Quick recap: What is the Arctic Spine Race?
Most races you just sign up for online, pay your entry fee, and rock up to the start line. The Arctic Spine Race ain’t one of those races.
Before you’re even allowed anywhere near the start line, you have to prove to the organisers that you’re capable of surviving out there. That means a pre-race interview, providing evidence of previous experience, and convincing the race director that you’re not going to end up becoming a rescue mission somewhere in the Swedish wilderness.
In Part I, I talked about my experience leading up to and during the race itself. In this part, I want to go through the preparation, logistics, kit, and planning that goes into attempting something like this.
Because dragging yourself 463km across the Arctic isn’t something you blag, (although I thought I sort of could).
Training
One of the slightly ironic parts of preparing for an Arctic race is that I live in Singapore, which is about as far removed from Arctic conditions as you can get. Instead of training in snow and freezing temperatures, most of my training was done in 30°C heat with 80–90% humidity. Clearly, that doesn’t prepare you particularly well for –40°C and blizzards, but there are still some benefits.
The heat forces your body to work much harder to regulate itself, which can improve cardiovascular efficiency and overall endurance. In simple terms, if you can keep moving for hours in Singapore heat and humidity, the engine itself is usually in pretty good shape.
What you obviously can’t replicate is the cold, (the occasion dip in an ice bath, doesn't really cut it). You can’t train for frozen lake crossing, pulling a sled across deep snow, the mental challenge of being alone in a white wilderness, or the way extreme cold slowly drains your energy. So a lot of the preparation becomes about building the engine and the durability, then trusting you’ll figure out the environmental side once you’re out there. Which, in hindsight, might have been slightly optimistic.
Just a minor setback
Going into the race, I was pretty confident that I was fit and strong enough for the challenge. The engine was there, however, there were a couple of things holding me back from really hitting my full potential, mainly an ongoing Achilles tendinopathy that had been hanging around for well over a year.
It started after I tore both of my calves during training for a HYROX. In true stubborn fashion, I didn’t rehab them properly, raced, fucked my Achilles. Again, didn't rehab probably, raced, and then proper fucked my Achilles. Knob-edd!
The rehab for the Achilles was tricky, mainly because I still needed a lot of time on my feet for training. So most of the rehab ended up being about management rather than complete rest, finding that fine balance between doing enough to stay prepared for the race, without aggravating the tendon.
The rehab itself mainly involved strengthening the calves and tendons, with lots of loaded seated and standing calf raises. The tricky part was managing the load, because pushing too hard would usually set me back a couple of days.
Looking back now, the Achilles situation was probably the biggest uncertainty going into the race. I knew the engine was there and the training had been done, but there’s always that little voice in the back of your mind asking whether something that’s been a problem for over a year might decide to show up again at the worst possible moment.
When you’re attempting to cover hundreds of kilometres on foot in the Arctic, even a small issue can become a very big problem. At the time though, I felt confident enough that I’d managed it well, or at least well enough to get to the start line...
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| The eerie beauty and 'at oneness', in the silent surroundings. |
Strength & conditioning
About six months out from the race, my strength training didn’t change massively. I was incorporating more Olympic-style lifting, mainly clean & jerks and snatches, alongside some isolation work, but most sessions were kept circuit-based to build strength while maintaining work capacity.
Around three months out, most of my resistance work centred around sets of five reps, with consistent heavy squats, deadlifts, and lunges three times per week. The weightlifting (clean and jerks and snatches) and BJJ gradually tapered off during this period, unless I fancied throwing some weights around for a change.
Conditioning progressed mainly by increasing duration month by month. Because of the Achilles issues, I wasn’t running at all. Instead, I used the elliptical (cross trainer) as my main replacement. It worked well because it was low impact, although whenever I increased the duration significantly the Achilles would usually flare up slightly. Most days, I alternated between the cross trainer and circuits on the Rower, SkiErg, and BikeErg.
Six months out, cardio sessions were around 60 minutes, and I increased that by roughly 30 minutes each month. By January, my longest sessions were 7.5–8 hours on both Saturday and Sunday. I wasn’t worried about distance or calories. The goal was simply time on the legs and getting used to long, drawn-out fatigue.
One session I absolutely hated, but probably benefited from the most, was doing repeated loops on the beach wearing snowshoes and boots. It was uncomfortable, monotonous, and pretty boring, but it did help simulate the slow, grinding movement you get in deep snow.
If I were to change anything, I’d probably spend more time strengthening the muscles involved in downhill loading. My shins took a serious beating, and that’s something I underestimated.
