Go outside. Sit down. Wait.

I know there have been a few blogs/blogs that want to be articles/etc. out recently that have been talking about FRA kit and whether it is worthy of the name “compulsory kit”- and if it serves it’s purpose. Not really being much of a racer these days, I’m not actually going to weigh in on that argument- we have different fish to fry.

Talking with another friend on a local Mountain Rescue team recently, he mentioned he was going to a local outdoors centre to do a talk on MR, response times, and all the stuff that goes on in terms of getting people off the hill when they’re injured/ hypothermic etc.
One of the most interesting parts of his talk was when he gets everyone to stand up, wander outside, out into the wood that surrounds the centre, out for a bit (this is in the dark), and then… “ok everyone. Sit down. We’re going to be here for an hour”. After a few minutes, everyone is cold. It’s dark. The question is asked: “What do you wish you had with you?”. An interesting perspective changer for some.

So what?

Why am I writing about this now?
I was wondering about doing the same experiment with some running friends. We go out on the hill, mooch around for a bit in the cold- during which we are fine- and then… Stop. Ok, we’re here for an hour. What do you wish you had?

All of a sudden the windproof that you brought seems like it isn’t entirely up to the job. Those gloves made of polartec fleece- when damp, really aren’t warm… and your feet go cold really fast. What do you wish you had now? This is not a pointless task in wondering what you might take out with you on the hill as a runner/walker/whatever, I hope it is a thought process that might shed some light on how long someone might be out there if something goes wrong.

Consider this: You’re on Bleaklow and have a catastrophic issue- ankle break, something like that, unable to move. It’s taken you an hour of straight running to get to where you are. Happy days, you have a mobile AND there is signal. You can drop Mountain Rescue a line and give them your location.
Amazing.
Now what?

If you’re lucky, the phonecall was routed from the police to MR.
If you’re lucky, the information of your Grid reference has been communicated correctly.
If you’re lucky, they’ll Sarloc you- which geolocates your phone. Great. This has taken 30 mins so far.
The call goes out to the team- it may take 20 mins for the first members to arrive at base. Give it another 10/15 mins for information to be gathered, kit sorted and get into the trucks and away. Depending on the closest access point, that might be 10/15/20mins drive- so only now is the MR team *maybe* getting onto the hill.
In the best case scenario, from your original call, you’ve been lying there for more than an hour in the cold, rain/hail/wind etc. How warm are you? (I'm not going to ask how comfortable are you, coz you've got a broken ankle).

Considering it took you an hour to get where you are in running gear with a small rucksack/bumbag, MR are heading out with rucksacks full of gear. If you’re lucky, there is a fast party who will try to get to you as fast as possible- it might take another hour, by which point you’ve been on the hill for 3 hours, 2 of which you have been stationary in the elements.
Got enough in your bag to deal with that?

Ok, MR get to you, they have warm jackets, food etc, bad news is- the all the heli's are away dealing with heart attacks and strokes elsewhere. You now have to wait another hour+ for a stretcher to turn up, and then a 2 hour+ thrutch off the hill. Probably in the dark. But at least you’re a bit warmer….

That was all *assuming* you have mobile signal and all the information is passed on efficiently.

Now imagine you head out onto Bleaklow, your partner knows you’ve gone for a run, and knows your route… but you have no mobile signal. You now have to wait for your partner to realise that you aren’t back at the time you said. Call you a few times. Get no answer. Start worrying, and eventually call MR.

How long have you already been lying there now? A few hours? Only *then* does the whole thing grind into action- and now they aren’t coming directly for you, they have to search the route you were going to do AND a few deviations around it- which might take a while. A few hours, to be fair… so you might be there, what? 4-5 hours before someone gets to you?

Now- imagine you *haven’t* told anyone your vague plans- but someone knows you’ve probably headed to Bleaklow. Add on to the fact that you aren’t home by now, you have no mobile signal, no-one knows exactly where you are or where you were headed, so MR get the heads up after you’ve been on the hill for 6 hours. They then need to work out how the hell to search 250square km of moorland to find you. The guys around Bleaklow tend to know the trods, the routes and the general nature of runners in the area, so the search won’t be totally without precedent, but how long might it take them to find you?

Now think about what you have in your bag. 

Ok- so this isn’t just for runners. Walkers can go pretty unprepared as well, and some runners can go very well prepared indeed.

My main thought process here was that I was on Bleaklow the other day and for one reason or another, had to sit down with a load of other people as a hailstorm blew in. We had EVERYTHING on and were only there for about 15 mins before we could get up and move again, but by the end of that 15 mins we were COLD, and the best option for warming up was moving.

