5 days from the book

Wales, the best country in the world. Snowdon, the best mountain in the world. And the best weather in the world.

We’d brought a group of turtles for the weekend, a few Scots braving North Wales public transport among them. We met in the morning in pouring rain. About halfway up, the wind kicked in. Lucy nearly blew off. We were holding onto each other, and one guy was doing it in flip-flops. Whatever they tell you about waterproof clothing, they’re lying. Every one of us got soaked.

The guides said it was the worst weather they’d seen in 9 years, so we turned around. We tell people we climbed. Look, it was too dangerous. We used our heads.

Afterwards I went over to the hostel where most of them were staying. Brilliant place, huge kitchen, everyone inside and cosy. They were going round in a circle saying why they’d joined and what they liked about it. I joined in and did a little speech. It felt like a proper community.

Then we took over the pub. Pies and chips for everyone, at a place that probably does four pie orders a week, and a few drinks. We all went home closer.

We’d all earned the summit. But the summit was never the point. The point was coming together, and we got that halfway up a mountain in the rain.

Ask Ryan. I once ate 12 Krispy Kreme doughnuts in under 3 minutes, just to see if I could. Ryan’s got the video.

I used to think that was cool. It isn’t. It just meant my stomach could hold a ridiculous amount of food.

Then I started stopping at about 80% full. Something strange happened. I got fuller from meals, and now I can’t eat what I used to. I don’t leave restaurants crawling out like a frog about to explode anymore. I walk out feeling decent. Chuffed, even.

The Stoics call it temperance. I liked the word so much I joked I’d name my kid after it. Temperance Flear.

Psycho-Cybernetics was written by a plastic surgeon, Maxwell Maltz. Some of his patients walked out with a new nose or the scars gone, and their whole lives changed. Shy one week, confident the next. The power of my hands, he thought.

Then he noticed the others. He’d do his best work, a perfect job, and they’d look in the mirror and say: I look just the same. You didn’t do a thing.

It wasn’t his hands doing the magic. It was their self-image. If that didn’t change, nothing changed, no matter how much the outside did. So he started talking to people about how they saw themselves before surgery, and a lot of them never went ahead with it.

I see the same with weight loss. We think we’ll be happy at 20 pounds down. We get there and still see the same person in the mirror.

It’s one reason I had every before-and-after photo taken off the Turtle website. I used to call them a necessary evil. Hypocrite, coming in here.

Work on how you see yourself while you work on the body. Otherwise the best result in the world still looks the same to you.

I started a health and fitness website in school because I wanted to learn how to build sites and get them ranking in Google. I went to a Welsh-language school, so my English grammar was terrible. I wrote the articles anyway.

Slowly I learned SEO and the posts started ranking. Then, on my way to university in Cardiff, I got an email and a phone call from the man who ran Cardiff Sports Nutrition. He’d seen me ranking for fitness terms and wanted me to do his website. I was on my way there now, to halls. His shop was 200 metres down the road. You can’t make it up.

That turned into a job in the shop from my first day of uni. I watched how he coached bodybuilders, physique athletes and rugby players, and his store made way more money than my website ever did.

Then New Year’s Eve, going into second year. I’m sitting in Nando’s, broke and in debt, and someone messages me. They want to buy my website, One Stop Muscle. A few grand over PayPal, job done. That money went into creating Rugby Warfare.

Look back at those first articles now and they’re terrible. Really bad websites, really bad English. But none of the rest happens if I don’t risk putting them online.

One New Year I was in Cape Town for a friend’s wedding, and I was overwhelmed.

What helped was the Uber drivers. Most of them were from Zimbabwe, and I loved chatting to them.

One grew up with 5 siblings. If they wanted to watch a Champions League game they walked 10 miles to the nearest place showing it, and back in the dark. I asked where he’d go if he could pick anywhere. Taunton, Somerset. What? Where did Taunton, Somerset come from? Fair play.

He’d left Zimbabwe on a bus that took 3 days. Knew no one. Slept on the streets. Then a shanty house where, in rainy season, they bailed out 6 or 7 buckets of water every night so it didn’t flood.

I asked him: didn’t you ever want to give up?

No. Never give up. I never, never give up.

His why was his children’s education. One of them was now going to university.

I said, thank you so much for the chat. You’ve inspired me today.

Your why has to be so strong that giving up doesn’t even come up.