Another challenge of preparing in Singapore is the lack of hills and uneven terrain. It’s difficult to condition the joints, especially the ankles, for the unpredictable movements you get when travelling across mixed Arctic terrain. Frozen lakes, soft snow, hard-packed trails, and uneven ground all stress the body differently, and that’s hard to replicate when most training is done on flat ground in a tropical climate.
You’ll often see Arctic racers doing sled or pulk pulling training to simulate hauling equipment across the snow. I actually chose not to do much of that. With the Achilles already being a weak link, I didn’t want to risk flaring it up again by adding heavy pulling work. At that stage, staying healthy and getting to the start line was far more important than perfectly replicating race conditions.
So instead, I focused on general strength, long conditioning sessions, and durability, accepting that some of the very specific elements of the race would simply have to be figured out once I was out there. Looking back, that was probably the right call at the time, although, like many things in endurance racing, you only really find out for sure once the race actually begins.
Nutrition
Generally speaking, I keep a fairly simple and healthy diet seven days a week. Nothing fancy, just good quality food, with the occasional bit of crap and some alcohol at the weekends. That didn’t change too much during most of the training, although December was a bit of a write-off. There was definitely more alcohol and indulgence than usual, mainly because I had a bit of a “fuck it” phase before properly dialling things in during January.
Once January rolled around, I made a few deliberate changes. I moved from a higher-carbohydrate diet to a higher-fat, lower-carbohydrate approach, completely cut out alcohol, and limited junk food to a cookie on Wednesdays and a 'dirty burger' on Sundays after a big training session.
At the same time, I gradually increased the amount of fat in each meal, mainly by adding good-quality olive oil. The idea was to give my body time to adjust to using more fat as a fuel source. After a couple of weeks I did notice a drop in body fat, although that was probably helped by the massive increase in training volume as well.
Despite what many nutritionists and coaches might recommend, I deliberately chose to train in a calorie deficit. Having done ultra-endurance events before, I understood the reality of eating during something like this. Accessing large amounts of calories in the Arctic simply isn’t very practical.
For a few reasons:
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It’s the Arctic. If you stop moving for too long, you get cold very quickly.
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Cooking takes time. You have to unpack a stove, melt snow for water, cook, and pack everything away again.
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Food adds weight, and every extra gram ends up in the sled you’re dragging behind you.
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Quality calories are limited in expedition-style foods.
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Digestion becomes an issue. Stopping to deal with bodily functions wastes time, and again, if you stop too long, you freeze.
All of that is easy to overlook when nutrition advice is given from a textbook or laboratory.
The logic behind the higher-fat approach was fairly simple. Firstly, during the race I needed “bang for buck” calories, meaning a lot of energy in a relatively small amount of food.
Secondly, the dehydrated meals I was taking from Expedition Foods were roughly 80% fat, so it made sense to get my body used to that beforehand. When it came to choosing food for the race itself, the main considerations were weight and practicality. Military-style ration packs are convenient and ready to eat, but they contain moisture. In –40°C temperatures, anything wet freezes solid, and wet food is also heavier than dehydrated food.
So most of my food choices were things like crisps, crackers, granola bars, and other dry snacks that were lightweight and less likely to freeze. Energy gels were useful for quick boosts, although they also tended to freeze if you weren’t careful. Chocolate and sweets were great for morale, but when they freeze, they can be hard enough to break your teeth.
One slightly more luxurious item I brought along was a hand-pump Nespresso machine. It works just like a normal Nespresso machine but uses a manual pump instead of electricity, which makes it surprisingly practical for expedition use, and honestly, having a proper coffee in the Arctic was a massive morale boost.
Things that freeze in Arctic (that you don't expect)
When temperatures start dropping towards –30°C to –40°C, you quickly realise that a lot of everyday things don’t behave the way you expect them to.
For example:
Energy gels – great for quick calories… until they turn into solid tubes of sugar.
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Chocolate bars – excellent morale food, but frozen chocolate can feel like biting into a brick.
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Freezing my effin tits off Water bottles – unless you insulate them properly, they freeze surprisingly quickly.
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Toothpaste – turns into something closer to a mint-flavoured ice lolly. Just used chewing gum and floss.
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Boot laces and straps – stiffen up and become a pain to adjust with cold hands.
Lighter - can't spark. I had to stick mine down mine arse crack to warm up quicker.
Eyes - moisture in the eyes, freezes and eyelashes stick together
Gloves and boots - vapour from warm hands and feet, freeze the gloves and boots within 45 seconds.
