Between the 24th and 28th of June, polar explorer Ben Saunders competed in the UK's longest non-stop running race, the Thames Ring 260 . This brand-new, 260-mile ultra-marathon entails completing nearly ten back-to-back marathons within a 100-hour cut off time. Starting and finishing in Streatley, Berkshire, the race covered most of the Thames Path and the Grand Union canal.
Ben is the third in history to ski solo to the North Pole (a challenge Reinhold Messner called "Ten times as dangerous as Everest"), he holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Briton, and no one has been able to repeat the journey since. He is planning three groundbreaking expeditions between now and 2012, and is using the Thames Ring 260 as "a training event". At a time of intense economic challenge, fewer speakers are as qualified to talk about tenacity, resilience, and succeeding against the odds.