What if you don’t have that option? I don’t mean for this to be a scary kind of blog, but rather, a thought provoking one. Walking and running in the hills with kit is generally a compromise. What works for you, how fast do you want to go, and what are the consequences if the worst happens. Some kit is better than no kit (mostly)- and yes, some people rely on their ability to get out of situations- to “not be there” when it really hits the fan- which is all well and good, but what if you’re with someone else who goes down hard?
I don’t expect you to be able to carry enough kit for both of you, but it would be nice to think that *one* of you has some stuff to keep you guys alive and not hypothermic for a few hours….

Note- the response times to rescue callouts in this blog are semi-based on real life. It depends on phone signal, how accurate the information is, how far out you are and a whole load of stuff. It’s taken 2 hours+ to get to a casualty 1km away from a road on a Bridleway from the initial call because of muddle information. Equally, it’s taken just under an hour to get to someone in the middle of Bleaklow from an initial call because of the quality of information. 

 

Right, now you've read it and you might think I'm anti-runner- that is nonsense. THINK about the kit you might want- have a read of THIS Blog. 

Equally- If you're wondering when is the appropriate time to callout Mountain Rescue- have a read of THIS one. 

And Yes, I have written a generic response to all the comments I have been getting in the comments section, and across facebook at large. It's HERE. 

Question your fitness philosophy

When you follow something for a long time, you think you understand it. You meet the people, you do the course, you ask the questions, you try to understand and you go away to do the practice. You think you’re doing it, or the closest that you can come to it. That might be true. It might not. When the whole thing turns about face and dives down an ego plated rabbit hole you have to wonder if what you structured yourself on was flawed, if your paths actually diverged a while ago without really realising it, or if the whole damn thing was just something to be cut away anyway.

Gym Jones. Mark Twight. Words and names that for a long time were pretty synonymous. Mark’s ideas about training and becoming more capable outside on the mountain were sharpened, distilled and fed into this entity that was Gym Jones. As an outdoors kind of person that hadn’t really seen the value of the gym I was entranced by the concept of increased performance and increased horsepower through hard and focussed work in the gym… and that it would go hand in hand with working at the thing that I loved doing- namely hillrunning.

Having bought and devoured “extreme alpinism” in the early 2000s, I had been attempting to follow the “Twight way” of doing things (if such a thing existed) for a number of years. It sounds a little cliched, but in the way Mark was looking at things, there really were no rules, except to question what you think you know- to keep progressing.

Look. Listen. Execute. Learn. Repeat.

The focus was that gymwork was simply a means to help you get better in your chosen sphere. This partnered with the understanding that- just as Bruce Lee wrote- by far the biggest limitation is not the physical- but the mental.

Yes, there was the whole “300” thing which made Gym Jones a household name in certain circles- mainly the “bros” network, and those that wanted washboard stomachs. When Mark finally came to the UK to do a seminar, I jumped at the chance to be there. Luckily it was just a short bike ride from where I lived, so I paid my money and went.
Nigh on everyone there was a gym goer- barely without exception. Anyone who was someone in the fitness industry was determined to get a piece of the 300 action. Then there was me, and a dude called Ben who was a climber, we were totally psyched to see and talk with Mark…

Through the weekend there was a tiny inkling of a doubt that everything we were doing, everything we worked on was for the benefit of people in the gym. There was not a lot of chatter about strength for power or for ability, but rather, simply for strengths sake. I put this aside as there was a LOT that I learned-  about how to question and think and get better -  so the inkling of thought disappeared and I immersed myself in getting better for my sport. Practice. Fail. Learn. Repeat.

The next time I saw Mark was a number of years later when a further seminar in the UK was planned. By now I was living up north, running a lot in the hills, I had a new job as a Physiotherapist and so it was a bit of a chore to get to London. However- I did.

This time round it was different. Yes, Mark was there, but it seemed like there was a further change in the emphasis from the original concepts. The first seminar was admittedly a massive Gym based orgy of bashing around- but if you could push the conversation towards fitness for “outdoor endeavour” then you might get some look in.

By this seminar, it was almost as if the phrase “the gym is not and never will be an end state” had never been uttered.
Everything that was looked at and mentioned was about performance in the gym. To me it was becoming a physical deadend. Ego’s were out, there was a lot of gym based “smashing it”. Having said that, there was still something to take away. Quiet and thoughtful conversations could be had, ideas about training that could be extrapolated to help hill fitness and strength in the mountains when you really need it. It was a good time, and was the last time I saw Mark.

