In their effort to highlight the need for immediate action on climate change and to raise awareness of their innovative pledge campaign, the fearless duo travelled to the frozen hinterland, along with a fellow forty runners.

While the UK was enjoying an unusually warm Easter Weekend, Sean (32) and Ed (28) were waking up to -30C temperatures and perpetual daylight on an enormous sheet of temporary floating ice.

Recalling on his online blog, Sean told of being awoken at 4am on Monday morning (after a restless night’s sleep clad in four layers of clothing, five pairs of socks and three hats) before being herded straight to the starting line.

“It was all a blurred rush. Before I knew it we had set off and I had not had time to even stretch, let alone put on my snow shoes properly,” remembered the strategist for Google.

“The first of the ten 4.2km laps was like an exciting novel adventure, winding our way round the Russian camp and the runway, and through the ice dunes that punctuate the flatness of the white, icy north pole landscape. At lap 2, it started to dawn on me that actually these laps take quite a long time, and that really it’s quite cold. It did not help that the tendon in my knee gave way at that point, meaning that for the rest of the race I was in a lot of pain, and that at many points all I could do was hobble and drag my left leg along. By lap 5 or 6, my whole face was frozen - literally – hair, eyelashes, skin: all white with frost and icicles. By lap 7, I had lost all feeling in my feet, but I thought I had just one lap left, only to discover that the race was 10 laps, not 8. The last two laps were simply spent dreaming of the relative warmth of the tents, hot liquid, and a cessation of pain.”

Despite their earlier doubts and worries of not being able to finish the race, both Sean and Ed turned in more than respectable times of 6:00 hours and 5:31 hours respectively.

In addition to their daredevil antics, Sean, a masochist to the end, followed the punishing race with a (very) brief skinny dip in the freezing Arctic Sea (pictured left).

Writing on the plane journey home, Sean added to his blog: “After 48 hours at the pole, I was very glad to be leaving that harsh landscape – the cold and the lack of sleep were simply too much and made it increasingly harder to appreciate where we were at… Yet, without wanting to get all preachy, if we as a human race let this wondrous breathtaking natural phenomenon disappear in the next 50 years, it will be a travesty, an unforgivable act of negligence for which we all have to take responsibility.”

As a further bonus to their colossal achievement, EarthFireIce yesterday passed their first milestone of 1,000 pledges of individual action against climate change.

From everyone at Global Cool, HUGE CONGRATULATIONS!

Click here for EarthFireIce website (please be lovely and add a pledge or two to their campaign)

Click here for Sean and Ed’s ace blog

Click here for North Pole Marathon website