Expeditions into the unknown
Ross Turner Since getting back from the Red Pole, the most inaccessible point of Australia, we’ve been thinking about what our next expedition should be. We’re looking at doing some more poles of inaccessibility, probably the South American pole in Brazil at the end of next year, with some smaller expeditions to prepare for a big one in 2018. Not many people have been to these poles — there are 11 in total and we plan to visit most of them over the coming years.
Getting kitted up
Hugo Turner The kit above is our defining collection. You’ve got the paramotors — giant fans with parachutes (1) — and the big paramotor wing from the Red Pole trip, the ski poles and the Nansen/modern polar pulk sleds (2) from the Greenland trip, the oars from the Atlantic Ocean row, and then there are various items from the Mount Elbrus expedition in Russia — ice axes, crampons, high-altitude mountaineering boots and rope. The Greenland expedition required a huge amount of kit because we had to source all the traditional equipment; skis, Nansen sled (3), bamboo ski poles, goggles, crampons and traditional food. We also carried modern kit as back-up. It was a huge amount but it was necessary. There are no luxuries on a polar expedition.
Ross On the Greenland expedition, I ate the same food that Sir Ernest Shackleton, who led British expeditions to the Antarctic, would have eaten and used the same kit he would have used, like old goggles and leather shoes, which comes with durability risks. In such extremes, you have to respect your surroundings so I took spare boots, gloves and a down jacket. The old kit was perfect and better than the modern kit in a lot of respects.
Get the blood pumping
Ross A lot of the training we do is specific to the expedition but we always focus on the heart. Endurance training improves how blood can be pumped around your body, while anaerobic cardiac hypertrophy training, sprints for example, trains the volume of the heart.
Not too much muscle
Ross On long expeditions, muscles don’t float, so we try to keep ourselves as light and efficient as possible. If you’re eating 4,000 calories a day and going to the gym five times a week, you’ll lose huge amounts of muscle on an expedition because you just can’t eat and train as much. Our normal weight is one or two kilograms either side of 90kg (14st 1lb). On expeditions we lose about half a kilogram a day. On the Atlantic crossing, we lost over three stone each.
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Forget carb-loading, chew the fat
Hugo Modern adventure foods have a high level of carbohydrates, so you feel very energised but then get huge lows. We try to eat more fats before our expeditions so the body gets used to using fat, not carbs. So a lot of olive oil, butter — we even take bricks of lard.
5,000 calories a day
Ross When we’re on expeditions we have three square meals a day, plus snacks — in total it probably comes to about 5,000 calories. Breakfast is usually porridge with berries, which tastes like wallpaper paste. Lunch is chocolate bars, nuts, flapjacks — maybe soup if you’re lucky. Dinner is pasta, potato or fish pie, something stodgy. And then you’ll have a pudding just to get the calories down.
Back to square one
Hugo I broke my back in 2007 when I was 17. I was messing about on a beach diving into the sea and hit a sandbank. I was in hospital for two weeks and had a neck reconstruction, which included a bone graft and fusing vertebrae together. It took 18 months to recover and I still feel the effects.
Push it to the limit
Hugo On a typical day we trek around 24km (15 miles) for eight to ten hours. When you’re trekking, you take small, repetitive steps, so the muscles you don’t need wither away. When we got off after the Atlantic row, I couldn’t really stand because all my stability muscles had wasted away.
● The Turner Twins are ambassadors of Breitling’s Emergency II Timepiece. Available from Breitling, 130 New Bond Street, London. Watch their Red Pole world first at redbull.co.uk/redpole