#WoodenSpoon – Page 2 – Deano's World

Everest: Dinner At My Place

15/10/201829/12/2020Mark "Deano" Dean

As soon as I decided to give the Everest Rugby Challenge a go I knew that I would have to host a fundraiser at my local Nepali restaurant: The Gurkha Kitchen in Oxted. The restaurant is owned by my good friend Purna Gurung and I have been going there and enjoying their hospitality for over twenty years. In fact many of my friends look forward to the almost annual invite to celebrate my birthday although they often tell me they are there for the food not for me. I suspect there is probably a little truth in that as the food is certainly more interesting than I am most of the time.

So on Tuesday 2nd of February I will host seventy friends and family at “my place”. The hope is to raise in the region of £10,000 for the charity Wooden Spoon which will go towards using rugby to improve the lives of disadvantaged and disabled children in the UK. By raising that amount I will also meet my own personal target allowing me to achieve an old dream to go to Nepal and Tibet and see the Himalaya up close and personal. Not quite the mountaineering adventure I dreamt of when I was growing up but it might be a step in the right direction.

If you want to join in on the 2nd February for some great food, amazing hospitality and to find out about what the LMAX Exchange Everest Rugby Challenge is all about then please feel free to drop me an email.

Everest: Making Plans

09/10/201829/12/2020Mark "Deano" Dean

OK I have 185 days until I get on a plane to Nepal and at this point I am very aware that I am still 19 stone and I need to lose roughly another 3 stone. I am also aware that apart from the near death experience in the Lake District a few weeks back I haven’t really done much mountain walking since I did the Three Peaks in 2009.

I probably need to play a few games of rugby as well because if I can’t play a game at sea level in Surrey I suspect I might struggle a bit at over 6500m in Tibet.

I also need to work out how to replicate training at 6500m because unless there is a substantial, and as yet undiscovered 8000m high mountain, somewhere in the UK there are not many options locally for me to stagger up or fall down. I still need to climb a few of the usual UK peaks like Snowdon, Ben Nevis, Pen-y-Fan and Waun Fach and I have booked trips to Wales, The Lakes and Scotland over the next three months but I suspect they will just help with the cardio fitness rather than the altitude.

It isn’t all bad news as I’ve joined a gym, the Nuffield Health club, in Chislehurst just off the A20 so I can get in early on the way to the office. The even better news is that I’ve even been to it and no, to the cynical bastards among you, not just to use the Sauna and Jacuzzi. In fact I have dropped from over 20 stone to 19 stone since joining so I must be doing something right.

I’ve also managed to raise over £1000 of my £10,000 target through the kindness of donations from friends, family and other well wishers. If you can afford to donate to the fantastic charity that is Wooden Spoon and help me hit my fundraising target please click here

I have also been lucky enough to have received numerous suggestions and messages of support from friends and family. A friend of mine, we’ll call him “Dave”, who teaches mathematics has helped me break down all the problems, tasks and issues I have into simple formulae so it doesn’t all seem so daunting.

Helping Disadvantaged Kids = (Mountain + Rugby + Altitude + Pain) x Fundraising

(Mountains x Altitude) + (Gym + Rugby – Cake)/Gin* = Not Dying*

*Apparently to make these formula work Gin is a constant and Not Dying is a variable.

“Dave” also suggested I come up and play a few Vets games for my old club, Old Mid-Whitgiftian, in Sanderstead. He suggested this whilst lying on the sofa, watching Peppa Pig and moaning about his aches and pains from playing the day before and surrounded by used ice packs. The whole situation was made infinitely more amusing when his son ran in and jumped on him. I suspect it will take until the new year for me to find the necessary courage to actually pull a pair of boots on and run out on the pitch but I think it prudent to see if I can still catch and/or pass.

“Dave” also suggested I take up smoking because apparently research has shown that smokers do better at altitude than sensible people. As I very much suspect this research was done by the sort of people who write the “Six Months of Snow Hell and -20° C In May” weather reports for the Daily Express so I decided to take his suggestion “under advisement”. Apart from the other obvious disadvantages I wasn’t sure that making myself smell even worse on the side of a mountain was in anyone’s best interests least of all the poor unfortunate soul who has to share a tent with me.

I also just heard that the fabulous team at Wooden Spoon are also sorting out “Altitude Training” for all the challengers and this sounds both incredible and awful. Simulating the effects of playing rugby at 6500m sounds dangerously close to “simulated dying” on a mountain so I am nervously awaiting the details.

So between trips to mountains, suggestions from “Dave”, giving up cake, drinking Gin, going to the gym and “simulated dying” I have the basics of the plan to get me ready to play rugby on Everest. My wife liked this plan so much she recently increased my life insurance premium and has started saying things like “I will miss you forever you know”. In hindsight I am not sure watching the film Everest with her was such a good idea.

