Nathan Allen appears to be a normal student, reading Natural Sciences at the smallest college in Cambridge, Peterhouse. Yet during the Easter vacation last year, whilst most students had their minds set on revision, he trekked to the North Pole, walking and skiing hundreds of kilometres in two weeks, effectively a marathon a day, hauling all his food and equipment in a sledge, in temperatures that plunged to -40°C; this was the lowest his thermometer could read, although with wind chill it was probably more like -70°C. When asked what drove him to such an extreme venture, he does not have a prepared response. He himself admits that he doesn’t have a “well crafted one liner”.  He says that he rather wanted “to do something that showed what I am capable of. I have also always had a fascination with the North Pole; you are literally on top of the world.”

His expedition was twenty-two months in the making. “You can’t just pick an expedition like this out of a brochure.” As well as the planning, he wanted to “push new bits of technology, to start from scratch with much of the equipment, questioning why and how does this work and then coming up with some custom solutions to improve them”. “These new bits of technology then had to be custom built, custom tested, custom destroyed and then custom rebuilt to make sure it actually does work.” This whole process from making the necessary specialist equipment to actually transporting him to the North Pole was hugely expensive and his attempt to find sponsors during a time of economic hardship proved particularly difficult. This was exemplified by the fact that four months before he planned to leave, his main sponsor, who were funding 80% of the trip, pulled out. At this stage, the expedition seemed doomed to failure yet seeing Nathan’s motivation, it is clear how he managed to find more sponsors at very short notice. Getting out onto the ice was the easy part.

On the April 2nd 2009 he was dropped on the Arctic ice cap, and trekked northwards for two weeks. To many people the biggest obstacle would have been the remoteness and although he claims that this was not really an issue, the fact that he named his equipment may suggest otherwise.  For example he called his sledge Philip; when asked why, he remarks, “I realised that the Queen must spend a lot of time looking over her shoulder going ‘come along Phillip’ and I spent most of my time looking over my shoulder and that’s how the name came about.” But it seems the food proved the most difficult hurdle. “I had to consume between 6500 to 7000 calories a day (about 3 times as much as your average person), yet at the same time, I had to have the maximum number of calories for the smallest given weight.” Therefore his diet consisted of ghee (purified butter fat which is too illegally unhealthy to be sold as butter), Quaker porridge oats and Sainsbury’s Basics chocolate - he ate 6 bars a day - managing to get them soft enough, so as not to chip his teeth, proved a challenge in itself.  As he says, “At minus 40 degrees Celsius chocolate is a perfectly viable construction material. I had so much, I could probably have built an igloo out of it and it would have been structurally sound.”

It is when he talks about the dangers he encountered everyday that you realise quite how brave this was.  He had a constant fear of falling through the ice which varied in thickness from tens of metres to only a couple of millimetres. If you are to fall in “that is it, the experts reckon you have about 7 seconds to get out but that’s never realistically going to happen”. Polar bears are also a constant worry since “they will eat anything moving, the bigger the better – so to them I was just lunch dressed in Gortex”. It is the rather haphazard jokey way in which he deals with these dangers that really shows how determination triumphs over fear. There is no doubt that Nathan has the former in truck loads. When I asked him the inevitable question of “what next” he replied, “I don’t want to become a competition adventurer. Most of the earth has been explored. If I had a choice I would go to Mars – scientists have recently discovered a glacier, it’s only a small glacier but my tent is not too big, so we’ll see what we can do”. And you know what, after meeting him, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he does do it.