SHOULD YOU WALK WITH ME?

VLOG preface

You can view the video at the bottom of the online article, or here. The following is an explanation of how this vlog came into existence. 

Have I changed?

My behaviour has disintegrated… probably due to lack of social (and parental) supervision.

For example; I swear at inconveniences. I eat food off the ground, I let Wombat eat the leftovers out of my bowl (it gets worse). If there isn’t hot water, I don’t bathe. I pee standing up (yep). I throw tantrums… The list goes on but for the sake of #mypoormother let’s move on to the tantrums… 

Standouts: 

• Narrowly avoiding an anxiety attack resulting from the disorganisation of my tent during the literally explosive first few weeks of the expedition. 
• Throwing my hiking poles at a cow that was mocking me after I slipped, fell and winding myself on black ice… and then became pinned to the skin-burning-road due to the weight of The Beast (my pack) during a -20°C snow storm.
  • Before I get more hate-mail; let’s be real. The cow wasn’t in any danger of being hit… plus I wasn’t going to throw my poles far enough to have to retrieve them from thigh deep snow.
• Giving the finger to a cyclist (once he’d gone) in the northern section of the Atacama Desert as he merrily passed in the same midday heat that forced my decision to start walking at night, and
• Refusing to reduce my kilometres while acclimating to the Peruvian mountains, because I thought I was fitter and stronger than I actually am… I blame watching Captain Marvel. 

But the most explosive, are the 3 second tantrums, like when I decide to make a coffee but I can’t find my spoon (every.single.morning), or when I lose a sock, or when there’s too much wind to set up my tent, or I spill a drink INSIDE my tent.. OHMYGODDDDDD!

While I’m sure fatigue and an overdue break play their part, I have found another correlation: explosiveness VS (noone to) blame… 

If you lose my sock, no big deal – I could probably do with lightning my pack. If I lose my sock… ( 💣)

All of this I carefully curate out of Instagram but when friends visit, I pull myself together and present a half decent human. Which works relatively well except in the case of one, who told me I was subnormal and needed help… (👎).

Real friends tell you where it’s at

So when my tell-it-how-it-is friend of more than 10 years came to walk with me, I put the question to her and let her see me at my worst. Since we’ve done a lot of adventuring, she has a good measure of my worst. 

I knew she’d be ok walking with me. We’ve competed in endurance events together, where the only thing pushing us forward (certainly not experience) was grit, determination and pride. 

So – we made a vlog about her time with me. It was meant to be for us, but we decided to give you an insight into my life, and why it can be a battle to take on more than what I’m managing, even something as minor as losing a spoon. 

You may have met Kat before

Kat is one of the toughest women I know. She’s the kind of chick who can jog over to a hospital appointment, after delivering a keynote address, via precautionary instructions from her doctor… only to throw the radiographers into panic, discovering she’s a casual 24hrs from death by collapsed lung. Yep, that happened. 

She’s also one person I can count on to always say YES when I ask her to come on a ridiculous adventure. She even entered into the worlds longest Kayak marathon (this year’s registrations just opened) in Victoria Australia, to help me prepare for an ocean crossing at the begin of this adventure.

A lot can go unspoken… and a lot is said. No time wasting, we tell each other how it is and I’m grateful for it. 

Kat arrived in one of the most tantrum prone areas, in the northern region of the Atacama Desert.

The vlog

Here we took on the battle together, and she came wanting not only to experience what I’m doing, but to understand the burdens, and the impact different people are having – the good and bad… and she spent a fair amount of time lecturing me about being open to help, or more to the point, being wary of opportunists adding to the load and diminishing the experience (a problem I never foresaw until I had a public profile) – because as Kat likes to say, it’s no stroll in the park… and not something she’d do for fun!

WATCH BELOW

The following, is a journal into what it was like. Footage is limited, because it was tough. Really really tough……

Also, if you want to be involved ⬇︎

But wait, there’s more!

Watch here to see us preparing for the world’s longest Kayak race! #Icantholdupthecamera