Life was going swimmingly. Continuing to regularly run and keep fit and then 2021 rolls along and ………. **BANG** …. life gets turned on it’s head. Being told out of the blue at the doctor’s surgery I need an heart operation which is considered
U R G E N T …… things went a little topsy turvy. I suddenly found myself admitted to a hospital bed, having only suffered one serious head injury 40 years previously, but otherwise I’d been fighting fit my entire life. My world stopped spinning. Having an aortic valve replacement was brutal. The recovery was testing to put it mildly. 3 months recuperation was depriving. Thankfully, Boeing who I was working for at the time as an engineer, supported me fully all the way.
Pushing to recover a level of fitness was tough and required a lot of self discipline. Even my surgeon said, “You are not normal”. At the time I had been prepping for a 1007kms walk and that was subsequently put on hold. It gave me a goal to work towards. Coming home from hospital, I walked 150 metres down my garden and on the way back, I genuinely questioned if I could make it back indoors.
Exactly one year later, I walked the 1007 kms, mostly solo, in 43 degree heat across Spain, with no shelter. As my dear wise dad used to say, “It’s mind over Matter.” How right he was – thanks dad.
Here’s me one year later after the operation, almost to the day, in Seville, Spain about to start my 1007kms walk on the Via de la Plata, the Silver route .
Winding back the clock, I was born with the carefree bug to travel. It was in my blood. I always loved walking and I was a very keen cyclist. At sixteen years old, I was planning a return road trip from Brighton to Land’s End which was approximately 650 miles. After a close shave with death involving an articulated lorry at Southampton, who was rushing to get to the port, I was patched up at the roadside, straightened my bike out and continued.
On Dartmoor, in the pouring rain, an open backed transit, passed in the opposite direction (with an unsecured load of large sheets of lead – probably stolen from some church roof), and one of the sheets flew off and came hurtling towards me narrowly missing my front wheel and me. Of course, he did not stop !
The last day of my trip was 160 miles long from Beer to Brighton. With old fashioned ‘oilskins’ to keep the rain at bay (whilst sweating profusely), on my ten speed racing bike carrying all my kit in panniers, it made for a long uncomfortable day but I completed the journey in six days.
After joining HM forces, things stepped up a gear and I started endurance running. I’d always been a runner, not particularly fast, but could continue pushing myself through the pain barrier. I ran the South Downs Way in two and a half days ( a couple of times), 106 miles over challenging terrain, walked it on a few occasions (together with my daughters) and ran it with my eldest daughter when she was thirteen years old.
Other feats included the North Downs Way and Wayfarer’s Way. I then focussed on running from Porto in Portugal to Santiago de Compostela in Spain on the Camino carrying my pack. I then completed the walk with my wife …..
and then walked the Via de la Plata across Spain from Seville to Santiago de Compostela.
In between all this, I took part in a Joint Service Scientific Expedition to the magnetic North Pole for three months on Ellesmere Island with HM Forces, which was a fascinating experience.
As a communications engineer (now retired), I was fortunate enough to travel and live abroad in a number of different countries and continued to explore when the opportunities arose in many corners of the world, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Australia to Sweden to the North Pole and beyond.
All this is in the past of course, so I won’t dwell on it. This blog is about now and the future so let’s move forward together and avoid a collection of meaningless photos from the past.