Six weeks in (General news)

Friday 02 December 2011 01:56PM

The six weeks since Aaron was born have been pretty amazing.

Before the birth I was assailed with stories and advice from all corners. What perplexed me was that most of the advice seemed to focus on the negatives of parenthood:

- “You’ll not get your ‘life’ back for eighteen years” - “Get some sleep now because you’ll be missing it in a few months’ time” - “You won’t be able to do any of the climbing/running/skiing things, ever again”

etc, etc. You get the picture. I started to wonder why anyone ever has a second child if their memories of the first were so difficult.

Thankfully there were others who would tell me what a wonderful experience being a parent (and specifically a dad) was. My natural reaction to impending parenthood was one of excitement, so I tried to listen more to the latter group of people and less to the first. Most encouraging were a few hardcore climbers who were completely positive about their experiences as dads: Nick Colton told me having babies was “delicious” and Bruno Sourzac, who I met on an international winter meet a few years ago, told me a few months before the birth of his first child, in response to my question about whether he had any adventures planned for the near future “my girlfriend is pregnant, I sink zis is a big adventure, non?” Nick was, in his day, one of the best British alpinists in a generation of greats (and he’s still pretty handy), and Bruno similarly predisposed to full-on adventure. If there’s one group of people that value freedom highly it’s elite mountaineers, so coming from these two this encouraged me no end.

I’m thankful to say that so far it’s been all I hoped it might be and more. For sure life has changed, but in many ways it’s changed for the better – there’s less faffing around and procrastinating, next to no TV and a bringing into sharp relief the things in life that are most important – time spent with my wife, time spent with my new baby, time spent training, racing and in the mountains and time spent working on my PhD.

I’ve managed to keep training well since the birth, with only a couple of unplanned rest-days due to exhaustion/sleep deprivation, and am feeling fit and looking forward to the coming season of ski-mountaineering races. This starts for me in late January with a couple of low-key races, if there is enough snow, in the Vosges mountains (the closest mountains to Brussels), followed by jumping straight in at the other end of the racing spectrum at the European Championships in Pelvoux (Ecrins), where I spent much of last winter.

I know I’ve got it pretty easy when it comes to keeping the training going through fatherhood – a job (my PhD) that is about as flexible as they come, a wife who the closest she gets to nagging me is kicking me out of the door at 3pm to make sure I get some training in before it gets dark and a baby who sleeps relatively well at nights and is never too difficult the rest of the time. I’ve also been lucky to get sponsored by Chariot Carriers, and I’ve been using one of their buggys a fair bit already for easy runs (need to keep it smooth for Aaron while he’s small so nothing too fast for now), and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how little it holds you back on a run. I feel proud that my little boy has currently done far more miles in the Chariot with me running than he has done in a car.

On the running front, after many false starts and bureaucracy I seem to have found a good group of runners to train with and finally managed to compete in a Belgian cross country race. I picked a tough one for a debut, one of the international Lotto Crosscup series. I wasn’t last, but I wasn’t very near the front either… Still, I seem to be improving at running on the flat so hopefully that will help out in the mountains too. Having a bit of speed in the legs is never a bad thing.

So back to parenthood: the negative things that people focus on – less time for yourself, less sleep, lots of shit, wee and general mess, are of course all true, but there’s enough joy sprinkled in there that those aren’t the things that you finish each day remembering.

To me it feels a little like alpine climbing – there are times when it is exhausting, when you wish it would stop or when you feel like you can’t cope. But overwhelmingly the experience is remarkable and filled with wonder. When you talk to people about climbing the north face of the Grandes Jorasses they don’t usually say “oh it was terrible, I hardly slept at all, I was cold and hungry and scared the whole time”. They usually say “yeah the Walker Spur is an amazing route, the climbing is so good, the view from the summit is incredible, we had one bit that was a bit tricky but we got round it like this…”. I’m trying to cultivate the same attitude to parenthood!

Postscript: By popular demand here’s a collection of some of the best baby photos so far including some new ones.