Last Saturday I completed The Push challenge, organised by Back Up, with a team of 16 friends. In the end, we raised over £15,000 for the charity. A huge thank you to everybody who contributed. Below is a sort of write-up.
For the past two years, I have thought of myself as having died on 5th June, 2023.
No, that’s not quite right.
I have thought of the person I was as having died on 5th June, 2023. The person I am now came into being a month or so later, when awareness dawned, haltingly, in a Glasgow hospital.
For most of those two years, I have been grieving the death of who I was. This is made especially difficult by the fact that I find myself attached to his corpse, that I share his memories. I am not him anymore. But he was more to me than just somebody that I used to know.
Still, two years is a long time to grieve. Eventually one must move on. Catharsis and closure are required – but these are unlikely to come by repeating Groundhog Days at home, alone. So in my mind signing up for The Push rapidly took on a symbolism beyond mere personal challenge, beyond forcing me to face my demons (although it certainly remained that). It became a kind of pilgrimage. A final return to the mountains, where I would say goodbye to the man I once was. A funeral march, in my heart at least.
It was this conviction – that I might thereby find closure – that kept me from pulling the plug in the months and weeks leading up to the event. I spent many an early morning wide awake, trapped in bed, riddled with anxiety about all the things that could go wrong, all the reasons not to bother. When it looked like I might not be able to borrow a suitable wheelchair for the ascent, I almost leapt at the chance to call the whole thing off. But healthy encouragement from friends, combined with a sense that there was more at stake than simply getting up a mountain, meant I stayed the course.
Did it work? Unsurprisingly, real life turned out to be more complex than my attempt to dictate the terms of catharsis through overthinking. But overthinking is what I do, so bear with me.
*
Things did not begin well. I arrived at Euston Station the day before to find my first train cancelled. The next was delayed, which meant I missed my subsequent connection by two minutes. Whilst thus waiting for an hour at Crewe I somehow acquired a puncture, and realised with a sinking feeling that whilst I had a spare inner tube, I did not have any of the other components of a puncture repair kit. Eventually making it to Chester, the first train to Bangor was cancelled. The next one was delayed by half an hour. Having negotiated with a local taxi company in North Wales all day to keep pushing back my pickup time, I was somewhat distressed to get to the Bangor car park and find…no taxi waiting. A quick phone call established that a major road traffic accident nearby meant that the taxi was going to be another 15 minutes. Eventually I made it to the Caernarfon Premier Inn at 8pm, a mere three hours later than planned – and scheduled to attend a safety briefing in a campsite half an hour down the road, at 9. At that point, it seemed like calling things off would have been the right idea all along.
Luckily, however, I had bumped into my friend Rob at Crewe, who was having his own train nightmare on the way down from Edinburgh. Whilst I was (not) kicking my heels at Chester, he found a nearby bike shop and secured the necessary puncture repair components, before being picked up to be taken to the main campsite where most participants were staying. By the time I got to the Premier Inn, my friend (and chauffer for the weekend) Khalid was waiting for me. With the assistance of one of my carers, he managed to get my puncture fixed, and together we executed my first non-physiotherapist-supervised transfer from a wheelchair to a car. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.
We managed to make it to the campsite with about five minutes left of the briefing. Just in time to be told that, due to the adverse weather conditions, every team would only be going ¾ of the way up Snowdon after all. Because yes, the weather. Despite the rest of the country baking in a heat wave, Snowdonia had attracted storm conditions. I bit back disappointment. After all, getting to the top is not the point, as any good climber will tell you. It’s about how you (try) to get there.
*
One upside to having the summit bid cancelled was that my team was now scheduled to start in Llanberis at the civilised time of 10am. Khalid got me there around 9, and it was a little emotional. Of my team of 16, some were old climbing friends I hadn’t seen for years. Others had come from as far away as Vietnam and Indonesia. Some are people I've known since I was 13 years old. My friend Noah, the surgeon who was climbing with me that day two years ago, and who saved my life, was also there. For the first time in weeks, my nerves dissipated. This was a good team. I was going to be okay.
