Body composition assessments and acclimatisation with adventurer Benno Rawlinson

The North West passage is a route that goes across Canada. It’s 1,800 miles long and is on the sea ice. We’ll travel east to west from a place called Qikiqtarjuaq, all the way to a place called Inuvik on the northwest coast -- not too far from Alaska. We start mid-January and expect to be on the ice around 120 days, pulling a sled weighing 200kg behind us carrying all our supplies, the food we need and our clothing etc. We’re aiming to break the record for the longest unsupported and unassisted polar journey as well as the first ski traverse of this passage.

Historically, it’s an amazing route which was first sailed through in 1906 by Roald Amundsen and has been searched out for hundreds of years ever since by people trying to find a route that would take them over North America, but because it was completely frozen they really struggled with it. There was a boat discovered recently, captained by a guy called Sir John Franklin, where evidence was found that after getting their boat stuck in the ice, the crew potentially resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. We’re hoping things won’t come to that for us!

Essentially we’re giving it a go as it hasn’t been done before, because of the physical and mental challenge and we’re hoping for some spectacular scenery along the way -- including hopefully some interaction with polar bears.

I’m part of a team of three, made up of myself and Alex Hibbert, our team leader, who’s spent 300-400 days on the ice already in places including Greenland and the Arctic. The whole expedition is his brainchild so he helped bring the team together. The other team mate is Jamie Anderson, who, like me and Alex is a keen adventurer and made the team after he replied to an ad put out by Alex. Initially there were a huge number of applicants that were whittled down to 30 and finally down to myself and Jamie. There’ll also be two dogs on the route with us, their principal purpose being to fend off the threat from any polar bears, but it’ll be nice to have their company to break the monotony a bit too!

I think having completed challenges like the Marathon Des Sables and rowing the Atlantic will have helped me with getting selected, as complete novices pose a higher risk to the success of the challenge. 

Having the experience of what it feels like to be relatively uncomfortable in extreme environments will help with the mental preparation. I have been down to around -30 during skiing holidays and Scottish winter skiing can also be fairly chilly at times, but I haven’t experienced the temperatures of -40 we could potentially be exposed to on the ice. All those experiences have helped build a series of skills that will definitely help.

Obviously when it’s that cold you have to be vigilant with things like preventing frostbite, but we’ll manage that with layering our clothing and ensuring we have no skin exposed. One of the biggest challenges will be managing our route, particularly towards the end. For us, it’s a case of the colder the better, as the higher the temperature is, the higher the chance of the ice melting and breaking up and causing leads (or water channels). This could mean getting caught on a piece of ice or having to change our route to avoid these channels. If this happens, it’s either a case of trying to step across the breaks, walking around the water, tying the sleds together and paddling them across or, if it’s really big, we can chuck our dry suits on, jump in and swim across. If this happens, we’d swim across and pull the sleds over with a length of rope once we’ve reached the other side. Plus once the ice starts opening up, along with us, the polar bears will also be trying to avoid the water, meaning there could be lots of people and lots of animals together in smaller spaces -- which could be interesting!

Another thing we have to be careful of is sweating. All our activity has to be kept at a level where we’re going fast enough to stay warm, but not so fast that you break a sweat. The danger with sweating is that it freezes, leaving you more at risk of things like hypothermia. Also just trying to unfreeze and then dry things poses its own problems as the only way you have of doing that is by placing them on your body -- covering yourself in damp socks and gloves might not be the nicest experience after a hard day on the ice!

It’s mainly involved gym work, lots of cycling, running, yoga, climbing and stand up paddle boarding which is great for core strength. I’ve worked with nutritionists in the past with my rowing attempt, so have all that advice from then. We’ve all done various challenges previously, so we have a solid idea of what we need to achieve beforehand with our weight and muscle mass etc. Initially our training was all about putting on lean muscle mass, eating a healthy diet and not going silly with things like booze. I’m eating around 4,000 cals a day to maintain my weight after doing all that exercise. Almost daily I have been going to the gym, cycling and running as well as climbing and yoga a few times per week, so it all adds up. Towards the end it’s been all about putting on fat mass as we reckon we’ll lose a quarter to a third of our body weight. We could potentially come back with very bizarre body shapes, where some bits are very strong but other areas could waste away quite a lot!

The facility is amazing. It’s a fantastic set up with everything in house, which is obviously really convenient. It’s also pretty cool being tested in the same place as people like Jenson Button and the Brownlee brothers.   
 
The testing we did was a DEXA scan which was really interesting as you could see your entire skeleton at the end of the scan. You could also see the distribution of things like muscle and fat, which really highlighted that our fat gaining programme had worked! We could also see our bone density which showed up as average, meaning we’re nice and strong. We also went in the Bod Pod which told us our lean muscle mass and body fat percentage and helped us work out how many calories we’d need each day to maintain our body weight. We’ll actually be increasing our calorie intake to 5-6,000 cals whilst we’re out there to try and do that.

We also went in the environmental chamber and took the temperature down to -16 with some fans blowing on us to simulate the wind and make it colder still. That was a great way to start getting used to the cold. Although there will be some acclimatisation time when we’re out there, it’s good to start getting used to it now so you can start to plan the numbers of layers you’ll need on specific areas of your body.