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“Tommy mentioned someone he knew someone


who had done the Yukon 1000 so we looked it up that night and decided to sign up,” said Solly. “We never thought we’d get in because the chances are so slim. Tis year 6,000 teams applied and only 22 ended up racing.” When their application was


accepted two months later, the enormity of the challenge hit home and the pair embarked on a strict training regime, including regular rows between Totnes and Start Point. Tommy said: “We didn’t


know where our ability level might lie with the other competitors so we trained as hard as we possibly could and gave it everything we had.” As well as the physical


training the pals also dealt with race logistics: Solly took charge of the kit and Tommy mapped the route using satellite imagery. “I had to build it mile by mile,” he said, adding: “Te race is unsupported so although they followed us with a tracker and we had an SOS button and satellite phone, if we got into trouble we were three to four days from extraction. “At the race briefing the director told us


‘complacency will kill you’ and I very quickly realised


that was true. You are so far from anywhere that if something goes wrong you have to be able to survive.” Navigating through a section of the river called the


Yukon Flats was a harrowing experience, said Tommy: “It’s where the river braids into many sections and it’s a big and featureless area. Some people were in there for two days because they got lost. It was fogging in one portion so it was really tough but because we had spent so much time diving into the details of it during our training we took about four or five teams there.” Te complacency lesson hit


home when the pals caught up with another team towards the end of the Flats. Tommy explained: “Tere


are logjams in the river that you should be scanning for


all the time because if you hit one you can capsize. All of a sudden we were floating on one; we had got complacent chatting to the Scots team. We knew if we went in we’d lose all our gear and be stranded in the middle of nowhere. We were going so fast and the current was that strong that by the time we thought about using our paddles we had got sucked into an eddy that took us down to a part of the river I hadn’t mapped. Tere was nothing we could do. And then we


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