After an initial setback due to my legs being too long for the borrowed mountain wheelchair (and which I’d only before seen in photos), a hefty cushion was strapped in place, and a secure setup was established. With team members attached to various ropes and push bars, we set off at pace. This was a race, after all, and no team of mine was going to pretend otherwise.
The first hour was a breeze. The borrowed wheelchair was a truly impressive feat of DIY engineering, the large mountain bike tyres taking the bumps in their stride with me remaining remarkably stable despite inevitably being jangled around. I mostly sat back and enjoyed hearing my team members crack jokes and get to know each other, overcoming the obstacles thrown up by gates, path narrowings, and hillwalkers of various competence. And the weather was fine. Overcast, but not much wind, staying dry, and pretty warm. Inevitably, thoughts turned to a summit challenge.
Except then we hit the clag. That weird rain, that you only get inside a cloud, started soaking everybody through, whilst the wind picked up the higher we got. In short, things rapidly became miserable. But my team kept up good spirits and good commitment, and we made it to the designated three-quarter point by the turning for Clogwyn Du’r Arduu. Brief lunches were had in the limited shelter of a bridge, and whilst an organisation-defying bid for the summit was briefly discussed, the 40 mile an hour winds, 3m visibility, and general unpleasantness of the conditions quickly persuaded everybody that turning around was indeed the best idea. So back down we went.
Relatively wet, but staying surprisingly warm, I started to feel the bittersweet edge of what the day meant. Getting me up that path required real physical exertion on behalf of my team, and whilst I enjoyed listening in on their camaraderie, it was difficult not to simultaneously be reminded of how much I used to love pushing myself and my physical limits in the outdoors. And it dawned on me, now that we were heading down, that I really wasn’t going to see much of the mountains after all. The appalling visibility meant that whilst I could see a hill path for the first time in two years, I couldn’t see the valleys or the ridges or the skyline that should have provided its setting.
It was also difficult not to feel that in some ways the joke was on me. For there is no denying that climbing had once made me an outdoor elitist. I used to look down with condescension on “mere” hill walkers. Not just the clueless types with the wrong footwear trying to navigate with an iPhone instead of a map, but also properly equipped people who belonged on the hill. Whilst they “only” walked up the mountains, I climbed them, taking self-satisfied delight in outpacing walkers despite having a rucksack full of ropes and gear, or proving that I could move faster than them even on a nominal rest day. For me, hubris was a drug. And yet here I now was, the most useless person on the mountain, having to be pushed and pulled under no steam of my own. Nemesis, it turns out, is a real bitch.
In the end we made it back to the start point in just over 3 ½ hours, racing another team to the finish line, and with whom we would later be declared joint winners (though we have our suspicions about who really came in quickest). No summit, and no views – but also no disasters. At that moment, it felt like a good deal.
*
As the team milled about in the faint car park drizzle, enjoying cups of tea and post challenge snacks, conversation perhaps inevitably turned to the day that got me into this mess in the first place. Basically, people wanted to know what really happened. I tried to explain a few things, but given that he was the one conscious throughout the whole ordeal, Noah soon took over.
He didn’t tell people anything that I didn’t already know. But equally, it had been a very long time since I really had to face those facts full on. A long time since I had recalled the notoriously inaccessible “cauldron” on the mountain side, where the rocks crumbled, my gear failed, and I fell so far that I not only exploded my left arm and broke my neck, but hit my head with such force that my helmet turned into what Noah describes as confetti. To say that it is a miracle I survived would be doing a massive disservice to Noah’s medical skill in the aftermath of the fall, and to the bravery of the helicopter winch crew that somehow got me out through a sliver of open rock on the mountain side. But to say that it is a miracle that I not only survived, but did so without permanent brain damage, is a lot closer to the mark.
In any case, I felt the guilt wash over me. Guilt that I put Noah through that day. Guilt for the worry and anxiety that I caused my friends and family for weeks afterwards, when nobody knew first whether I would live, and if I did, whether I would be some kind of a vegetable. Guilt that I prattle on about metaphors of having died, openly contemplate suicide in a very public blog, when a real, biological death was closer to being my fate than I have any right to have survived.