I continued to train, I continued to run. A few pretty hard races came and went, and my indoor training continued to be informed by the older principles. There was, of course, much more work that could have been done, but at least I was not turning into a “running only” guy- just as much as I wasn’t turning into a “gym guy”. My training was done solo, just as runs and races are done solo. No ifs. No buts. No excuses. No-one to impress and no-one to distract.

2015 rolled around and we entered the Bryce Canyon Ultra- we were going to be in Salt Lake City for a couple of days- where Gym Jones was based. To say I was pretty psyched to have an excuse to head to the gym that I had been following for so long was an understatement. No, I wasn’t following the day to day stuff closely- they didn’t need to know what some random guy in the UK was up to, and the work that was going on there seemed a little detached from what I was doing-  but I got in touch and was cordially invited to train there on the final days of my trip. Amazing.

I also asked if there was anyone that might be able to advise me on a couple of places to run in the hills around Salt Lake. Apparently not. Wait. What?
Gym Jones- the centre for people that train hard to get better at doing things outdoors, and there was no-one who could advise me on a hill to run up?
Odd.


So I ran the race, did quite well and we found ourselves back in SLC. On the appointed day and time we went to the address and found the gym. I was a bit jittery- wow, actually here!
I was greeted by others in the gym and soon enough we were doing warm ups and other bits and pieces- as you’d expect, and then a full team based effort. Something about pulling a chain on a rope and sprinting etc. Our team lost.


There was a test, that seemed tailored to me. It was. I “achieved” the standard of getting a Gym Jones tshirt. Long coveted. It should have been an amazing moment, yet it felt empty.
Speaking to Lynne later on she said “they cheated, you know”.

I… What?

"They cheated. When you did the team vs team thing, the other team cheated. They did far less than you guys."

Things started to add up. I’d totally drunk the Kool Aid.

From my perspective the idea of Gym Jones was to work hard. No cheating. No cheat reps. No pretending. No getting out of doing the hard, hard work. Anything less than 100% honesty and integrity and you might as well not be there. It reflected back to “extreme alpinism”. If you cheat in training and end up in the shit on a mountain, there is only one outcome. Nature doesn’t forgive laziness or cheating in training. Cheat at training, cheat yourself. It suited my work ethic, it suited the way my mind and my training worked.

Yet, to be in *the* place- *the* gym and know there were shortcuts being taken shook me.
Not shook me to the core, you understand- yet that, along with other niggles I noticed, things were beginning to stack up.

In my limited interaction, I put GJ on a pedestal as a shining light, a beacon of excellence hardwork and commitment. In those first days, maybe it was, but as time goes on, even the brightest sword can become tarnished.
Cheat reps. Easily attained t-shirt. Focus on the gym. Massive disinterest in stuff in the hills. Driven by ego. This was not a place I was comfortable being, and was not the place I imagined it would be.

At the end I asked the question:- "When is Mark getting back?" The answer was an embarrassed shuffle and a chat in the corner. “Uh, Mark was getting a bit abrasive”. U-huh. Well that’s kind of his thing… right? “People were getting tired of being on the website- kinda Cat2 and Cat1 racers getting called out for not trying hard enough, being told they were a bit shit, when in fact they’re faster than him”.... And I was thinking….

Uh- is that it? I mean, that’s kind of the deal. Isn’t this place about trying to be better, not being satisfied? Always asking what could be better and being aware that even if you *think* you’ve made it, there is always something to sharpen...there is always *something else* to burn.

I was listening to complete bullshit.

So I listened. Nodded. Turned and left. Bitter taste in my mouth.

What to do?

We went home, I kept the t-shirt- it doesn’t get used much, it’s a reminder of a hard truth of when what you believe in gets taken over, commercialised and turned into bullshit.


What does get used is the old, original text from the very first symposium. It sits alongside the Tao of Jeet Kun Do and a couple of other texts on my shelf. No, it is not the ultimate training document. No, it does not tell me how to do everything, but it reminds me that it is better to think, to question, to wonder and to rebel against that which seems to be gospel. Do I question it? Hell yes. What is a document there for but to be questioned?

Now what?

I don’t look at the website anymore. I don’t read anything about it. Mark has his own podcast and I listen to that instead. I don’t really interact as I just don’t feel...I dunno, is the word “worthy”? Who knows.

Listen. Learn. Be as skeptical as possible. Hold yourself up to the mirror and be honest about what you see. No audience to pander to. Only one thing to be responsible to- the highest judge there is, nature.