Extreme Dad

20 miles down, 200 aches to go

We all have moments when we question the wisdom of little things we do (such as the decision to have children...).  But when those little things start mounting up, it's time to start having a serious think about sanity.  I started questioning mine about 500 metres into yesterday's 20 mile hikeathon through Caribbean tropical rainforest.  Luckily, I decided to leave reaching a conclusion until the end of the hike, because 10 hours of pain over rugged terrain in searing tropical heat later, I was too exhausted to think about anything.  Here are a few of the more pleasant memories from yesterday:

Sadly, you can't wander around remote parts of our island without, er, security.  With machine guns...

A typical example of my view for most of the day

A welcome break by a mountain stream

The trail takes us down to the coast

Paradise found and 20 miles of pain worthwhile

The real test comes today, when aching so much I can hardly type, it's my turn to look after the boys because Zoe has a portrait commission to get on with.  Wish me luck...

fatherhood, hiking, adventure, sport

What the hell am I doing?

It's 2:30 am and I'm out of bed.  Of my own volition.  I realise now that I've completely lost the plot.  Agreeing to go on a 20 mile hike through tropical rainforest seemed like a fun idea after a few beers the other night.  Right now, after 3 hours sleep, it sure as hell doesn't.

It's a long time since I did anything near a 20 miler, and I've never done one in the tropics.  So if you don't hear from me again you know why...

The most extreme of extreme sports: Womens' hockey

A lovely lady from work raised a painful memory the other day when telling me about her addiction to hockey and her devastation at having just been banned for swearing at the referee.  For a whole year.  Hmmm, in my experience, angry women with sticks don't restrict themselves to blue language when they're mad...

Womens' hockey is the most extreme, insane, violent, hateful sport out there.  It's about as extreme as you can get.  Believe me, I know.  I learned the hard way.  When we reached 15 at school,  the school in its lack of wisdom decided to grant us a certain degree of choice.  One particular choice we were given, and one that caused considerable excitement among my young friends, was the opportunity to ditch rugby in favour of hockey.  With the girls.  Most of the other blokes just scoffed.  It was a no-brainer for them.  Rugby was for blokes and where the road to popularity lay.  Hockey was a girls' sport and not fit for boys itching to become men.  How sorely mistaken they were.

Three friends and I, who were more interested in the girls in their provocative sports attire than in popularity or becoming men, decided to opt for hockey.  This, much to the amusement of the other boys who called us a bunch of sissies, as well as a few other things I'd rather not commit to writing.  We couldn't care less. We'd be leching over the girls while they were cuddling eachother in a maul.

20 minutes into the hockey session we were on our knees in front of the coach, pleading for our lives to be let back onto the rugby pitch.  There had been no leching and no smooth talking.  There had only been fear.  Those girls were the personification of evil.  We were young and naive in those days, but had been on this planet long enough to realise that 22 hormonal girls with sticks and a rock hard ball to smack at eacother spells trouble.  Not a mistake I've made again.

Sports kit junkie

Yes, I admit it.  I'm an addict.  I love the sports themselves, but I love the kit that comes with them just as much.  Take climbing for example.  There's no end of wonderful new toys to buy.  I love the look and feel of a carabiner.  And you may find this pitiable, but nothing turns me on more than a set of new shiny quickdraws.  Don't even get me started on ropes, ice axes, rucksacks and $500 jackets...The same goes for Kitesurfing.  Those kites just LOOK SO GOOD!  I simply have to have them.  And if it means running up the credit card to it's limit, well that's what its for isn't it?

Extreme expenditure on kit is what I should probably be most concerned about.  For reasons of marital harmony I'm not going to let you know the value of all my stuff.  But it's a lot.  Nope, an awful lot.  There are kites, ropes, boards, helmets, slings, control bars and oh, my latest acquisition, a 900cc Honda Fireblade sports bike.  Which I bought here. In tropics.  Where there's nowhere to ride it.  BUT IT JUST LOOKS SO GOOD!

Cost aside (although cost is probably what I should be most concerened about - I could have retired by now if I hadn't spent so much on kit), the main problem is storage space, or lack thereof.  Were we to pack all of my kit into our home, I'd have to evict one of my children to make room for it.  While tempting, this isn't feasible because both my home and host countries have fairly stringent child protection laws.  So my kit is currently spread between here, the UK and Tenerife, where my folks live.  the upside of this, is that I don't have to lug climbing kit and surfboards half way across the globe.  But I am reliant on the (very) goodwill of my folks and my mother-in-law. 

Fingers crossed that they don't decide to do a spring clean any year soon.

