Lewis Hamilton may have enjoyed the highest profile this year, but he wasn’t the only one to push the boundaries of what was thought possible.

Over the past 12 months we have reported on feats that have been by turns inspirational (completing a 10km race weeks after recovering from leukaemia), bizarre (swimming the length of the Amazon) or simply sensible (giving up politics in order to get a real job at the wheel of a racing car).

Here, in no particular order, we review the people who came from nowhere to beat the odds.

Jason Lewis

As long as the only fuel he used was his own muscle power, any mode of transport was okay for Lewis when he set off from Britain 13 years ago on a record-breaking round-the-world trip. By the time he finished in October, the 40-year-old from Dorset had been robbed, beaten, hospitalised in a collision with a car and chased by a croc in Australia.

In total he travelled 46,000 miles by kayak, rollerblades, bike and foot. “I never thought it would take so long,” he said on completing the mammoth trek. “I thought it would take about three years.”

Adrian Flanagan

The first man to sail solo through the Russian Arctic sea, Flanagan had to enlist the help of Roman Abramovich to secure safe passage. However, he was completely without help off the coast of Brazil where he was tailgated by pirates: “Sitting on deck with a loaded shotgun on my knees waiting for attack is not much fun.”

The 46-year-old has spent the past two years attempting to become the first man to sail the world “vertically” (think “Arctic route” rather than “standing up a lot”). So far he has completed 30,000 miles and hopes to finish in the spring. Asked what next upon his return, he said: “I rather like the idea of getting a microlight licence and flying across Australia.”

Mike Durham

A “middle-aged guy with two kids”, Durham got to us in June with the story of how he had just completed a 10km charity run in London, mere months after beating off a form of leukaemia that had threatened to kill him within three years. It was scary, groundbreaking treatment, too, which involved killing Durham’s diseased bone marrow and transfusing stem cells from his brother. He thought it was worth the risk. And he was right.

Martin Strel

Not many Slovenians on our list, but then not many people can swim 3,375 miles. In a piranha-infested river. Strel, a sprightly 52-year-old, took 66 days to swim the length of the Amazon river. Perhaps unsurprisingly he was the first man to achieve this feat, and our intrepid reporter Matthew Mohlke was on hand to witness it.

“The only thing he was really afraid of was the candiru, a parasitic fish a couple of inches long that swims up the penis and locks itself into place with fins,” says Mohlke. “The only way to remove it is by surgery.”

Strel, having swum the Yangtze, the Danube and the Mississippi as well, has his eye on the Nile - all 4,132 miles of it.

Rupert Longsdon, Rory Sweet and Henry Cookson

Almost beggaring belief, these three Brits kitesurfed their way to the Pole of Inaccessibility in January. It is the least hospitable spot of the Antarctic and a place where just one team - Russians, using motorised transport – had set foot before. Even more remarkably, the trio were novices who blundered into extreme adventuring after winning the 2005 Scott Dunn Polar Challenge – a 320-mile foot slog to the North Pole and reputedly the world’s toughest race.

Mark Zuckerberg

It’s not just windswept adventurers that have been making waves this year. In the world of technology, Zuckerberg has swept all before him. A year ago few people had even heard of Facebook but now it is a global brand and he seems to be taking its success in his stride.

First he turned down a reported billion bucks from Yahoo!, then he let Microsoft buy a puny 1.6% stake for a whopping $240m (about £120m). And since letting programmers develop their own applications for the site – more than 7,000 are now available – Zuckerberg seems to have acquired the keys to the future of the internet. Incidentally, he is 23.

Jonathon Ive

You might not have heard of him but, judging by the popularity of the gadgets he has designed, you know his work. Born in Chingford, he is the man at Apple computers. In the company pecking order, he modestly claims to be way down the list, but he earns a reported £1m a year and we hear that he has recently been rumoured for the top job at Apple after the success of his designs.

What designs? This is the man who thunk up the iMac, the iPod and, at least in part, the iPhone – that slab of technological beauty that everyone wants for Christmas (after a Wii).

Lord Drayson

Few people have the cojones to jack in their day job and pursue a boyhood dream, but that’s what Paul Drayson, the Labour life peer, did in November after speaking to us about his passion for racing his biofuel Aston Martin. Before he left his post as minister for defence procurement to compete in next year’s American Le Mans series he opened up all manner of sensible motoring debate at government level, such as questioning the effectiveness of speed cameras.

“He handed in his resignation and the PM said, ‘We hope to see you back in government’,” a Ministry of Defence spokesman said, adding by way of explanation: “He came second in the GT championships this year.”