It’s the Easter weekend. A brief time of rest before the final push, well comparative rest! Raoul is busy picking up ski bindings and poles, and combining that with more time on the boat with Ben. Rich has been forging links with the Somerset community, well strictly speaking food producers and his family!
It has been an opportunity to pick up chocolate, donated kindly from local Minehead company, Nutcombe Chocolates. 70 bars of dark chocolate will keep them going.
“We were keen on the lower GI dark variety which Nutcombe have kindly provided. Hopefully better on the teeth and certainly on energy release.” Richard commented, mouth full.
Tower Farm cheeses, another local producer will provide a selection of fine quality cheeses for use when they reach the ice cap. It will be a good addition to the freeze dried foods in the evening, and an essential source of fat and calcium.
Jones Green Grocers in Williton came up with the goods fruit wise. Apples, oranges and kiwis for the boat will Keep the scurvy at bay! Kiwis- a huge source of vitamin C.
It has been a few months in the offering but this weekend we visited the Fareshare warehouse to collect a vast majority of our food rations for the expedition. This is food that otherwise would have ended up in the land fill site due to damaged packaging or wrongly printed sell-by dates. It must be stressed that this food was surplus to the requirements of Bristol disadvantaged community.
This is an amazing charity, something anyone in the food industry should support and be aware of. Here’s a summary:
FareShare is a national UK charity supporting communities to relieve food poverty
FareShare is at the centre of two of the most urgent issues that face the UK - food poverty and food waste
The charity addresses these issues in three ways:
Providing quality food - surplus ‘fit for purpose’ product from the food and drink industry - to organisations working with disadvantaged people in the community
Providing training and education around the essential life skills of safe food preparation and nutrition, and warehouse employability training through FareShare’s Eat Well Live Well programme
Promoting the message that ‘No Good Food Should Be Wasted’
Today we are delighted to announce an ongoing partnership with leading sports nutritionalists, Orbana.
Orbana is a revolutionary drink that uses only healthy ingredients to give a steady release of energy without the spike and crash - all without using a single ounce of caffeine, sweeteners or preservatives. Orbana combines a special mixture of energy sources with a generous amount of vitamins, minerals, amino acids and electrolytes to delay fatigue for up to two hours. So now when you need a kick, you can do it in a way that’s actually good for you.
We are trilled to have the expertise and proven quality of Orbana. It will provide vital additional calories on the Ice as well as the essential nutrients and vitamins that can quickly become deficient, without too much teeth cleaning after. It will make all the difference. They will be put straight to the test next week when we enter the lab for further VO2 max and lactate threshold tests.
This will finance the pulks which are on order. It continues to be a testing time as we search for any outstanding equipment. Boots are proving to be the main difficulty. This is something we are not scrimping on, and certainly won’t be recycled. An essential part of the kit, an expedition can easily fail due to foot problems.
Due to the exceptionally good winter (good if you like the cold!) Boots have been selling like hot cakes. So we are scratching around to find a couple of pairs of suitable Baffins.
Training and schools work continues. We are excited to announce a visit to St Mary Redcliffe School in Bristol. This trip is due to be filmed by the BBC, there may even be some more tire pulling!
Easenmyne, a Jersey based business have come on board with some significant and much needed funding. We are also excited to announce another major backer although details can’t be released quite yet. Kit supply keeps on coming, we are very grateful to Mammut as well as OC technologies for the generous supply of a tracking devise. This will enable regular signals to be sent back from the boat and ice to the site with exact positioning and weather, without us going through the painstaking process of email or phone.
We will continue to search for the remaining funds although by now we are well on the way.
Media coverage continues. The Jersey post recently had us on the front page. Raoul continued his radio tour this time on BBC Jersey breakfast show. Richard is due to be on Radio Bristol this coming Wednesday. There is also some exciting national coverage coming up.
Many thanks also for kind messages of support and donations. Also big thanks to Alex Thompson for your tireless work over the past few weeks and contacts!
We continue to cram, attempting to fit in our kit preparations, ongoing sponsor finding along with the crucial strength and conditioning training.
Raoul has chosen a more traditional approach in recent months, hauling tires along the Thames towpaths (go along and given him support near Hammersmith!)
Due to logistics I have preferred using the gym under the excellent guidance of Andrew Wadsworth of My Life Personal Training, friend and conditioning coach to many elite athletes. This afternoon sees lactate testing which will provide some good data which can be applied to the ice cap. It will give us heart rate ranges in which we are most efficient in terms of calorie burning.
We are also fortunate enough to be supported by Dr Andrew Middlebrooke an highly experienced sports physiologist from Exeter University. We will be sending back critical physiological data to the lab to be analysed. As there are comparatively few studies in this area this will be useful figures for future research.
Raoul and Rich have had a busy week on the hunt for kit. Even in these tough economical times many outdoor sports retailers have been kind enough to offer discounted equipment for our expedition. We are trying to get the tent we require at the moment. This has to be the best as our safety is paramount and without the tent we wouldn’t last long on the ice-cap. Winds can gust to 100 miles per hour on Greenland and ripping the tent in two or having it blow away is a real threat. We are also ordering Skis and boots and flexible touring bindings. Our Pulks (sleds) will probably come from Norway where we have managed to source good quality proven equipment which is large enough to carry supplies for a double crossing. The difficult thing now with funds still an issue is to balance the books. We have to buy the equipment and get it here and become familiar with it before we set off but we also have to pay for it. Hopefully most companies will give us 30 days to pay up! The organisation side of the project is coming together and the training is steady there are still not enough hours in the day to get everything done!
It really has proved to be a huge challenge this CNE project. The hours that we have put in have been crazy. We are chained to our desks each evening and if not chained to 3 tyres with sweat dripping down our foreheads! Rich has stepped up his training and is doing intense bulking workouts ready for when we hit the ice. At the moment in Central London the wind is howling outside, it’s a taste of what will be in store when we’re miles from nowhere in the North Atlantic…Can’t wait to get going!
We have had some interesting meetings over the past couple of weeks and there has been some hope of getting the funding we require to get this project to the level we want it. Rich and Raoul spend hours everyday sending sponsorship proposals to companies UK wide to try to raise some cash. progress has been painfully slow. Remember we have been at this for two whole years now! We are playing a waiting game. Waiting for replies to our mails and hoping it will all work out. One of our problems is that we don’t have the time to wait. So we phone e-mail and mail some more proposals and another day continues. Training is as important as fundraising and we both know the size of the task ahead of us. To raise the cash and arrive on Greenland ill prepared would be a disaster. But then again if we don’t raise the cash we are also in big trouble. We can feel the pressure mounting with so many schools following our progress. Fingers crossed!
chocolate, donated kindly from local Minehead company, Nutcombe Chocolates. 70 bars of dark chocolate will keep them going.