Electronics - batteries for watches, phones, GPS, and torches die much quicker.
One of the things you quickly learn in extreme cold is that everything takes longer than you expect. Even simple tasks, like eating, drinking, going for a poo, or adjusting kit, become slow and awkward when everything around you is trying to freeze.
It’s just another small reminder that when you’re racing in the Arctic, you’re not just managing distance and fatigue. You’re also constantly negotiating with the environment.
Equipment
As mentioned earlier, the race uses a “traffic light” system for kit requirements. Red items are mandatory for safety reasons and you simply can’t start the race without them.
Clothing
When it came to clothing layers, I felt I was pretty well sorted. I didn’t think it was necessary to spend a fortune on these items, and most of my layers actually came from Decathlon. To be fair, they performed really well. The only real investments I made were in boots and gloves. The boots themselves were good quality, but even so, another competitor (Louis) mentioned that his froze solid just like mine did. That seems to be fairly common in such temperatures.
When it came to gloves, I noticed that the more experienced Scandinavian racers were using mittens over liner gloves, often from specific Scandinavian brands designed for extreme cold. That’s something I’ll definitely invest in next time. I’ll also take a second pair of boots, so I can start halfway with something that isn’t already frozen.
Poles
The baskets on my trekking poles were shite. They were far too small in diameter, which meant they kept sinking into the snow. At two different points during the race, I actually lost them completely. Next time I’ll use proper ski baskets, which now seems painfully obvious, and I’ll take a spare set.
Cooking Stove
One thing I did get right was the stove. I used a petrol stove, which performed well in the cold. Some racers using gas stoves complained that theirs froze and stopped working. The downside of the petrol stove, however, is that you have to manually pump it to build pressure, which wastes time and energy when you’re already exhausted.
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| Rations and kit for the trek |
GPS
A handheld GPS is another mandatory (“red list”) item. I had a good Garmin handheld GPS that I’d used in previous races. It works perfectly well in the UK and in fairly cold conditions, but once the temperature drops below –20°C, it basically becomes useless.
Fortunately, I was also using a Garmin Fenix 8 Pro watch, which worked really well for following the route. Because it sits against the body, the battery life was surprisingly good. However, on the coldest night, when I was crashing hard out on one of the lakes, the battery drained much faster than expected, something I hadn’t really accounted for. Luckily, I still had my old-school map and compass.
Skis
I chose not to use skis, mainly based on advice from a couple of Scandinavian colleagues. Learning a completely new skill right before a race like this carries a risk. My muscles wouldn’t be adapted to the movement, and the potential for injury made it a gamble.
From what I heard from some of the other competitors, the rental skis weren’t particularly great anyway. Even though skis can be more efficient and potentially save energy, I was still managing to keep pace with the front of the pack, so I didn’t feel like I was losing too much by sticking with boots and snowshoes.
Hydration
Hydration is one area where I definitely made some mistakes. On day one I brought a CamelBak hydration bladder, which froze solid within a couple of hours. At that point it just became dead weight.
The same thing happened with my supposedly “insulated” water bottles. Even when the water itself hadn’t frozen, the liquid inside the screw-lid threads and drinking valves had, making them impossible to use. What did work well were my flasks, ironically, cheap ones from Decathlon, which kept water reasonably warm for several hours. Next time, I'll take more and bigger ones.
Another mistake I made was keeping them in the pulk (sled) behind me. That meant constantly stopping, taking off my pack, unclipping the harness, and digging through the sled just to get a drink. It took me a couple of days to realise I should have just kept one in my backpack for quick access. Bit of a dickhead move on my part.
Pulk
The pulk itself wasn’t too much of a problem, but getting in and out of the harness wasted a lot of time. Some competitors had large carabiners attached to their harnesses, which allowed them to clip and unclip quickly. Watching them do that made it pretty clear I’d overlooked a simple solution. Next time: bigger carabiners.
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| Pulk: My life in a sled |
Complacency
This is quite painful for me to admit, (painful in that “I’m better than that” kind of way). The truth is, I didn’t finish the race largely because of my own mistakes. I became complacent with my timings and didn’t properly account for the time I was wasting along the way.
I was doing walking-pace calculations in my head, but I wasn’t consistently checking those estimates against the actual time.
Before the race, I’d even written everything down: target arrival times for checkpoints, how much sleep I could afford, and when I needed to get moving again. But once I realised I was ahead of schedule at the start of the race, I stopped paying attention to those notes. What a pratt!
