James Henderson (pictured above after completing the swim from Nevis to St Kitts and back again)

The writer behind A Life of Adventure is James Henderson, who has competed in and written about extreme events and adventures since 1994, for UK publications including the Telegraph and Runner's World, and most of all the Financial Times - often in the Desk till Dawn column of their magazine How to Spend it. For them he has followed in the footsteps of plant hunters in South Africa, the Voyageurs (canoeists in Canada) and ski-borne smugglers in the Alps.

He was the first British writer to run and write about the Marathon des Sables, in 1995 (and therefore probably carries some loose but entirely joyous responsibility for the many thousands of kitchen tickets issued on behalf of people wanting a wonderful, madcap adventure in the desert). He has competed three times in Den Store Styrkeproven (540km non stop from Trondheim to Oslo by bicycle), most recently in 2016, the Dalsland Canoe Marathon + (55 miles in a yellow tub) and he raced six Eco-Challenges, as navigator on Britain’s most successful team (placed 5th= in Morocco 1998, 8th in Borneo 2000).

Sadly, like Eco-Challenge, many of these races are now defunct - Trans 333 (333km non-stop in the Sahara), the Western Isles Challenge (three day, multi-discipline through the Outer Hebrides) and the Mark Webber Tasmania Challenge (five days of multisport in Tasmania, currently on sabbatical).

Time to retire then? So he thought. Except the FT decided otherwise… twice actually, first for the Mark Webber Challenge in 2011, and now again, for IGO Montana in August 2017. The great thing about endurance is that you can keep at it for years. And of course, even though he's pretty slow now, he still enjoys getting out there.

James Henderson writes the Training Journal at A Life of Adventure. You can read it here...