We conclude our series from the arctic this month, with an article of personal reflections by Signify Director, Richard Eyre, former CEO of ITV and Capital Radio and one of the participants on the 89º North Pole Leadership Challenge.

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‘No one goes the to the North Pole and comes back unchanged’, said Alan Chambers, who led the first British unassisted walk to the North Pole from the Canadian coast. Alan’s words had affected me deeply. I wondered what on earth could be so seismic as to provoke such a profound review.

He was right, though along with the other 14 apprentice adventurers, I still find it hard to articulate what happened to us at the end of April this year. Certainly we had to dig deep, physically and mentally to complete the journey. At times it was a sublimely spiritual experience, the ice stunningly beautiful, the very thought of walking to the top of the world where fewer than 500 people have ever stood before, intoxicating. At times it was plain graft, an animalistic lifestyle of relentless activity – even sleep a trial, as your toes part frozen fabric to get into an iced-up sleeping bag. And maintaining a steady emotional state as the ice pack floated against us – waking up two miles south of where we went to sleep, having covered only four miles north the previous day – was as demanding as any leadership trial of my career.

The North Pole Leadership Challenge was devised by Alan Chambers and Pete Goss, both MBE’s, both ex-Royal Marines, both heroes, and Phil Wall, CEO of Signify. Alan’s partner on their historic walk to the Pole – just the 700 miles – was Charlie Paton, the second of our guides, and training and nutrition guru to our team.

It began in January this year, when we recruits travelled to a training weekend on Dartmoor. I thought Dartmoor in January sounded pretty cold but I didn’t say anything. The Marines introduced us to our kit, each other and our tyres. For the next three months the central part of our training would involve scaring horses and small children by towing around old car tyres.

The participants were entrepreneurs, bankers, lawyers, traders, a couple of FD’s, all individuals who got where they are by challenging other people’s ideas. But strong shared values formed quickly around respect for our guides. Let’s be clear, you don’t argue with a Marine at the best of times, but when it’s minus 25 degrees Celsius and the route north is littered with danger, you join the team whoever you are.

I think we also saw something in each other that we liked. Many of my friends told me I was barking to try and walk to the North Pole. These people, thirteen men and two women, aged between 23 and 49 all understood. They all had the same look in their eye.

At Heathrow on April 15, we were joined by Ann Daniels, our third guide, who made history in 2000 by reaching the South Pole with the first British all woman team. She’s also been to the North Pole twice before and rapidly won our affection and admiration for her extra-ordinary blend of grit and loveliness. Ann came to deputise for Pete Goss, who made the tough call to stay at home with his family to nurse a very poorly daughter.

We flew to Svalbard, a group of islands north of Norway for two days’ final training before boarding a Russian plane for the final three hour flight to a base camp located around 89 degrees North, about 45 nautical miles short of the Pole. Christian, the Frenchman who would be our daily radio contact on the ice, was worried. ‘It is much too warm,’ he confided. It was minus eight. Warm is clearly a relative concept, but his worries were confirmed as our path north was repeatedly crossed by staggeringly beautiful ‘leads’- jagged fissures in the ice revealing the black water of the Arctic Ocean.

Some of these were two feet wide and could be crossed on skis, dragging our 40kg sledges behind us. Others were like rivers; all we could do was to find a way around them, west or east – not north. The other obstacle was pressure ridges, ‘screw ice’ as the Norwegians call them. These are formed when the currents in the ocean below push huge ice floes together. We watched it happen one night – the most awesome sight of my life. The result is enormous blocks of blue ice squeezed into walls up to twenty feet high and hundreds of yards across.

Some days we encountered such damaged ice that we managed only three and a half miles northward. So by the evening of Saturday 24th April we had one day left and we were eight and a half miles south of the Pole. Though we had covered nearly 100 miles in total, we had never achieved more than seven northward miles in one day.

We woke at 5.00am – in 24-hour daylight who cares? We struck camp, the atmosphere thick with anticipation, trepidation. Alan’s briefing was brisk, focussed. We agreed we would walk for 24 hours if we had to and we set off at a conversation-stopping pace, not knowing whether those 24 hours held triumph and back-slapping. Or failure.

The conditions were brilliant, a hallelujah blue sky and minus 17 degrees. There were four or five big leads to mess with our minds but we found crossing places relatively easily. The breaks were shorter, quieter, less chatter. People sat on their sledges, drinking their soup, munching chocolate, dried fruit, nuts, keeping energy up. Then away again. At each break someone would call the miles from a GPS. We were covering the ground at an unprecedented pace. Then, six hours into the walk, the line closed up, some rummaged in their sledges for flags and together we walked up to 90 degrees in line abreast. At 0810 BST on Sunday 25th April, Alan plunged his ski pole into the snow and said, ‘We did it.’ I still can’t tell the story without my eyes filling with tears.

Back in Svalbard I was telling my tale to a Norwegian friend. ‘I guess you tested your edges,’ he suggested. I guess we did. They’re going again next year. Any takers?

Richard Eyre