Aggregation
It's high time for an update. First up, the journey back from Greenland: we were picked up from the ice around 1100 on Friday of last week, by a ski-equipped Flugfelag Islands Twin Otter. The landing was pretty spectacular (it touched down a few metres from our tent) and the pilot seemed rather unhappy with the ice conditions, setting off with his shovel to flatten out some of the bumps. We dug the shovels out of our sledges and joined in, sweating under the midday sun, before he waved us on to the plane. The take off wasn't quite as hair-raising as my pick up from near the North Pole last year, but bombing down a snow runway in a ski plane is always an interesting experience.
We landed at Isafjordur (NW Iceland) a couple of hours later to find that all the connecting flights to Reykjavik were full, so we decided to hire a car instead (and offer a lift to the Austrian mountaineer Dagmar Wabnig in the process). The six-hour journey is a bit of a blur, but our one litre Toyota Corolla performed admirably considering Iceland's 'roads' generally look like this and the locals tend to drive this kind of thing. We dropped it outside the (gorgeous) Hotel Centrum looking like a mud-splattered, battle-hardened rally car, before grabbing a quick shower, one of the best steaks on the face of the earth, a couple of hours' kip and the 0745 flight to Heathrow the next morning. I was driven straight from Heathrow to Cheltenham, where I gave two presentations at the Cheltenham Science Festival (which went surprisingly well given the lack of preparation/sleep) and I got back to London around midnight.
The rest of last week was equally manic. The main news is that we've decided to launch the next expedition in four weeks' time. More on that soon. We spent Friday morning on a treadmill at the University of Hertfordshire's Physiology lab, being tested by our merciless human performance guru Dr. Justin Roberts. After a month in Greenland the heat and humidity felt debilitating, but the test results were encouraging – I even managed to hit a new record maximum heart rate of 201 beats per minute. That's 3.3 beats per second. Hardcore training starts again next week and I've been out on both my road bike and my mountain bike today to blow away the cobwebs.
Next week promises to be equally bonkers – I'm off to Toronto on Tuesday, where I'm co-presenting with Dr. Guy Miller at IdeaCity. I'll be packing my running shoes and I'm toying with the idea of taking my road bike – does anyone know how cycle-friendly Toronto is?
I'll upload the Greenland photos soon. Right now, I'm off off to bed.
— Filed under Greenland