That small lapse in discipline gradually caught up with me. Over a race this long, little bits of wasted time add up quickly, and before you know it you’re suddenly chasing the clock.
It’s a tough lesson to swallow, but it’s also a simple one. Next time, I’ll pay much closer attention to the timings and pacing strategy, and I’ll also have the advantage of already knowing where the survival huts are along the route, which will make planning rest stops and refuelling far easier.
Experience, as always, is a brutal but effective teacher.
Closing thoughts
Looking back at the preparation, the training, the equipment, and the lessons learned, I don’t think I was massively underprepared. Physically, I was in good shape. The systems mostly worked, and a lot of the kit choices were solid. But races like the Arctic Spine Race have a way of exposing the smallest weaknesses, whether that’s in planning, decision-making, or simple discipline.
Over hundreds of kilometres, small inefficiencies and minor mistakes slowly compound. A few minutes wasted here, a poor decision there, a bit of complacency with pacing…and eventually the margin disappears. That’s the brutal honesty of events like this. Still, every race, finished or not, leaves you with something valuable, experience, and sometimes the biggest lessons don’t actually arrive during the race itself; sometimes they show up afterwards.
Once the adrenaline fades, the body stops moving, and you return to normal life, that’s when you really start processing what just happened, and that part of the story is something I wasn’t fully prepared for...
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| Trying to take my boots off at checkpoint two (around day 5) |
Aftermath on the body
As soon as I was told my race was over, my body pretty much gave up, and I went straight into rigamortis. It was as if I’d been operating in some sort of functional survival mode out there, where only the absolutely necessary systems in my body were allowed to operate, and even then, only at a pretty sub-optimal level. The moment the race stopped, that switch flicked off, and I became Tinman.
I was fucking ravenous too. I could not stop eating. I lost about 4kg in weight and have never looked so lean and scrawny in my life. That’s pretty common after extreme endurance events; your body is essentially trying to claw back energy after days of running a massive calorie deficit in extreme conditions. The next few days were rough.
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| Just one foot in front of the other |
I had sharp pain in my fingertips, pain in my heels and forefoot, and my toes were starting to go black from the constant impact and pressure inside my boots. My lower limbs looked like a donor “elephant leg” you’d see in a kebab shop, swollen, inflamed, and not particularly pleasant to look at.
During the race, other racers and myself developed 'cold onset asthma', which comes from breathing in extremely cold air. Breathing becomes tough, you're constantly wheezing, coughing and spitting out gunk. This lasted for a about a week or so after the race.
Days later, I could still barely move and was still absolutely ravenous. When I got back to my mum’s place, my body seemed to shut down even more now that it realised it didn’t have to do anything anymore, the fatigue hit properly. I was proper fucked! It was nice to have Mumma-bear look after me, like I was a sick kid again. Bless her cottons. x
During the night, I was absolutely pissing sweat, and this went on for nearly two weeks. That’s likely my nervous system trying to rebalance after being pushed into full fight-or-flight mode for days on end in the Arctic. Apparently after extreme events like that your autonomic nervous system is all over the place heart rate high, HRV in the floor, hormones out of whack, and your body is basically trying to re-establish some form of equilibrium.
Even now, four weeks later, things still aren’t quite right. My body can’t regulate temperature properly yet and I barely sweat when I train, which is pretty strange considering I’m back in Singapore. Training itself is a bit of a sorry state. I attempted squats the other day and could just about manage 6 reps at 100kg. Normally, I can rep out 140kg without too much drama. After finishing the set, I went light-headed and had to take a knee.
Only in the last couple of days has my HRV started to normalise, and my resting heart rate was sitting around 67-70 bpm, and is only now beginning to come back down to around 40-42 bpm (normally it sits between 37-39 bpm). My coordination still feels off, I feel clumsy and unstable at times, and occasionally my legs will buckle beneath me.
I still have pain in my left heel, and the toes on that foot have pins and needles and some weird sensations going on, which I suspect is a mix of nerve irritation and the battering they took during the race. My ankle tendons are still tight as fuck, and the dead-black skin from my toes has finally fallen off, along with one of my toenails.
I was feeling pain in my fingertips for two weeks, and the dead skin has finally fallen off them too. However, I can't use my thumb to unlock my phone, as I don't have a fingerprint at the moment.
Interestingly, the InBody machine says my body fat has been sitting between 3–3.5% for the last couple of weeks, yet I look a bit bloated and “fluffy”. That’s most likely inflammation and water retention, the body holding onto fluid while it repairs the huge amount of muscle damage and connective tissue stress that something like this creates.
