You just have to hang on in there through those dark hours - don’t give up, let the mountain sustain you and empower you, and you will experience the mountain within you.
We can’t always choose our circumstances but we can choose how we respond to what life throws at us, and there is power when we realize our ability to alter our destiny.
There was another whole bunch of hopefuls. They would diminish down at a startling rate. We had seen it happen before.This time, though, we were there as the old hands. And it helped.We knew what to e...
There has been one further element to success, and that is its underlying message. I believe it is actually the biggest factor.If you think about it, at heart, there is such a strong link between sur...
The thing about a ‘comfort zone’ is that it sounds, well, just too comfortable – and when you are too comfortable you lose your edge. That’s why I call it a comfort pit, because a pit is somewhere you...
The other final memory, from growing up on the island, is of going on a monster run one day, and getting very bad groin rub on the last mile towards home. I had endured the rubbing for the previous ei...
The next few weeks were a real struggle.Mental turmoil was a new emotion for me, and not a fun one.I felt I had let myself down, and that I had wasted four months of my life to hard, cold misery, and...
The day after our wedding, we flew off on honeymoon. I had recklessly waited until two days before our wedding to book the holiday, in the hope that I would get some great last-minute deal somewhere.A...
The DS had told us the parameters – run, you pass; walk, you fail.
Standing, balanced precariously on the narrow top of a drainpipe, you had to give a good leap up to grab hold of the narrow ledge, and then swing your whole body up and over.It took some guts, and a c...
Our next test weekend was in a particularly hellish area of the Welsh mountains--remote, godforsaken, and full of even more boggy, ankle-twisting moon grass.The area became known affectionately by the...
Our achievements are generally limited only by the beliefs we impose on ourselves.
Most people never reach their limit because they are never sufficiently tested. This means I’ve got two good pieces of news for you. The first is that whenever you do something beyond your ‘comfort zo...
Meanwhile, Trucker and I, through all of this, had been renting that cottage together, on a country estate six miles outside of Bristol. We were paying a tiny rent, as the place was so rundown, with n...
Meals were often eaten standing up, and I wasn’t quite sure why they had bothered to issue us with beds, we got to see them so little.
It’s not rocket science: the rewards go to the dogged.
It was like climbing a mountain of waist-deep molasses while giving someone a fireman’s carry, who, for good measure, was also trying to force a pair of frozen socks into your mouth. Nice.
I was also really fortunate at Eton to have had a fantastic housemaster, and so much of people’s experience of Eton rests on whether they had a housemaster who rocked or bombed.I got lucky.The relatio...
I look back now and can see how much my father also found his own freedom in the adventures we did together, whether it was galloping along a beach in the Isle of Wight with me behind him, or climbing...
Finally, I broke through and hit the steep track on the far side of the forest, and spotted the lone DS tent, silhouetted against the skyline.The routine when arriving at a checkpoint was rigorously e...