What's Your Personal Everest Story?

[Geoff Holt]

Welcome to the new Personal Everest social network site. The purpose of this site is for you to upload your Personal Everest stories. They may be Everest's you've already climbed, they maybe Everest's you've been planning for years but have never got around to. Either way, we'd love to hear from you so please upload your stories here.

[Olivia Stefanino]

Learning about Geoff's Personal Everest is such a humbling - yet inspiring - experience! I guess life - for each of us - is about one Personal Everest after another. Sometimes scaling the heights can seem dizzyingly euphoric and at others, we end up with a sense of "So what?".

In terms of creating the life of our dreams, it helps to focus on what we want rather than on what we don't want...common sense perhaps, but then common sense isn't commonly used! So, as a former journalist and currently a leadership consultant, I was delighted to be invited by a publisher to write a book! It was a dream come true. At least the invitation was a dream come true...actually producing the book was a different story.

I had six months to write "Be Your Own Guru - personal and business enlightenment in just 3 days" - and to be honest, for the first four months, I worked out many ways of how "not to write a book". With less than two months to go, something needed to shift...and fast!

One day, I was contemplating on why I was having such a struggle, and I came to realise that it was the quality of my thinking that was the problem. I had (very stupidly!) been focusing on struggling...and worrying about what would happen if I missed the deadline!

The penny dropped.

I decided then and there to spend an hour in meditation, focusing on the feeling I'd have when I held my finished book in my hands. After a few minutes, I felt a real buzz. Continuing to focus, the buzz grew into what I can only describe as an electrifying sense of excitement and creativity. Immediately, I knew how I was going to write the book...and over the next six weeks, my fingers flew over the keyboard and the manuscript was eventually delivered...on time.

But that was just the first Personal Everest. The game was then on to see if I could get it published (Capstone Publishing) outside the UK. And now, while it's available worldwide via Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc, it is also being translated into simple Chinese and Polish! But perhaps the biggest milestone was last March, when I was invited to Mumbai, India to launch a special edition of the book!

But the thing with achieving a Personal Everest is that it leaves you so hungry for more...

[Geoff Holt]

Hi Geoff,

My name is Heike. I listened to your amazing story last night at Burghfield Sailing Club and I just want to say thanks. You are so inspiring and it made me think a lot. Even normal,ablebodied people like me have their hurdles, or mountains to climb. They might not be big but they are still important.

A few years ago I discovered the importance of never letting age ,or disability, stop you from doing what you like, or achieving a goal. I was 42 then, a housewife and mother, with two wonderful boys aged 13 and 11. My 11 year old was interested in karate.He wanted to improve his confidence. One day we had a visit from a guy from a karate club and he promoted the whole thing very much as a family activity. So I signed up,too, and on the way to our first lesson I got so nervous that I crashed the car. Luckily nothing happened to the other car or driver, just our car had a very nasty dent and my legs were shaking even more. What was I doing at my age trying do do martial arts! I wasn't at all in any way fit, have never been a sporty person,and I felt too old for that. But the whole session was such fun and I got completely hooked! To my joy there were some other people there my age. So I set myself a goal: reaching Blackbelt! But sadly none of the people in the original group stuck it out, only my son and me. Last year I achieved my goal. It was not easy. A few times I nearly quit, but by then I was an instructor myself, and everytime I thought about giving up, the first thought in my head was:what would my son and my students think! I can't teach my son "stickability" if I don't stick to something worthwhile myself! I learned that often in life the goals you set yourself might start out as personal goals...it's all about you yourself...but it also affects a lot of other people. And sometimes you set out with a certain goal in mind and work towards it yet by doing so you achieve something else. At one time I was hald back from a grading and in order to reach my next level I increased my training. I started attending a different class twice a week. Three very nice and very young men took me under their wings and helped me with my sparring. I had no confidence in my sparring abilities, no good techniques and I just hated sparring. But sparring wasn't required for my grading, so I didn't set out to do too much about it then. After a while my sparring became so good that I totally lost this feeling of "being intimidated" . I got to really enjoy it, being so much more confident, that I wasn't even bothered about my next grading anymore. Just after my blackbelt grading last year we had a world championship in Birmingham,a two-day event with over a thousand copetitors from the UK, Australia, New Zealand and America. I was part of a sparring team( 5), we had to qualify for it in the first place, and we won Gold! We were all surprised, but especially me. I was the oldest in my team and I managed to get a good few points in.

Sometimes you set out to do something and you don't know where it's really leading you. You learn about yourself, your limitations, your capabilities, you need a lot of patience,too, mainly with yourself, all along the way, and for me? Starting karate as a bit of "familytraining" to encourage my son I ended up as an instructor and taking part in a world championship winning Gold!!