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| The day after finishing (left), two weeks later (right). |
In short, finishing or not, the race might have stopped, but the body is fucked and clearly still catching up.
Where's your head at?
Obviously the biggest thing for me at the moment was the disappointment. I also had some personal stuff going on at the same time which added to the “depression” (I’m using that word in the slang sense to describe my state of mind, not the clinical condition).
When I got back to the reality of life in Singapore, I found everything and everyone a bit… dull. I felt very alone, secluded, and embarrassed that I hadn’t finished the race.
For seven days, I had essentially been alone, suffering in physical pain, hungry, cold, battered, and bruised. Then, suddenly, I was back in a world that seemed insignificant compared to what I had just been through. My mind was spiralling down what felt like a dark hole of anti-climactic existence. I kept asking myself, “What’s next?” in almost every area of life, relationships, friends, career, and even family.
In simple terms, I was experiencing a massive come-down. What professionals often describe as post-achievement void and re-entry loneliness.
Post-achievement void
Post-achievement void is commonly experienced by ultra-marathon runners, retired athletes, service personnel returning from deployment, entrepreneurs after a major launch, and anyone who has spent months, sometimes years, chasing a huge goal.
So much time and effort is dedicated to achieving this mission, target, deadline, or race that when it’s suddenly over, you’re left with a strange emptiness; there’s nothing left to prepare for, no mini signs of progress, no small wins, no sense of forward motion.
Your brain has spent months running on adrenaline, stress, anticipation, and dopamine, and then suddenly it all disappears. You experience a bit of a neurological and emotional crash. People around you often have no real idea what you’ve just been through. Conversations that once felt normal suddenly seem trivial.
Someone tried to impress me by telling me their mate had completed two HYROX races in one weekend. My internal reaction was basically: so fucking what, do you know what I’ve just done? My attitude was starting to suck. Any sign of weakness, excuses, or laziness in the gym started to irritate me. I felt like I was slowly turning into Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses, “During the war…". Everything seemed dull, ordinary, and underwhelming compared to what I had just experienced.
Re-entry loneliness
Another thing that can happen after intense expeditions or races is something called re-entry loneliness. When you're in the middle of something extreme like the Arctic race, your world becomes very simple. Your brain is completely focused on survival and forward progress. Every decision matters. Every kilometre counts. Then suddenly you come back to normal life, work emails, gym chats, and people complaining about trivial things. The contrast can feel strange. You’ve changed slightly through the experience, but the world around you hasn’t. That can leave you feeling oddly disconnected for a while, like you’re temporarily out of sync with normal life.
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| Stiff AF, and moving slow, trying to avoid the inevitable pain |
The reality
From speaking to other endurance athletes and reading about expedition psychology, this emotional dip is actually quite common. Many people experience a psychological low two to four weeks after major challenges.
It’s not just ultra-runners or expedition racers either. You often hear the same thing from retired athletes, soldiers returning from deployment, entrepreneurs after launching a business, or even people who have spent months preparing for something like a marathon, an exam, a big project at work, or a wedding. For months, everything revolves around that one thing. Then suddenly it’s over, your body is recovering, your nervous system is fried, and your brain is trying to process an unfinished story. It doesn’t mean something is wrong; it just means you’ve come down from something big. A bit like a hangover really.
Getting over it is fairly straightforward: 1. Rest 2. Settle into your routine and 3. Set another goal, and 4. don't make any major life choices. For me, in the next few months, I'm going to get cracking back on with my BJJ and work towards my long-time-coming purple belt. I'm going to start learning a language and do a wine sommelier course (just fancy it, ha ha). In September, I'll get back into Arctic mode for 2027.
The Arctic has a funny way of humbling you. You can train hard, plan everything, buy the best kit, but environments like that expose every weakness you bring with you. In my case, it exposed complacency.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. I did take away some deeper lessons from the experience. The biggest one has been a shift in perspective. When you're willingly put yourself through that level of physical and mental suffering, a lot of other things in life suddenly lose their ability to rattle you.
I have a slightly more blasé outlook on certain challenges. If I’m prepared to drag myself across the Arctic in those conditions, there aren’t many things people can throw at me now that feel particularly intimidating or stressful.
Strangely, the experience builds a quiet kind of confidence, the sense that whatever comes next, you’ve probably dealt with worse.
Oh well, unfinished business.
KA POWWW!
I did the occasional updates on my Instagram stories, if you care to experience the real thing with me.