Six months and Brian Blessed

Free food and booze is an offer that not many blokes can refuse, however if you chuck a speech by Bear Grylls into the mixer, then you would have to be a solvent abuser not to jump at the chance. Thankfully I'm not partial to sniffing Pritt Stick down some ally in Shoreditch, and so I accepted this offer from my new buddy Paul, and went to watch Bear talk about climbing, God and eating live animals at the All Saints Church in Kensington.
I tried to resist feeling the smug skepticism that non-religious people suffer from, and accepted the fact that Bears faith has actually played quite a significant role in his life. A brief and probably quite inaccurate) biography of Bear reads: joined the regular army at 18, rejecting the normal path to Sandhurst that public school boys take. The was asked into the Marines soon after this, and progressed to the SAS at a comparatively young age. Soon after this he broke his back in a low level parachuting exercise, and spent several months wondering whether he may ever walk again. Thankfully he began to walk again, and was directed onto an Everest summit attempt by an ex-girlfriend. After this his TV career took off, and he has started to eat live snakes and sleep in camel carcasses.
Bear was typically English in his modesty, and completely honest about the filming routine that they use i.e. that for a large proportion of the time he and the crew sleep in a hotel, apart from the odd night where they film in the desert/mangrove swamp. Although he did not give any technical advice that was relevant to the Everest Test, his attitude and burgeoning enthusiasm for all things 'adventure' was a refreshing perspective.
I thought I was lucky to see Bear, however it was only later that I managed to get hold of some tickets to see Brian Blessed at the Royal Geographical Society. As well as being the 'loudest man on Earth', Blessed is also an adventurer. He climbed Mont Blanc at the age of seventeen, and he has remained an active mountaineer throughout his life. Though he has never reached the summit, he has tried to climb Mount Everest on three separate occasions. During his attempt in 1993, the then 56-year-old climbed higher than any other man of his age; the height record was later broken by Yuichiro Miura in 2003. He has also successfully climbed Aconcagua in Argentina as well as Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Hopefully his experiences, mixed with his thespian delivery will make this a cracker.

As the title suggests, it is sixth months until we leave for Nepal and try and do the actual event. Thus we had the Trektators party at The Collection in Kensington. A brilliant night and a great starting point for everyone to pick up their fitness training and fund raising.

Eruptions

Whilst recently travelling through Guatemala I had the opportunity to climb a 3000m high volcano next to Lake Atitlan. Initially I thought it would be a ruddy good laugh with some quality views from the top, as well as being good fitness training for the 'Test Above the Rest' charity event next April.
Great views and training were attained, however the ascent was far from 'a good laugh'. As well as dodging bandits who like to relieve the odd traveller of their camera/money/hands whilst they climb the narrow jungle path to the summit, I was also completely exhausted by the time I reached the top. This enlightened me to the arduous task of climbing to Base Camp, which is an extra 2000m or so higher than the Volcano. Furthermore, as well as getting there, I am also gonna have to exercise my infamous 'right arm fast'.

BJ the Nerd

Unfortunatley, due to my strong interest in all things Geographical, I have been labelled a nerd/40 year old man/wierdo by a fellow member of Team Hillary (Chris Martin). However, this interest may prove to be beneficial for the our team's image.

A brief history of Hillary and Tenzing's summit attempt reveals that the trip was predominantly sponsored by the Everest Committee, which is a sub-section of the Royal Geographical Society. The RGS has sponsored various expeditions that seek out the extreme corners of the earth since it's establishment in the mid 19th century; this is partly due the geographical nature of these expeditions and the fact that a knowledge our how our planet works can only be created through a complete exploration of it. However, other factors to do with prestige (especially during the Imperial decades) also play a significant role in why the RGS put their name to such expeditions.

I recently went on a tour of the Royal Geographical Society with a view to becoming a Fellow. On this tour I probed my host and some of the other members of the society about whether they think that I could get some support from the RGS and in particular the Everest Committee for Team Hillary. Although the RGS are unlikely to give us any support, I was given some promising contacts that may be helpful in aquiring some sort of support from one of Hillary's charities. The principle aim of this is to try and borrow some of the heritage from the Everest Committee and Hillary himself, and apply it to our very own Team Hillary.

Running 5km, the Olympics and raising enough money for the bus home

Running five km should be a doddle for most men in the 20s or 30's. However, add in the fact that we had to wear full cricket pads, and that certain members of the team had eaten their body weight in barbecued meat the night before, and suddenly this casual saunter turned into an ominous Herculean task. However, we all succeeded in completing the run without developing serious inter-legular rashes, and managed to raise a whopping £2.50!!!

In addition to raising 100,000th of our target amount, perhaps the biggest achievement of the day was managing to secure an original Olympic torch from the 1948 London Olympics, which we have been asked to take up to base camp with us in April for the big match. This was the icing on the cake of what was probably one of the most English events that I have ever taken part in: mixing cricket and mountaineering whilst running past a spitfire outside the Houses of Parliament, before giving a swift salute to Churchill's plinth and finally jogging across the finish line with Chariots of Fire playing through the PA system...bloody brilliant.