But most of all my reason for being there last night: I had definitely learned not to let my age get in the way of things. So last summer I went with my family( my husband is Irish) to a family reunion to the west of Ireland. Lahinch is a small seaside holiday resort with a brilliant surfbeach. And I learned to surf! By the end of the week I could catch more waves than I missed and I was able to stand on the board a good many times, if only for a few seconds. It was so thrilling! Nature provides the power and all you have to do is harness it. Here in Reading we have a very nice 70 year old neighbour who sails a lot and has

[Geoff Holt]

My personal everest is travelling 1500 meters round the school yard in my wheel chair on 26th of November.Everyone was cheering and saying well done as I went round the track 10 times in 26 minutes,it was a very special day for me.It was very difficult but all the children shouted and this helped me.I am 11 years old and live in a cottage 5 miles from Pwllheli.I live with mam, dad brother Dylan 9 sister Elin 7 and we have a 6 month old sheepdog called Dot.
Many people sponsored me to go round the track and we raised £3003.50 to spina bifda and hydrocephalus I felt very happy. My dad saw your special campervan with writing on it side with you coming down the lift last summer in Pwllheli, we were all sitting in the car waiting for mum she had gone to spar to shop and was taking ages as usual.
My next challenge is to finish the 15 miles I have been doing since march and I have only got 3 miles to go.
Here are some photos of me doing the challenge.
best wishes
Gwen

[Geoff Holt]

Dear Geoff, There are some similarities between you and me in how we came to be disabled. In my case I was somewhat older as I was 27 years old at the time. I was taken into hospital and within twenty-four hours I was completely paralysed and unable to communicate with anybody. Though it was not an accident but an ailment called Guillian-Barre syndrome. It was 10 months later that I came out of hospital to a wheel chair and a further year before I was walking about on crutches. I was a boat builder and it was obvious that I was never going to build boats again. At the time of my admission into hospital I had two children under school years, my need to provide for my family and to give them a good start in life was always on my mind. It was four years after my illness that I had gained enough strength to work; this took the shape of becoming a pub licensee, and this I was for twenty years. By that time my children had flown the nest, and thankfully decided that pub life was not for them. I left to open a water garden in the grounds of a thatched cottage that I had bought whilst I was at the pub. Some four or five years after that I sold it to one of my stepsons. My first wife had run off with one of the customers while I was at the pub. When I was 59, I had another dose of Guillan-Barre, this time not so bad, just 7 months in hospital, though I did loose some more movement and strength. It was about this time that I saw a picture of a Challenger on the front of a disabled drivers magazine, and I knew that this was a boat that I could sail. I contacted the address given and they promised to send to a list of where I could go sailing. There was nowhere between this side of Southampton or until you got to the other side of Weymouth! I thought brilliant; here we are in one of the premier yachting centres in the country and nowhere for disabled people to go sailing. I thought I had better do something about it. I went up to Eastleigh to see Julian Mandiwall, and he said to me, if you get one years running cost up together I will get you a loaned boat. I buzzed around Lymington to all the yacht related industries and the town and district councils, when I collected enough I managed to persuade the council to allow the sailing club to make another entrance into their dinghy park from the car park. At about that time I wrote to the Lymington Times a letter asking like-minded people to attend a meeting at the Town Sailing Club. That was about eleven years ago. A few things have happened between now and then, we started sailing at Spinnaker Yacht club as well at Lymington after about three years we realised it was to much to run both places as one group and that was how New forest Sailability started with Eric Blyth taking over as the Chairman. And me, just to liven things up a bit about four or five years ago I had a hart attack and had a double hart bypass. Have I had a personal Everest, I don’t think so, but my daughter has had two successful carers separated by having three children, She is now a senior occupational therapist at Bournemouth Hospital and my son who will be fifty this month is a professor of Geochemistry at Southampton University. Personal Everest, no, but maybe about two or three personal Snowdon’s. Hope to see you and your wife at our annual dinner on the 12th February. Will send you details. Brian.

[Tracy Sortwell]

I think that I've achieved at least one Personal Everest, have one planned and there are probably several that are out there but unknown to me at the moment, simply because I haven't considered them. But none of them will ever match Geoff's achievement of sailing around Great Britain and are probably more like mole hills rather than Everest!

The Completed One
I was 18 when the first London Marathon happened. At that time, I was a reasonably successful club track and field athlete, specialising in Long Jump and 100mts Hurdles. A number of people with little obvious knowledge of what is required to run a marathon asked me if I was going to do it - after all I was an athlete and this was a race - so I must be interested...... I politely informed them that it wasn't something I was planning at the time, but might do it when I retired from the track or when I turned 40!
So when at the age of 40 I was offered a free ( sponsored by Flora and the WI ) but late place on the 2003 London Marathon - I had to get my running shoes on. Most of my family and friends thought I was completely mad - I had stopped competitive athletics some 7 years before, had never run further than 5km (Race for Life) and had only just started to go to the local gym as I had realised how unfit I had become.
Well after only 12 weeks of training - on 13th April 2003 at the age of 41 and 5 days (so still nearly 40!) I set off with 32,000 mad crazy, but far better prepared than me marathon runners. Did I finish - you bet, didn't run all the way, just to the 16 mile marker and then walked, jogged and talked to spectators - who were great. My target was 6 hours - and I finished in 5.54.34. I still can't believe I actually did it!

The Planned Personal Everest
I am currently in the final year of a degree in Performing Arts. My major project is setting up a community group of disabled, sensory impaired and able bodied to perform a short drama peice entitled "Why Can't I?" Resulting from this I hope to form a Theatre company in Peterborough with the name Limitless Theatre which will specialise in putting on productions with disabled, sensory impaired and able bodied people working together.
From what I've learnt already it will not only be the disabled community that I need to persuade to come on board, but also the theatre/venue administrators and audiences.