moving on…

Another dull posting, my apologies, but next week I should hopefully be posting up some nice Rjukan Ice climbing reports and pictures. YAY!

So yeah, Dave and I are flying out on Monday for nearly 2 weeks of waterfall ice action, meeting up with others along the way, should be fun! And my Nomics and new ropes should get some decent use at last (thanks to Adam at EMS for these).

In other news, my week-long Ofcom induction was fantastic, I’m thrilled to have been given the chance to get involved at the Olympics with these guys, the experience will be immense, and the people I’m to be working with are a fantastic bunch, great engineers and a great laugh to boot. Plus, I’m being paid (always a bonus!).

In other, other news, Phil and I have found somewhere else to live. Once the paperwork has all gone through we will be shifting our few possessions over to a remote ‘Crofter’s Cottage’ (or whatever it once was), with stunning views and a water supply that comes directly from a spring on the hillside above…bizarre and ramshackle, living there is definitely going to be an experience, and a challenging one at that. I will now be embarking upon a quest to find a decent, cheap 125cc trail bike to be my ‘winter hack’ at Phil’s suggestion as the car will likely not make it to the house in the snow! Hell, if he thinks I should buy a second motorbike then who am I to argue!!

Life is improving.

life

I’ve not felt like writing much recently, there are too many things on my mind, and too much of life just seems to be getting in the way of living.

My home is gone, one month on I am still living in a caravan on the driveway waiting in limbo for a ethereal insurer to save us. Slowly I’m losing my grip on hope, one day salvation will come, but meanwhile the descending spiral of woes both real and imagined hasn’t even begun to slow.

Morbid thoughts have been clouding my mind after my involvement with the recent flooding as a SAR ‘observer’. My mother has been in intensive care after a severe infection and emergency operations, and with her and my longsuffering father all my remaining strength and positivity are invested.

I’ve been flying and failed to concentrate, failed to be caught in the inexorable grip of the G-forces we court when flying aerobatics, failed to immerse myself in the fight and just ended up feeling sick and despondent, this is not like me.

I’ve been to Scotland to attempt to climb, and been repulsed by the weather and avalanche risk, yet another unsuccessful trip to stir the soul into desolation.

A whole host of other things are also battling to drag my mind down to within sight of the bottom, yet somehow the light is still there shining above me and I can’t let that go.

I was successful at a job interview last week and will be heading off for a week of training next week with Ofcom – I will be working at the Olympic games in 2012 as an Venue Engineer (running radio investigation) – a chance of a lifetime and an experience I’m really excited about being given the opportunity to have. The interview gave me the chance to talk about who I am and what I’m capable of, showed me once more that I’m skilled and capable as an engineer and valued as a person.

I’m off to Rjukan, Norway after the week at Ofcom, for a two week ice climbing trip I’ve been planning since the middle of last year, and despite losing my climbing partner for the trip, and failing to be anywhere near where I would like to be with my strength and fitness training, I feel good about the whole thing, I know that all I need to do to have the trip of my career so far, is to open my mind and let myself believe in myself. This is a feeling I’ve not had before, a knowledge that as long as I try, as long as I trust and let myself run, things will work out ok.

I just need to apply this philosophy to the rest of life, it can all be ok.

simplification

I was going to make my next blog entry a nice positive one about a day out I had last week flying the Pitts Special: it was one of the best days I’ve had in a long, long time and as such is one that I may indeed write about in the future, but for now I just don’t have it in me (sorry Paul).

I spent this weekend up in Scotland failing to climb anything for various reasons, but the main one being a piece of news I received from Phil on Friday evening (I’d headed up on Thursday you see). It would seem that our lives had suddenly become much simpler, or at least they will have once all the initial brouhaha is over and done with…

Possessions…who needs them right? Perspective is something that is often gained rapidly and with almighty clarity when all of a sudden you have none.

Ok, enough of the cryptic – Phil called me to tell me that we’d had a house fire. Mercifully no-one was hurt and we had no animals in the house either, but somehow those hugely important facts don’t feel quite as comforting as they perhaps should when what you’re hearing is “everything’s gone…everything”.

Now that’s all a touch melodramatic, as everything is in actual fact not gone, just covered in a thick layer of noxious black soot – the fire burned itself out in a smouldering pile of molten metal, plastic, carpet and electronic components. It did not follow the more obvious course of setting the bookcase alight and destroying the building as well as all of our worldly possessions for some reason (oxygen starvation most likely according to the fire brigade). So, whilst we do still technically own everything we did before, none of it is ever going to be useable again – the soot and smoke damage is almost total…

So where does that leave us? Well, we are now living in Phil’s cousin’s caravan perched precariously on our driveway, desperately trying to get in contact with the landlady (don’t ask, but until we do, the house insurers still won’t know what’s happened, and we won’t know what’s going to happen to us!), and waiting for our own contents insurers to send out their damage assessor on Friday.

So, life may be crap right now, but at least it’s simple!

 

the new year

My blogging of late has been horribly lax, and my simple explanation as to why, is simply that I’ve had nothing to say, nothing I’ve wanted to share. I’ve been ill for what seems like weeks now, in fact ever since my ascent of Maesglasau Falls with Dave I’ve suffered a whole series of setbacks – first the bout of food poisoning that left me totally empty in more ways than one, then what I have termed the ‘uber cold’ (it wasn’t the ‘flu, but it did leave me feeling as weak and lethargic as my last bout of real ‘flu did), and now some inexplicable round of serious infection in my lip and gums.

