It turns out that climbing Helvellyn is something of a challenge, and if you're going to take on a challenge it probably helps to know in advance that it is a challenge. I just approached it like a fun day out. That was my first mistake. It also contains another challenge within it which is this thing called Striding Edge. I'd heard of it because it's sometimes on the news that people have fallen off it and killed themselves.
Well, now I've climbed it myself. And it's completely nuts. And so not Health and Safety. You can't climb a ladder these days without going on a course for a week and yet Striding Edge is full of Looney Tunes and their dogs crawling around on their hands and knees on a piece of rock about as narrow as my dining table with a thousand foot drop on either side. Where's their risk assessments? Even the mountain rescue guy we met wasn't very reassuring. Oh yeah people fall off it all the time he said. Cheers I said you've really put my mind at rest...I didn't really...
Doing things that are nuts is fine if the people you're doing it with also know it's nuts, but they don't. They all look like they're having a perfectly reasonable time, whereas I felt at times absolutely terrified. And there's more footfall up there than there is at Piccadilly Circus or the Metro Centre, but it's on the side of a cliff.
Amongst the crowds were a group of posh people in pink tops raising money for charity who all sounded like they'd just bought a copy of '1001 places to go before you die' and they were only up to number 9. I imagined they were trying to get Helvellyn in in the morning before doing the Eiffel Tower in the afternoon. They reminded me of the group of tourists that Dean and I overheard in the Ajanta Hotel in Delhi, who were going to do Delhi in the morning and Bangalore in the afternoon, or something like that. It'll take you all day to buy a bus ticket you idiots we wanted to say to them, but we didn't.
There were times yesterday when I looked down at the drops on either side of me, and I knew that if I didn't keep moving there was a real chance of me just getting frozen there and unable to move, so I made myself keep going. I haven't been that scared since the top of St Paul's Cathedral and that only went on for a very short while until I could get to the downward staircase. Even then once I got back to ground level I sat around with legs like jelly for about half an hour before I could walk properly again. This just seemed to go on for hours.
I sometimes stuggle to empty boiling water out of a pan, or to bend down to pick up a tea towel off the floor, so clambering around on jaggedy rocks trying not to fall to my death made me feel pretty feeble. Having Ruth point out that someone had got up there in a wheelchair with a couple of broom handles sticking out of it didn't really make me feel any better.
And even when you get to the top, you've got to get back down again. Swirrel Edge is only moderately bonkers in comparison but by that time my feet were absolutely mashed and all my joints from the waist down felt like they'd been hit with a hammer.
It took us 8 hours to get up and down the mountain and by the time I'd finished I felt absolutely out of it. The whole thing was 10 times harder than I expected it to be. I've been out walking in the hills before, but this was not hill walking, this was proper mountain climbing, and it felt like it too.
The worst thing about climbing Helvellyn wasn't that it left me feeling physically feeble, it was that it revealed a worrying tendency to crumble mentally on these type of challenges.
And it's not a new phenomenon.
I don't know what the un-magic formula is, whether it's a certain combination of physical discomfort, hunger, dehydration, a faulty balance of sugars, poor preparation or what, but often on long drawn out and physically demanding events, I start to come apart in the head. Sometimes I can't string a sentence together, often I can't remember my own name. On a holiday in Scotland last year, a B&B owner asked me where I'd come from that day and I couldn't remember. I've been left virtually comatose and unable to speak or function in Berwick on Tweed and in Killin and in lots of other places and at lots of other times and Ruth has had to go and get food and post it into me to bring me back from the brink.
It's happened on Audaxes, it's happened on Sportives, it happened on the Swaledale Marathon, it's happened often on cycling tours, it happened on this year's Coast to Coast to Coast. It happened in India. I just reach a point where I start to unravel in the head, and I lose the mental wherewithal to hold it together. I wonder what I'm doing there, I want it to be over as soon as possible, and I have trouble hanging on in there till the actual finish.
Often I get myself into these things by tagging along with other people, and whether it's because these things weren't my own idea that I end up getting mentally cut off at the knees. I just don't know.
So, no more challenges for a while. I don't want to end up on top of a mountain anymore with my sandwiches and drink a four hour walk away, I don't want to sit digesting a lovely meal at 2.40 in the afternoon anytime soon knowing that I'm still a 57 mile bike ride away from home. At no point in the near future do I want to cycle along an undulating hill at the side of a 15 mile long loch in the blazing sun, having to pour water on my own head to stop myself overheating, and then have to sit up all night drinking fizzy drinks to stop myself dehydrating. Nor do I have any intention of spending any more restless nights in Youth Hostels drinking Powerade so that my legs will work again the following day to enable me to repeat a 108 mile cross country ride I've just completed in the pouring rain. If that sounds negative then so be it, but I'm sick of half killing myself on a regular basis for reasons I don't even understand.
I've got a week's holiday coming up the week after next and for a change I want to go somewhere where I'm never more than 200 metres away from an ice cream shop, where I'm never 5 minutes away from a bacon sandwich. Where if I feel like shit I can just pack in there and then and go for a sit down and I don't have to drag my weary body another 4 miles on foot or 40 miles on a bike before I can get something to eat or get myself into a hot bath.
