It is 6.30am and there is a strange man molesting a large log in an east London park. A dog walker comes close before awkwardly changing direction. This strange man is me. And to be fair, it was entirely consensual.

What could bring a man to such depths? Answer: the world’s toughest ice race. I must somehow transform myself from average internet surfer to marathon ice skater, in three months, to race in the toughest ice race in the world: the Kuopio 200km ice marathon.

On 19 February, in as low as -30C, around 25 of the best endurance skaters in the world will line up. And me – a bloke who last skated at Gosport ice disco aged 14. Our mission is to skate non-stop for 200km in under 10 hours. A stupid idea? Definitely. A loophole allowed me to enter; a Finnish assumption that no one would attempt 200km if they didn’t know what they were doing. That loophole may close as of 20 February.

The blame for all this lies squarely with Great Ormond Street children’s hospital and a young man called Angus. The latter is my younger brother, and the former is the place that has saved his life and made living with Apert syndrome much easier. After one operation last year, I realised that I wanted to say thank you to the people who have helped him. It was time to raise some money. Easier said than done after years of bleeding friends and family dry through JustGiving emails – this one would have to be special. As Angus kindly put it, I would at least have to risk my life to hold my head up in Great Ormond Street. And so the idea of an unfit, bearded Englishman skating 200km took root.

Here we are two months in. As you can imagine, training for a 200km ice marathon in London has called for a bit of imagination. You’d think an ice rink would suffice, but the realities of two out-of-control, 19-inch blades travelling at pace through crowds of children are not worth thinking about. Maybe when I get more proficient I will venture back among the eight-year-old figure skaters at Lee Valley’s ice centre. Maybe.

And so we return to the log. The lack of large frozen surfaces has led to a whole new world of exercise: some fairly obvious, such as rollerblading; others, state-of-the-art techniques I have stolen from YouTube. I could explain, but video does it better.

“Just a man and his will to survive” from teddy Keen on Vimeo.

The training has brought with it highs and lows. Come to think of it, mainly lows. For instance, the week of nosebleeds due to stress … There have been many times when I didn’t want to get up, go to the park in the dark and perform ballerina lunges overlooked by the local cafe. “It’s for a good cause,” I say to myself each time my buttocks cramp up and I fall over in front of the builders smirking into their morning teas. Then there was alcohol-free Christmas. Say no more …

The highs have come from random acts of kindness. Two personal trainers, Marc and Janos, gave up being paid to help young women tone their backsides to help me tone my backside. The guys at Orbana offered to keep this most unprofessional of athletes fuelled up with energy. Hopefully all this generosity is due to the cause, and not out of pity for a one-man cryogenics test lab.

After assuring Timo, the ice marathon organiser, that I was indeed an avid endurance skater, he asked if I’d like to join him and his friends for pre-season training in Holland. I accepted. Two weeks later we stepped on to the world’s largest artificial ice track and it became clear someone had been telling tales. So began the weirdest/funniest weekend of my life as I was trained from scratch in a Finnish ice skating version of Last of the Summer Wine. Move over Eddie the Eagle …

Our man in Holland from teddy Keen on Vimeo.

As well as fitness there are other realities a wannabe 200km ice skater must face. As Timo put it, the cold is the biggest threat and frostbite can be par for the course. For lack of sizeable freezers, cold baths are my newfound way of acclimatising to Finland’s freezing conditions. The first one I took lasted about 30 seconds. I’m now managing 10 minutes, or half a Chuck Norris, although this often requires a good search for certain body parts afterwards.

But it’s not all physical masochism; there’s psychological pain too. This week the kids at Great Ormond Street have been designing my special spandex outfit. As you can see, any initial qualms about outsourced child labour are outweighed by the power the children wield with their felt tips. The creator of this winning design wisely didn’t sign their name.

That brings us up to now. Three weeks to go until a stranded penguin will be standing at the starting line, waiting for the gun to go off. A little part of him that hopes that the gun will be pointed in his direction.

In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of questions. What is the best comeback line when being verbally bullied by school kids while rollerblading? (It needs to be short – I need time to escape.) And can you think of any good sponsors – Iceland frozen foods, perhaps? Penguin biscuits?

• You can read more about Angus’s story and follow Teddy’s misguided adventure at teddyonice.com, and you can sponsor Teddy at justgiving.com

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