So basically, thus far, 2011 hasn’t really been my year. I feel drained, horrendously unfit and pretty disappointed in myself. Plans had been forged to enable this winter season to be incredible – I spent most of the summer training my fitness, my strength and psychological levels were good, and then work came and after that the seemingly never-ending period of illness. It all feels like such a waste.

So, now I’m sat here, dosed up on antibiotics, still in a fair amount of pain (stupid gum infection), slightly depressed about how things have been going, but also feeling positive that I’m going to turn it all round.

Plans for more Winter forays are being made, partners are being sought out, training is starting to be done to get me back into a fit enough state to survive the Ben Nevis walk-in. Of course my trip to Rjukan in March is still enough of a way off that I may yet still be capable of climbing that WI6 I’m lusting over, so all is not yet lost!

I’m also working harder with my Mountain Rescue stuff – this weekend should yield some hilarity with my Helicopter and winch training scheduled for tomorrow at RAF Valley (I can’t wait!!), and next weekend is the ‘Casualty Care’ course, for which I have been struggling to study but mostly failing because I find the text book such hard work – I just hope I can retain enough from the course to pass the exam in February!

If all that weren’t enough, I’ve set up a couple of pages to raise some money for NEWSAR (North East Wales Search and Rescue) through two events I’m now signed up for:

Sponsor me (and Matt) in the Saunders Lakeland Mountain Marathon (my first ever MM) here: http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/laurenrichardson

Or, if you’re more of a road runner, sponsor me (and Matt again) to run the Snowdonia Marathon (my first road marathon) in October, here: http://www.charitygiving.co.uk/laurenrichardson2011

Both of these events will be serious tests of my resolve and my motivations, as I’m going to be putting in some real training efforts for both of them. The Snowdonia Marathon in particular scares me. I’ve never run that kind of distance before, and I’m out of running shape at the moment, but I’m determined not to embarrass myself and as such will also be participating in a few shorted distance races in the lead up (one of them will hopefully be the Lake Vyrnwy half-marathon, if I can ever manage to book a place, and I’m also now toying with possibly entering the ‘Race the Train’ event in Tywyn in August…should be an interesting year!)

Tips and encouragement will all be much appreciated, and I will be keeping the blog updated through the year with progress on how our training is going for each event. I’ll also be pointing out the links more and more as the time draws closer.

gear we like, part 6: winter odds and sods

So, the winter season is well and truly upon us, and I’m still too ill to take any real advantage of it. Great. That said, the past few of times I have been out (both in Wales and a recent trip to the Cairngorms), I have been trialling and contemplating some very simple gear ideas, and it’s time to tell the world!

• Cycling Glasses

Ok, what the hell am I on about now – cycling glasses for winter climbing? Oh yes. Check me out!

Ok, I look stupid.

So why am I wearing them? Well, since I started wearing contact lenses to climb, rather than just wearing my normal glasses, I’ve realised that I feel a little vulnerable in the face area, which is especially relevant to me as I seem to be a magnet for falling ice. I contemplated using a helmet visor, but the one available for the Grivel Salamander is more of a peak than a visor, and not what I was looking for, so the thought of ‘safety glasses’ struck me next, and hence, on a recent trip to Decathlon I found myself looking at clear cycling glasses, admiring the amount of face coverage they provide, and also feeling stunned by how cheap they were (£8 I think). They are now a constant companion on the winter hills – ace for protecting eyes from falling ice, spindrift, or even just the wind. They’re no replacement for goggles when the sh*t really hits the fan, but I’d say a good 90% of the time a pair of these are a great thing to wear as they’re comfortable enough that you forget you’re wearing them and provide you with a nice protective barrier to boot.

• £9 Casio Digital Watch from Argos

Another slightly revolutionary concept here – a cheap but tough digital watch, but not to wear on your wrist…

When winter climbing you’ll inevitably be wearing multiple layers and gloves, which means that wearing a wrist watch is either not an option at all (i.e. if you’re like me and find the watch plus glove cuff combo excruciatingly uncomfortable), or you wear one but it is underneath your many layers and a total pain to actually be able to look at.

Really there are three main options for telling the time on the hill in winter: 1) wear a watch normally and suffer the consequences, 2) wear a watch over the top of your clothing layers and suffer the consequences, or 3) don’t wear a watch at all (rely on your partner, or have some form of clock stashed elsewhere).

So far this year I have chosen varieties of option 3 every time – usually either relying on my partner wearing a watch, or digging my phone out of my pocket, neither of which are particularly good options really. My latest notion, is to use a watch permanently attached to my rucksack strap, mounted upside down so I can simply glance down and see what the time is, no hassle! Now, obviously this won’t work if I’m not climbing with the bag on, but most of the time I spend out in winter I will be wearing my rucksack, or it will be close by, so theoretically this could be a great solutions, only time will tell (sorry!).

So there we go – as you can see in the picture, my new cheap retro casio fits onto the webbing strap of my Berghaus Arete perfectly – they’re almost made for each other! All I had to do was remove the watch strap, and refit the pins around the webbing (so the webbing is effectively just a replacement watch strap). I will admit that it was a touch fiddly, but the result is stunning – no cable ties or duct tape in sight!

The reason I chose this watch (I think the model is an F-91W or something), was because it was a) cheap, b) digital (don’t want an analogue watch as it’ll be more fragile with all the moving parts), c) water resistant, d) long proven to be pretty much indestructible (I know people who have had these for years, put them through hell and they just keep on and on working), e) low profile/thin/small and f) has a replaceable strap and not a built in rubber thing. In other words, it is perfect for what I wanted here – it even has the added bonus of having a light and functionality as a stopwatch or alarm.