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.