Khalid took me back to my hotel, ostensibly so I could get a couple of hours rest. For some reason, however, whilst I’d maintained decent body temperature on the mountain, once the event was over it rapidly collapsed. (One of the many side-effects of spinal cord injury is that your body loses the ability to self-regulate core temperature.) Instead of sleeping, I shivered in bed under a duvet for an hour, my mind churning.
Leading up to this event I had imagined driving past some of my favourite climbing crags, some old haunts in North Wales, no doubt feeling sad, but nonetheless saying goodbye. But because of the terrible weather, and not driving along the A5, or through Capel Curig, or through the Llanberis Pass (due to staying in Caernarfon for two nights and the main campsite being on the “wrong” side of Snowdon), I wasn’t going to get to see anything. Not even the Snowdon Horseshoe, which not so long ago I scrambled solo in just 4 ½ hours.
I felt the bitterness rise. As I lay there shivering, for the first time since that fateful day I wished I that had never learned to climb. Wished that I could be just a regular hillwalker, blissfully unaware of how much more the mountains have to offer. In that moment, I hated climbing for the snob that it turned me into; for how it took over my life, became an obsession that defined everything – only to rip everything and more away.
Up until that day, in that dark Caernarfon hotel room, I had only ever wished either that the fall had never happened, or that it had killed me. Never that I had not become a climber. After all, you don’t stop loving the love of your life just because she stabbed you in the heart and left you to die. But reflecting on what, in that dark moment, felt like a failed pilgrimage, I wished with all my soul that I had never touched a rock.
They say that anger is a stage of grief. Until last Saturday, I thought I knew what that meant. It turns out that I did not.
*
But they also say that it’s darkest before the dawn. And if I have learnt anything in the last two years, it’s that friends make everything better.
Khalid picked me up again, and as I somehow stayed upright in his passenger seat, I let a certain nostalgia pass over for me. He and I used to climb a lot together; truth be told he was something of a mentor. For a long time after I woke up in hospital, the person I felt most guilty towards was him, even though he was hundreds of miles away when the disaster happened. But over the previous years I’d spent a lot of time in the passenger seat of his car, to and from various adventures. When I remarked “just like old times” as we pulled out of the carpark, he thought I was taking the piss. But for once I actually wasn’t.
At the main campsite, Back Up had organised a Post Push Party in one of the barns, out of the rain. The wood fired pizzas were great, although I think most of us could have done without the disco lights and a DJ playing 90s hits at volume. Still, as the evening progressed, I enjoyed sharing beers with the team (plus Hollie’s mum and dad!) and just enjoying the company of good people I no longer see as often as I would like. And a funny thing started to happen. As people passed me beers and fetched me slices of pizza, and we all shuffled up to receive our (somewhat questionable!) joint first place award from the organisers, I started to feel different. Not normal, as such. Not comfortable in my own skin. But as if I might, one day, be able to be comfortable in this skin.
For the first time in two years, it seemed like that might be possible.
*
I slept badly, as I always do now. The next morning I enjoyed the delights of trying to fit under tables in the restaurant where the hotel breakfasts were served. (Something I did not know before I became a wheelchair user: the vast majority of tables in public places are incompatible with wheelchairs, either because they block your knees, or the supporting base is incompatible with a wheelchair foot plate. You would not believe how annoying this is.) Killing some time before heading for the train home, I asked one of the carers to accompany me as I briefly pootled around the Caernarfon docks, went to look at the castle.
A pleasant stroll, if I’m still allowed to call it that. Just enjoying the view of a pretty Welsh town, briefly escaping the aesthetic jumble of failing East London architecture.
As I circled the castle, a seagull shat on my head. They say it’s good luck. About time mine turned, so I’ll take it where I can get it. Even if I know I will still have to make my own.
I always find your searing honesty a pleasure to read. It seems to me as if despite so many things in this Push Back going wrong, it has nevertheless been something of a turning point for you. And I am very glad.
I don’t underestimate for a moment what lies ahead. But glad that this experience did bring some joy.
Please keep writing. I should think your writing means a very great deal to very many people. Thank you.
Thanks for continuing to write, Paul. It's a privilege to share what you are going through. Thank you.