, Mark gives a long and considered answer.
“It feels like I’ve had two major chapters in my life so far. When I was 22, the first chapter, if you like, was going blind and 10 years later racing to the South Pole.
“The second chapter was breaking my back and working towards our mission of curing paralysis in our lifetime. It’s been about being out there, creating connections, translating the research from the lab to a viable company so people can access the technology. And that requires all sorts of different strands to be pulled together, from learning the research landscape, to connecting scientists, technologists, charities, investors, and others.
“I’ve been a small cog in a big machine, and we’ve contributed to creating an intervention that you could describe as close to being a cure, or part of a cure. You always have to be very careful with the language, but it’s the only company really — it’s called Onward — that has made a breakthrough in the cure space for paralysis.”
Pollock’s life is testament to seeing the reality of life and getting on with it. His fondness for Run in the Dark is clear when he reminisces about its origins, back when he was laid up in hospital having broken his back in that fall.
A friend of Mark’s, the late Piers White, was the sounding board.
“I was just chatting about a fundraiser, because at that time, I didn’t know how life was going to turn out, but I knew I needed to put a lift into my house, and I needed to buy an adapted van, and I knew the costs associated with the injury are huge, even just getting the right wheelchairs, all these sorts of things. So I was talking to him initially about a fundraising idea, and we decided that we couldn’t just do a 5k fundraiser in one location as it wasn’t ambitious enough.
“So we decided to have events simultaneously in Belfast, Dublin, Cork, and Galway, 5ks and 10ks in all locations. Very quickly, people in Singapore and Sydney and San Francisco and New York wanted to get involved. Right from the beginning, it felt like there was momentum around it.
“I got out of hospital a couple of days before the first event, which was mid-November 2011 and it was an absolutely horrendous night. The Dublin event was around and through Trinity College. Participants were running up Pearse St along the outer wall of Trinity and turning left through a side gate to get back onto the main grounds.
“I was sitting just at that turning point with Simone, and it was raining really hard. There were thousands and thousands of people running in the rain to support us.”
It gave him the feeling, he says, “that anything is possible here”.
And so it proved. “Between 2011 and 2024, we had over 250,000 participants, more than 10,000 volunteers, events on all seven continents, including Antarctica, and hundreds of thousands of euro were raised,” he says.
He admits to an element of inner debate about whether or not to keep going, but he felt it was time for a change and has begun a part-time professional doctorate in elite performance at Dublin City University.
It sounds incredibly high-powered but also maybe something of a placeholder for whatever that third chapter will be.
In his opinion, he was working across so many areas of late that “I wasn’t doing enough on the paralysis side”.
“The paralysis work needed to be at the top, with everything facilitating it, yet the paralysis work would have started to drop down a little bit,” he says, adding, “I’m working hard on deciding what can I do next.”
He agrees when it’s put to him that allowing yourself to be actively engaged, physically, in the efforts to reverse paralysis is exacting.
“Post-blindness as I was rebuilding my identity as a competitor, I got back into rowing and started adventure racing, and ultimately competed in the 43 day expedition race to the South Pole, those challenges were the targets, those were the things I was going for.
“My speaking business really facilitated paying for those. And what I learned from the adventure I brought back into the speaking, but the driver, the target, the main activity, was the racing.
“When I was in hospital for 16 months, the main driver was, who are the best scientists and technologists in the world, and how can I get access to some of their interventions, and what can I contribute to what they’re trying to do?”
Prior to his paralysis, he says he left more aligned to polar explorers, yet working with scientists such as Dr Reggie Edgerton [of UCLA] is a bigger challenge, a more intrepid journey.
This is the work that aligns electrical stimulation and robotics, reigniting movement where previously it had been taken away. Mark’s competitive spirit had a perfect repository.
“What I could offer was a desire and a commitment to turning up and training consistently over a long period of time.
“We’re much, much closer than we were 10 years ago,” he says of those scientific efforts. He notes that venture philanthropy is now involved, and that work is progressing.
“If there’s something interesting that’s viable, and you get it funded, you need a mechanism to get it out in the world. And we’re now starting to see all three of those pieces in place.”
His own work “as a human guinea pig” has been part of that. He has been informed that different models of spinal stimulation to those which he has tried are being tested, a brain interface with a stimulator above the spinal chord, something he could see becoming commercially available in the next 10 years.
“I continue to be a test pilot for Ekso Bionics exoskeletons combined with Onward’s spinal stimulator to determine the impact of using these interventions over a long period of time,” he continues.
“Most research studies consider very short time frames, but you don’t train for an ultra marathon or an expedition to the South Pole for a few weeks and expect to get a result. Rather, you train for months and years to reach your performance potential. That’s what I’m doing as I explore the intersection where humans and technology collide on my mission to cure paralysis in our lifetime.”
It is science, but it is powered by faith — that people who have lost the use of their limbs or parts of their bodies can find a way to use them again.
Some years ago, on an appearance on the Tommy Tiernan Show, Mark discussed the difference between being a realist — which he very much is — and an optimist.
“I’ve accepted the facts being that I can’t see and I can’t walk, but I can use my arms. I live in a great country at a great point in history, despite all of the challenges in society that need solutions. And I acknowledge that there is a full and meaningful life to be lived in a wheelchair, if you have the relevant supports. Those are all facts.
“What can I not control? Well, I’m not a neuroscientist, so I can’t do the science, I’m not a robotics engineer. So I can’t do that. I’m not a billionaire, so I can’t fund a thing. But what I can do is build relationships with people and help connect those people on our mission to cure paralysis in our lifetime.
“That’s on the hope side of the equation. And, using what I learned through sport and expedition racing, I’m turning up and training, I’m acting as a human guinea pig walking in my robot and using the stimulation, I’m telling the story to raise awareness, and I’m bringing people together to get it done. So there’s lots of things I can’t do, lots of things I can do, and I try and focus on what I can do.”
He has nothing but praise for the “brilliant work of charities” working in the paralysis arena, and he’s excited about his academic project, but, he adds: “It’s missing the third part of the Venn diagram.”
He sounds actively enthusiastic about finding out what it might be.
“Someone told me a while ago that when I went blind, I didn’t know the South Pole was going to be the end of the story 10 years on,” he says.
“I just started going back to the gym and taking on more and more challenging races. So I’m taking a similar approach to my next chapter.
“I am interested in resilience. I am interested in performance. I am interested in collaboration, and I’m deeply involved in work and research in those areas. Those themes pull together the paralysis work and the adventure racing, and they explain what I used along the way to deal with the challenges of the past. But, yeah, beyond continuing with the work to cure paralysis, I don’t know what the next South Pole is yet.”
As Mark puts it: “The mission continues.”
