Day 1, Week 1

Northam Burrows

A few months ago, Grant my husband and I had attended an evening with Alistair Humpreys. The evening was called ‘A night of adventure’, a lecture evening featuring a number of people who had basically temporarily headed off on adventures. It was fascinating, mostly because all of the speakers, without exception, were ‘normal’. One chap spent the weekend collecting Scottish Munros, another had walked across the Eurasian Steppes. Most of the adventures were done on a shoestring and had started because their originators had grown tired of waiting for the ‘right time’. It made me realise that we are all able to experience adventure and they don’t need to be journeys to the ends of the earth.

I recently received an e-mail from Alistair. The subject line was intriguing. ‘Would you like to live more adventurously’ it cried. Well ‘yes’ I thought, ‘I really would’. So I signed up. It was easy, you can do so here.

It turns out Alistair was offering a way to experience adventure in every day life. It had been triggered by the fact he had recently got married and now had a family, which of course had curtailed his ability to just head off and cycle round the world. Having responsibility did not diminish his desire to occasionally step off the sheep trail and go and do something different. These series of e-mails was designed to encourage us to go off and have our own adventures.

Without spoiling the plot, Alistair encourages us, when planning adventures, to consider our own barriers. Mine is easy. I am clinically obese. That is despite being a (newly) qualified personal trainer and despite having a lifelong passion in sport and being active. I’d be kidding myself if I didn’t own the fact that being overweight does hamper my ability to do things and it’s definitely getting worse the older I get. So, now is my time to recognise that there will never be a ‘right time’.

The time is now.