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Speedo Mick will team up with an Olympic champion for his next huge challenge
3 hours ago
Speedo Mick is going to be teaming up with an Olympic champion for his next huge challenge – a polar expedition in temperatures of at least -10 degrees!
Mick will join Olympic gold medal winning javelin thrower Fatima Whitbread and six other hardy walkers on a gruelling seven-day trek next February.
Pulk & Peak – Cold Frontier 2026 will raise funds for the Speedo Mick Foundation and Fatima’s UK Campaign, which both share the same aim: to create lasting, positive change in the lives of young and vulnerable people.
The team will face incredibly harsh conditions on their adventure, trekking around 20k each day through snow-covered winter mountains to the Nordic polar landscapes.
Mick, who comes from Dovecot, completed his last walk – a thousand miles from John O’Groat’s in Scotland to Land’s End in Cornwall – in May 2023 and at the time, with a staggering £1million raised for grassroots charities, he planned for it to be his last.
But a suggestion from a fellow open water swimmer and the chance to raise even more for great causes has tempted him out of challenge retirement.
He explains:
“I’ve been doing open water swimming at the Serpentine Swimming Club in Hyde Park in London since 2012. I started going there before I did my first big challenge which was a cross-Channel swim.
“It’s an amazing club and one of the other members, David Liddle, got a group of people together including myself and said, ‘do you want to go on this adventure and do some fundraising?’
“This is the first time I’ll be walking with a team, I’m usually on my own and that’s difficult, to keep yourself motivated. But there’ll be eight of us doing this trek, including Fatima who I met a couple of weeks ago.
“She came the other day for the first time to the swimming club and she just jumped in. She’s hard as nails!” he laughs.
“I hadn’t even jumped in this year, and Fatima just went ‘come on, we’ll do it together’ and I thought, I’ll have to do it now. It was absolutely freezing!”
Mick says although they’ve only just met, the pair have already got some banter going.
“We’re getting on great and having a good laugh so I think it’s going to be hilarious. She’s been on I’m a Celebrity so I might even bring some cockroaches along to make her feel at home!
“I’m really looking forward to having that time to talk to her because I’ve got loads of questions. I’ve read a little bit about her, she’s had a tough time but look what she made of herself – an Olympic champion and an MBE – so I really want to know more about her life.”
Mick says the extreme temperatures make this challenge, and the preparation for it, different from those he’s tackled previously:
“I’ve never skied before but it’s cross country and we won’t be skiing down lots of mountains so hopefully it’ll be OK.
“It’s in February, though, so apparently it’s the worst weather. I think it’s minus 10 but that could go down to minus 20 so I might have to get some furry Speedos!
“It is dangerous but we’ll have guides who are well trained, and I’ll be getting a medical to check I’m OK to do it.
“The cold water swimming is actually good preparation because when you do that enough you get a layer of brown fat that insulates you a bit.
“You do acclimatize to lower temperatures because of that, so I’ll be swimming more over the winter to try and build it up.”
Although he’s planning a busy year ahead in 2026, with Everest Basecamp already in his diary for November, Mick says at 60 years old it’s not getting any easier.
“My body’s starting to tell me now: my knee, my back, my shoulder, they’re all going. If my knee gives up on this next trek, Fatima might have to give me a piggyback to the finish line!”
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