Island Life Magazine Ltd December 2007/January 2008 | Page 26

life

INTERVIEW

Photo: Food for thought for a passing polar bear

The Polar Bears
could have eaten us,
luckily they ate our
food instead
By Roz Whistance

Photo: The maze: the end of 75 miles of ice rubble

“Roddy Caxton-Spencer is a real life local action man who
runs back to back marathons, dares the extreme rapids doing
White Water Rafting, climbs mountains and treks across 100's
of miles of desolate frozen landscape - we ask him WHY?”

“I was seriously fed up when I ran out of
wine-gums,” said Roddy Caxton-Spencer,
extreme marathon runner, white-water
rafter, climber of Everest, Global
Challenge Yacht racer, and a competitor
in this years ‘Polar Race’ a 400 mile foot
race to the North Pole. And you can
see why. If you’ve fallen down crevasses,
had close encounters with polar bears or
seen your rescue plane abandon you for
another night on the ice, the last thing
you want to do is run out of wine-gums.

26

We are in the Crab & Lobster in
Bembridge, enjoying a liquid lunch, and
he is being hailed by friends. This is his
local when he is weekending on the Island:
he is married to a Cowes girl, Nicky,
and they have a daughter, Georgina.
Roddy used to play rugby for London
Scottish. Ten years ago, when he was
38, a somewhat reckless tackle on the
equivalent of Jonah Lomu floored him,
and there and then he decided it was
time to hang up his boots. To fill the

vacuum left by a sport that had been
the love of his life, he began his eclectic
journey through one extreme expedition
after another. He took part in the World
White Water Rafting championships –
“nearly killed me, I swallowed half the
Zambezi!” – after which friends sponsored
his charity to do the Marathon des Sables
(MdS) a five-day 250km run across the
Sahara – the equivalent of about five
back to back marathons. “I worked out
the only way my friends would sponsor

Island Life - www.isleofwight.net