Everest: Strange Decisions

Recently, when asked in an interview why I had decided to join an expedition with the challenge of setting not one but two Guinness World Records, I discovered I actually didn’t have an answer.  To be honest I was also rather surprised to be interviewed, by none other than World Rugby TV, in the first place.  Given the fact that I was only ever an almost average rugby player on my best day and that the likes of Tamara Taylor, Ollie Philips and Shane Williams were also on the expedition, I wasn’t really sure what appeal I would have to anyone outside the circle of my friends and family.

But I am getting ahead of myself; let me start at the beginning of this particular tale.  My name is Mark Dean, I am 40 years old,  overweight, catastrophically unfit, former bog-standard rugby player, a lover of wine and cheese and all the other things that tend to be bad for you and *spoiler alert* I haven’t set foot on a mountain in almost ten years.  All of which might make you question why, two months ago, I agreed to join an expedition to play rugby at the highest altitude ever attempted – Mount Everest in the Himalaya.  I made this strange decision, somewhat predictably after a few drinks, when a friend of mine told me he was going to set the World Record for playing a game of rugby at the highest altitude ever and suggested I come along for the ride.  To be fair, after a few more G&Ts than is sensible when making any sort of grown-up decisions, this sounded like a grand idea, and the fact it involved raising a serious amount of money for the charity, Wooden Spoon, made it impossible to decline.

Back in the present, sat in that interview, I began to wonder what on earth I’d got myself into.  What had possessed me to agree to something that was so far beyond my capability and outside my comfort zone that I may as well have agreed to play rugby on the moon.   For what seemed an eternity, I thought about the question before coming up with something like, “I had always loved rugby and had always wanted to visit Nepal and Tibet so to combine the two made perfect sense.”  I went on to elaborate that, “if it was to be my last ever game of rugby then playing it on Everest, with an amazing group of people, whilst raising a huge amount of money for the charity Wooden Spoon wasn’t a bad way to bow out.”  All of that is actually true, if a little clichéd, and may even be a small part of why I am going, but for some reason it rings hollow in my own head.

So, for better for worse, I am going to Everest next April to play what will almost certainly be my last ever game of rugby.  In doing so I am going to have to get fitter than I have been in over a decade, lose roughly 5 stone (32Kg), climb more than a few mountains in preparation, raise in the region of £20,000 for charity and somehow not lose my sense of humour along the way.  Hopefully, somewhere en route to that rugby pitch, laid out just below the North Col, 6750m up the face of the tallest mountain in the world, I’ll find my reason for going.  In the meantime, I am going to take this incredible opportunity to improve my life whilst raising money to help Wooden Spoon use rugby to change the lives of disadvantaged children in the UK.

My last thought on leaving the interview, to start what will undoubtedly be the toughest challenge I have ever attempted, is that maybe it isn’t all about the destination, maybe how you get there is the worthier part.