My friends clearly hate me

Yes, I'm convinced they do.  I haven't been out on the water for over 2 weeks now.  I'm child-bound at the moment because my wife Zoe is starting a portrait business and she needs to concentrate on her work.  So when I'm not at work, I need to watch the boys while she paints.  Admittedly this is mostly my fault.  I encouraged Zoe to do it.  In fact, I practically forced her.  You see, I want to be able to retire before I get to 31 and Zoe's my pension fund.

But there's a problem.  The business has been going for just 2 weeks and I don't think I can handle not getting out.  The trouble is, my nearest reasonable surf break is at least an hour and a half's drive over rough, winding roads.  So that's 3 hours to get there and back.  If you're travelling  all that way, you've gotta spend a couple of hours on the water.  Minimum.  So a surfing trip for me at the moment equals a whole day away from the family.  I used to take them with me, but Zoe can't paint portraits on the beach.  Or she could, but I'd have to look after the boys which would defeat the object of the trip.

So how does this lead to my friends hating me?  Well I presume they do because they're doing their best to increase the suffering.  One friend, a surfing buddy who has just bought himself a trail bike (Honda XL650) texted me last Saturday with, "What we doing tomorrow? Motorbikes or surfing?"  How's that for friendship?  Pure torture.  Instead of going for a burn on my motorbike I ended up dragging the boys to the zoo in the searing tropical heat (which was fun too. Honest).

Then on Thursday, another friend (a good climber) returned from a trip to Bonaire and spent the morning raving about the climbing there.   Apparently awesome cliffs above azure blue and crystal clear Caribbean seas.  We had searched our own particular Caribbean island from one end to the other looking for a good crag, and eventually found a reasonable one at what we thought was a nice family beach, only 40 minutes drive away.  But on a family visit to said beach just the day after our discovery, we found ourselves in the middle of a bit of gang warfare, with two of the north coast local villages having at eachother with everything from coconuts to machetes.  We haven't been back.   

So, withdrawal symptons have set in with a vengeance and I'm not quite sure if I'm going to make it through the day...

**Shameless plug alert**

By the way, in the interests of making my retirement dream a reality so I can give up work and go surfing when the boys are at school, please do order a portrait from Zoe.  She's good and her site is www.artmarten.com

The seeds of adventure lust are planted

I can't be certain how it all started.  I'm often surprised that it did.  I was shy at school (still am, really) and was generally a complete chicken when it came to anything even mildly dangerous.  I'd run a mile from a fight and thought playing marbles was risky.  At the time, we were living in southern Africa where men were men and boys were doing their best to become men ASAP.  It didn't pay to be a chicken.  The chicks at pre-school didn't dig it.  Still, much I was love in with young Rachel, I couldn't find it in me to enjoy hazardous things like rugby or riding a bike with no hands.

Then, somehow, at age 7 I made friends with the school nutter.  It was a highly unlikely alliance, but Kim and I became firm friends.  His folks had a farm and I used to spend weekends and holidays there.  I think that's when I started to discover that danger was fun.  They had motorbikes, a boat and a big workshop where Kim and I used to make weapons.  Everything  from Rambo knives to ninja throwing stars.  I kid you not.  At age 8!  The weapons were cool, but you couldn't actually have fun with them without doing someone some serious damage and getting a thrashing from Kim's dad.  The fun really started when I was let loose on Kim's monkey bike for the first time.  I lasted 12 seconds.  I panicked and accelerated when I should have braked, and ploughed straight into a wall.  The monkey bike was hurt more than me.  Kim's dad picked me up, dusted me off, bent the bike back into shape and put me straight back on it.  In two weeks I had graduated to a Honda 125.  When you're 8, a 125 can REALLY haul ass...

It was all downhill from there, really.  I have fond memories of Kim's dad encouraging us to swim under some rapids one afternoon during a picnic on the banks of the Ruzawi River.  "Just dive down deep", he said, as he sat on the bank with a nice cold beer.  The following summer, we were staying up at Mana Pools safari park and spent a few days on the Zambezi River fishing.  Kim's dad accidentally knocked his new fishing reel off the side of the boat. "Just swim down and see if you can find it", he said.  Swim.  In the Zambezi.  No one swims in the Zambezi.  Allegedly, there are about 300 crocs per kilometre of shoreline.  Thankfully, Kim's mum was on board and put her foot down.  Back in camp that same night, however, not having received our danger quotient for the day, Kim and I hatched a plan to catch ourselves a hyena for a pet.  I think the plan involved putting a lassoo in a dustbin with a nice steak in the middle...It was all downhill from there.