The days of Captain Scott are over: there are no new continents to discover, no great peaks yet to climb. Yet adventure remains, often surprisingly close to home. Take the Principality of Sealand, a self-declared country lying seven miles off the east coast of England.
For the uninitiated, Sealand is a gunning tower-turned-island-nation, comprising two hollow steel legs and a platform roughly the size of two tennis courts. It is accessible only by boat and a dodgy winch. Its most regular visitor is gale-force wind. It is, in other words, one of the worst places on earth to try to organise a half-marathon.
But that’s what we did. On a treadmill. Battered by wind and sea salt. In the middle of the sea. As this film demonstrates, making the race a reality was no easy feat, as storms, logistics and poor DIY skills did their best to sink us at each opportunity. But it was unforgettable and, in some ways, embodies the only type of exploration left to us in a ‘discovered’ world: to strike out for the known, and reinvigorate it with a sense of adventure, humour and creativity.
The film was made be Let it Howl and the adventure was the brainchild of Simon Messenger, whose “Around the world in 80 runs” challenge has seen him run everywhere from Macau to Madagascar. You can find him on Twitter @80_runs
