The book Laurie Lee wrote – As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – is my favourite travel book of all time.

After cycling from England to Cape Town I needed to find a way to get to South America.

The Marathon des Sables is known as “the toughest race on Earth”, running with all your food and kit for 150 miles through the Sahara desert.

I spent six weeks in the Canadian Arctic on an Ice Base on the frozen Arctic Ocean at 78 degrees north (at the spot often referred to in polar races as ‘The North Pole’, though in fact it was the 1996 location of the magnetic North Pole).