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Yesterday I said there would be no more about the Haute Route but maybe just one more go. Please forgive me!

It will stay with me forever, the event I did at the weekend, just like the Outlaw in 2015, the 24 hour bike ride or the Marmotte.

In the blog I showed you the first video and here are day two and three.

What happened at the weekend was nine month’s worth of work (on and off).

The scheming started in November last year with the booking of the event and the panic and discussion of what kit we needed and how steep the hills were together with how we would travel and how we would tell our wives!

Over that time, with the help of my coach Simon McCarthy and my physio Carl Dunstan, we were able to put together a plan based around the initial strategy that was dropped in November 2017.

My plan was as follows:

1. To complete the ‘Haute Route Dolomites’
2. See number 1

It was not to win, or get a time, or do anything else. It was to complete.

The strategy then got broken down into months and weeks and days and sessions and hours and kit and nutrition and travel and rest and all those things that are so difficult to fit in around a life of someone who has actually got a proper job and a proper family and commitments to so many other people.

It would never be possible to manage this without an extraordinary team of people around; at work, at home and around the exercise. That’s part of building a strategy.

Getting the right chess pieces in the right place.

We had to overcome some significant, unexpected events and disasters, not least the injury to David a few weeks before which meant he couldn’t go, and the absence of one of our other friends who just didn’t turn up. For one reason or another I was also unable to take my physio Carl and that was a big loss, but in the end the plans from nine months ago and the revisiting of the plans and the changing of them together with the advice from people who knew much more about this than me got me through and the result was the videos above.

As always, there is some real satisfaction in the observance of a successful strategic plan and event and that’s where I sit now.

It also gives you one other thing…

It gives you the right…the opportunity to set another plan.

Learning what you learned from the previous one and building on it, cutting out some of the negative factors, replacing them with positives and taking the confidence and belief you have achieved from nailing one plan into nailing another.

If truth be told this is probably the bit I like the best (it should be the bit in the middle and I’m working on that)

The first thing would be a huge high level negotiation at home to see whether or not I can set a framework to do something else having promised that this would be the last one!! If that’s successful I can sit down and drink a lot of coffee with different people and build a plan for something extraordinary.

I guess in the end all the plan provides is hope, but isn’t hope the very best of things?

Blog Post Number: 1778