Challenges are great for some people but they're not very good for me. Because when I mentally fall off a cliff into a very dark place, I don't want to be in the middle of nowhere. It's hard enough to deal with that kind of shit when there's a sofa nearby.
Well, now I've climbed it myself. And it's completely nuts. And so not Health and Safety. You can't climb a ladder these days without going on a course for a week and yet Striding Edge is full of Looney Tunes and their dogs crawling around on their hands and knees on a piece of rock about as narrow as my dining table with a thousand foot drop on either side. Where's their risk assessments? Even the mountain rescue guy we met wasn't very reassuring. Oh yeah people fall off it all the time he said. Cheers I said you've really put my mind at rest...I didn't really...
Doing things that are nuts is fine if the people you're doing it with also know it's nuts, but they don't. They all look like they're having a perfectly reasonable time, whereas I felt at times absolutely terrified. And there's more footfall up there than there is at Piccadilly Circus or the Metro Centre, but it's on the side of a cliff.
Amongst the crowds were a group of posh people in pink tops raising money for charity who all sounded like they'd just bought a copy of '1001 places to go before you die' and they were only up to number 9. I imagined they were trying to get Helvellyn in in the morning before doing the Eiffel Tower in the afternoon. They reminded me of the group of tourists that Dean and I overheard in the Ajanta Hotel in Delhi, who were going to do Delhi in the morning and Bangalore in the afternoon, or something like that. It'll take you all day to buy a bus ticket you idiots we wanted to say to them, but we didn't.
There were times yesterday when I looked down at the drops on either side of me, and I knew that if I didn't keep moving there was a real chance of me just getting frozen there and unable to move, so I made myself keep going. I haven't been that scared since the top of St Paul's Cathedral and that only went on for a very short while until I could get to the downward staircase. Even then once I got back to ground level I sat around with legs like jelly for about half an hour before I could walk properly again. This just seemed to go on for hours.
I sometimes stuggle to empty boiling water out of a pan, or to bend down to pick up a tea towel off the floor, so clambering around on jaggedy rocks trying not to fall to my death made me feel pretty feeble. Having Ruth point out that someone had got up there in a wheelchair with a couple of broom handles sticking out of it didn't really make me feel any better.
And even when you get to the top, you've got to get back down again. Swirrel Edge is only moderately bonkers in comparison but by that time my feet were absolutely mashed and all my joints from the waist down felt like they'd been hit with a hammer.
It took us 8 hours to get up and down the mountain and by the time I'd finished I felt absolutely out of it. The whole thing was 10 times harder than I expected it to be. I've been out walking in the hills before, but this was not hill walking, this was proper mountain climbing, and it felt like it too.
The worst thing about climbing Helvellyn wasn't that it left me feeling physically feeble, it was that it revealed a worrying tendency to crumble mentally on these type of challenges.
And it's not a new phenomenon.
I don't know what the un-magic formula is, whether it's a certain combination of physical discomfort, hunger, dehydration, a faulty balance of sugars, poor preparation or what, but often on long drawn out and physically demanding events, I start to come apart in the head. Sometimes I can't string a sentence together, often I can't remember my own name. On a holiday in Scotland last year, a B&B owner asked me where I'd come from that day and I couldn't remember. I've been left virtually comatose and unable to speak or function in Berwick on Tweed and in Killin and in lots of other places and at lots of other times and Ruth has had to go and get food and post it into me to bring me back from the brink.
It's happened on Audaxes, it's happened on Sportives, it happened on the Swaledale Marathon, it's happened often on cycling tours, it happened on this year's Coast to Coast to Coast. It happened in India. I just reach a point where I start to unravel in the head, and I lose the mental wherewithal to hold it together. I wonder what I'm doing there, I want it to be over as soon as possible, and I have trouble hanging on in there till the actual finish.
Often I get myself into these things by tagging along with other people, and whether it's because these things weren't my own idea that I end up getting mentally cut off at the knees. I just don't know.
So, no more challenges for a while. I don't want to end up on top of a mountain anymore with my sandwiches and drink a four hour walk away, I don't want to sit digesting a lovely meal at 2.40 in the afternoon anytime soon knowing that I'm still a 57 mile bike ride away from home. At no point in the near future do I want to cycle along an undulating hill at the side of a 15 mile long loch in the blazing sun, having to pour water on my own head to stop myself overheating, and then have to sit up all night drinking fizzy drinks to stop myself dehydrating. Nor do I have any intention of spending any more restless nights in Youth Hostels drinking Powerade so that my legs will work again the following day to enable me to repeat a 108 mile cross country ride I've just completed in the pouring rain. If that sounds negative then so be it, but I'm sick of half killing myself on a regular basis for reasons I don't even understand.
I've got a week's holiday coming up the week after next and for a change I want to go somewhere where I'm never more than 200 metres away from an ice cream shop, where I'm never 5 minutes away from a bacon sandwich. Where if I feel like shit I can just pack in there and then and go for a sit down and I don't have to drag my weary body another 4 miles on foot or 40 miles on a bike before I can get something to eat or get myself into a hot bath.
Challenges are great for some people but they're not very good for me. Because when I mentally fall off a cliff into a very dark place, I don't want to be in the middle of nowhere. It's hard enough to deal with that kind of shit when there's a sofa nearby.
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