So the planning is done (ish) and now comes the hard work. It most probably will not be plain sailing but I am excited about seeing what I am actually capable of and how I can adapt to the curve balls thrown at me. The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!

Everest: Reality Check

23/09/201829/12/2020Mark "Deano" Dean

Have you ever had that feeling of trepidation when you look around a room and everyone there is so much more prepared than you? I’m in a briefing with the rest of the LMAX Exchange Everest Rugby Challenge team, listening to Dave and Carrie from Adventure Peaks telling us what to expect, and I’m pretty much shitting myself. To make it worse, they are only talking about the training walk around the Lake District tomorrow and not the actual trip to Everest.

It probably doesn’t help that since I last climbed any mountain I have had my L5 disk removed, recovered from a bout of ITP, torn the ACL in my left knee and eaten far too much cheese. I was pretty sure most of the people in that room could outperform me on the hill in their sleep and I was genuinely not even sure I’d make it out of Ambleside before I started struggling to breath.

The plan was a route known as the Fairfield Horseshoe which has a disarmingly cute “5 Fells” rating. What that actually means is that people who, like me, look more like Shrek after a substantial pie-eating contest than a mountaineer should seriously think twice about attempting it. The route itself starts and finishes in Ambleside and contains the following hills: Nab Scar, Low Pike, High Pike (Scandale), Heron Pike North Top, Heron Pike (Rydal), Hart Crag, Great Rigg, Fairfield, and Dove Crag. All in all, just over a 1000m climb and, with the trek in and out of Waterhead, roughly 20km of walking.

What that really means is a lot of up, followed by a lot more up and then a knee-breaking descent back down after taking in some spectacular views down towards Windermere and Coniston.

So, if that was the plan… what happened? It started well enough, but then again, I’d like to think I can walk through a town on a road with the best of them. As we started the climb out of Ambleside, the realisation that I was in for a tough day hit me, along with the fact that judging from the size of everybody else’s rucksacks I had, as usual, gratuitously over-packed.

The initial climb was certainly a reality check; it needed to be. Climbing Everest, even if only as far as the North Col, is not to be taken lightly. I knew that if I couldn’t walk up and down a mountain in the Lake District then I had absolutely no chance of doing that at 6500m in the Himalaya.

Barely an hour in and having only climbed a hundred metres or so I genuinely didn’t think that I was going to finish the day’s walk and once again started to wonder what on earth I was doing. I have no doubt that most of my companions also thought I wouldn’t be capable but that didn’t stop many of them offering encouragement throughout the day. Their kind words certainly helped me to keep putting one foot in front of the other and I’m pretty sure without them I probably wouldn’t have made it round.

Basically for the next two hours I walked up the side of a mountain trying to keep my breathing under control and focusing on nothing more than one painful step at a time. I could feel my heart racing in my chest as it got the toughest workout it had received in many a year. I also think at this point my fitbit had logically assumed that I had either accidentally put it in the washing machine or that I was being chased by a pride of Lions.

The route around the ridge was a relief, the weather holding off meant that we could see down to Windermere and South over the Lake District. Cumbria is a beautiful place and those views down over the lakes certainly helped remind me that all things that are worth having never come easy. A brief lunch stop on Fairfield itself and the chance to pull on my trusty old Buffalo shirt was a welcome break – a quick sandwich though was all I had time for and then we were back on our way before our legs stiffened up. I also realised that trying to lose weight quickly was all well and good but that I needed to make sure I was fueling my body as well. Again my lack of preparation with regards to food made what was always going to be a difficult day even tougher.

The descent was horrid. I mean it was actually so awful that falling over the edge might have been preferable to the short agonising steps down the ancient stone path back into Ambleside. My knees were swollen and my feet ached from the unyielding confines of my new boots and it just seemed to go on for ever. When I finally reached the tarmac road back to the hotel at Waterhead I was shattered and ready for bed. I was so stiff I could barely walk to the minibus back to the hotel.

Arriving at the hotel I was taken aback by the kind words I got from the other members of the expedition, many of whom were nursing aches and pains of their own. Many of them took the time to speak to me and give positive feedback on what had basically been a torturous day in the mountains for me.

Throughout the drive home I started to plan the next six months. I had a lot of work to do but the fact I hadn’t crashed and burnt in the Lake District gave me the confidence that this expedition was actually doable. The reality check had been worth it and although success, for me, on Everest was still nothing more than a vague possibility it was no longer the rose tinted pipedream it had been 48 hours earlier.

So what next? How do I get the amount of time I need on the hill? Not only that but how do I achieve that in the time-frame without breaking my already notoriously fragile body? In those and so many other unanswered questions, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub.

Everest: Strange Decisions

22/09/201829/12/2020Mark "Deano" Dean

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.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: