Life Without Limits, A (10 page)

It was a busy week, but Georgie and I spent a fair amount of it going on runs. One evening we returned to the hotel to find that we were late for the big dinner that was being attended by all the heads and secretaries of state. We couldn’t very well walk in through the foyer in our sweaty gear while the high-ranking dignitaries gathered in their penguin suits. Nor could we approach from the erupting volcano end, where the champagne was already being sipped. After a quick reconnoitre of which a double-0 agent might have been proud, we found a way into the hotel through the spa, shot up to our rooms and were soon chomping on canapés as if nothing had happened.

It was a familiar scenario. A few weeks later we went to the twelfth session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in New York, where I was to swig margaritas with Margaret Beckett. Georgie and I had both entered the Brooklyn Half-Marathon during the two-week stay. We got up at 5.30 a.m. every morning to run before our sixteen-hour day started, the UN negotiations stretching into the night. We would turn up at the 7.30 a.m. UK delegation meeting with red faces, freshly showered hair and a large bagel in our hands.

Running day in, day out with somebody is the quickest way to forge a friendship. For a start you’re talking together for an hour or two each time. You see each other at your rawest, with no make-up or fancy clothes, just Lycra, sweat and sometimes tears. There is no façade to hide behind. You’re running, it hurts and by the end of it you’re feeling fairly broken and laid out bare. In New York that year I suffered some gastro distress and fertilised Central Park as we went round, just to add extra spice to the mix. How could Georgie and I not become the best of friends after that?

We had a wonderful day at the Brooklyn Half-Marathon. I came second out of around 1,200 women (and sixty-seventh out of 3,000 overall). Georgie came twenty-fifth, and I screamed, ‘Go, girl!’ from the sidelines as she approached the end. She later bought me a pair of knickers (still got them) with the words GO GIRL emblazoned across the bum. Before every race since, she has texted me the same message. It has become a kind of mantra for us.

After my epiphany in Jeju, I decided once and for all that it was time to look for new work at grassroots level. It was also around then that I happened upon triathlon. I was visiting my friends Pete and Rachel in Birmingham. Rachel was a member of the Birmingham Running and Triathlon (BRAT) Club, so I went with her to their Sunday swim session. There I met Paul Robertshaw, a man always on the lookout for fresh talent, as chairman of the BRAT club and as a single man with a glint in his eye! Either way, I credit him with the direction my life was about to take.

‘Have you ever tried triathlon?’ he asked me at the poolside.

‘No.’

‘You should give it a shot.’

Rachel told him about my recent achievements as a runner, and the three of us talked about triathlon. His enthusiasm and offers of support were infectious, and I left for London that night determined to buy myself a road bike and to find out more about this new sport.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard of it. At the Serpentine Running Club I had met a girl called Elinor Rest who competed for Great Britain at the Age Group World Championships in Cancún, Mexico in 2002. This achievement had made an impression on me, but it had also brought home the fact that I was rubbing shoulders with proper athletes. Now, eighteen months later, I rang Ellie to pick her brains further. She ended up selling me her third-hand, yellow-and-black Peugeot. It looked like a bumble bee. Still got it.

I didn’t have a clue. It cost £300, which was a lot for me, and I just rode it as it was. No clip-in shoes, no bike fitting; I sat on it and pedalled.

My first race was the Eton Super Sprint on 16 May 2004, a short, sharp free-for-all in the shadow of Windsor Castle for enthusiasts of all standards. I came third in that first one, but won the next two I entered in June and July. My lace got caught round the crank of my bike in one of them, and I fell off; then I ran down the finish chute without realising there was another lap to go. So Muppet was still very much stalking my every move. But I was also getting pretty good at this swimming, biking, running lark, and these mishaps did not prevent me from winning. I was so happy – as proud as I’d ever been. I was awarded a Timex watch for each win, a little glass thingummy and a voucher for £40 (although entry was around £50).

Paul came to watch, and invited me to compete for the BRAT club. It didn’t matter, apparently, that I lived in London, and he put me in touch with another club member, Matt Hawcroft, who lived nearby. Suddenly, I couldn’t get enough of the training, especially the cycling. I would cycle home from work, head to Richmond Park and flog myself for three laps. But, as ever, there was no programme or structure. I just rode.

Under BRAT colours I entered the Milton Keynes Triathlon in July and the Bedford Triathlon in August. Both were Olympic distance, which is a 1.5km swim, a 40km bike ride and a 10km run. I came fourth at Milton Keynes and third at Bedford. I won a silver plate. The two girls who had beaten me had represented Great Britain at the Age Group World Championships. I knew then that I had a talent for triathlon. By that stage, though, developments on the work front were about to take me away on another adventure altogether.

6

Nepal

After the erupting volcano experience in Jeju, I started looking for some hands-on development work, and found myself drawn towards Nepal. On my travels through Asia in 2000, it was one country I hadn’t visited, bar a brief stop in transit at Kathmandu airport, where I’d met the most engaging Nepali. I’d made a decision then to revisit the country properly, which I did over New Year 2003. After that three-week stay, during which I trekked to Annapurna Base Camp, I fell in love with the place.

After investigating options on the internet, I was offered a job by a local Nepali NGO called Rural Reconstruction Nepal (RRN), run by a well-known political activist called Dr Arjun Karki. The salary was $80 a month.

My heart screamed yes, but when it came to the crunch the decision was difficult. For all of my frustrations with it, my job at Defra was a good one and I did enjoy it. What was more, the following year (2005) would see the UK hold the presidency of the G8 and the EU. This meant my job would be invested with an increased level of responsibility. No longer would we be feeding into EU documents, we would actually be drafting them. The hours would be long, but the career progression rapid, as Georgie was to find out because she took my job when I left, and thrived.

It was always at the back of my mind, even after I decided to go to Nepal. Should I have stayed? Later it occurred to me that if I had stayed and made a success of it, would I ever have become a professional triathlete? On these decisions hang more than you can ever know at the time.

In the end, I applied for a sabbatical and my request was accepted. On 9 September 2004, I headed to Nepal.

It’s easy to see why anyone would fall in love with Nepal, especially if they had a passion for the outdoors. It has some of the most awe-inspiring scenery in the world, and against the backdrop of the world’s highest mountains the local culture of temples, festivals and free-ranging animals is vivid in colour and personality.

There is a lot wrong as well, though. The country was in the midst of a civil war when I arrived. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was intent on overthrowing the corrupt ruling monarchy and turning the country into a republic. They would eventually succeed, but when I arrived the conflict was well into its ninth year. The atmosphere was fraught. The Maoists drew their strength from the vast constituency of poor in Nepal who had nothing to lose. They destroyed police stations, army barracks and the local infrastructure, extorting money from tourists and calling frequent strikes or
bandhs
, which brought cities and towns to a halt. The monarchical government, through the Nepalese Army, responded with intimidatory tactics. More than 10,000 people died during the course of the ten-year civil war. It was a dangerous place to be, particularly at RRN. Arjun, our boss, was on a list of political dissidents wanted by the government. While I was there he was put under house arrest for antagonising them, and towards the end of my stay, in 2005, we had to smuggle him out of the country.

RRN operated out of a ramshackle building with wires everywhere, much like all of the buildings in Kathmandu, other than those owned by the government and the embassies. It turned out RRN was the largest local NGO in Nepal. Apart from me, a British woman called Ruth and an Austrian called Bernard, all of the employees were Nepali. Everyone was incredibly welcoming, and threw myself into the work as a jack of all trades, overhauling the website, editing documents, writing policy proposals and chapters for books, applying for funding and, in time, managing my own project, which was called the Community Water, Sanitation and Health (CWASH) project.

I loved my job, particularly the first-hand project management experience with CWASH. During the UN conference in New York in 2004, I had attended a lecture from a man called Dr Kamal Kar, who challenged the traditional concept of development through his Community-Led Total Sanitation scheme. The scheme did away with grand projects of investment and modernisation in poverty-stricken regions, and concentrated on education and empowerment at grassroots level. It was aimed at helping people to help themselves. He made a huge impression on me, and I enjoyed some lengthy discussions with him afterwards. I set about trying to pilot his scheme through CWASH.

The project was focused on the remote, conflict-ridden district of Salyan, a few hundred miles west of Kathmandu. It was not uncommon for a village of a hundred people to share one or two toilets. Men thought nothing of defecating in the open. Women would do the same, although custom allowed them to do so only before dawn or after dark.

Everyone in a community was encouraged to go on transect walks, or ‘walks of shame’, in which they identified how the waste was finding its way into rivers, livestock, crops, hands and feet. It led to the calculation that each person was ingesting between ten and twenty grams of faeces every day. Feelings of shame and disgust would trigger a desire for change and discussions about how the situation might be improved. It was a process of empowerment from ground level up. It was the very opposite of what we were doing beneath the erupting volcano.

CWASH took me deep into the Nepali countryside. We would drive for ten hours in a jeep along rocky roads to visit communities in the direst poverty, torn apart by the civil war. It was painful to witness, but so invigorating to empower them to improve their lives.

Immediately on arrival in Kathmandu I started investigating the prospects of pursuing triathlon. Not good. The only pool in the city was a 50m cesspit, so swimming was out of the question. I ran every morning when I first arrived, but you were taking your life in your hands among the Wacky Races traffic, smog and rabid dogs. So I soon bought myself a mountain bike and I christened him Prem (
premi
is Nepalese for boyfriend). Around that trusty steed, who had already traversed the Himalaya with his previous owner, my social life took off.

The first person I met was this wonderful, very married German guy, Cornelius. We soon forged a deep, platonic relationship that involved cycling off through the forests of Shivapuri National Park, to the north of the city, being eaten by leeches and carrying our bikes along what was left of trails washed away by the monsoon season.

I also joined a group of cyclists – six or seven local guys and anyone else who fancied coming along – organised by a Nepali called Sonam. He is a biking institution in Kathmandu, and owns the best bike shop in the city, Dusk Till Dawn. Through that group I met three
didis
(‘sisters’ in Nepali), an Argentinian called Agustina (or Tina), an Australian called Helen and a German called Billi. Tina is one of the kindest and calmest people I have ever met. Even now, if I get stressed about something, I ask myself what Tina would do. Billi, meanwhile, is my soulmate. We could have been separated at birth, our attitudes and characters are so similar. She was out there as a freelance journalist and translator.

Billi and Tina are mountaineers (Billi has since summited three mountains higher than 8,000m, including Everest), and they invited me on an expedition during Dashain, which is a two-week festival in celebration of the family. The Nepalese calendar is full of festivals. They seem to have more holidays than work days. Teej was my favourite – the festival for women, where every married woman wears the scarlet sari she wore on her wedding day. All the festivals are dazzling spectacles of colour and vivacity. People dance in their jewellery and throw coloured paint and water over each other. The cows, which wander where they please throughout the city, are bedecked with garlands, and each wears a crimson
tikka
, or painted dot, on its forehead.

But for my first Dashain in Nepal, I went with Tina and Billi to Langtang, a region in the north of Nepal that borders Tibet. We took the rickety ‘bus’ from Kathmandu and, as usual, chose to sit on the top most of the way, rather than be stuck inside with vomiting children, chickens, goats and mountains of luggage. This particular journey was about twelve hours, though, which was a bit hard on the bum. We were aiming to summit an unconquered 6,000m peak. There were harnesses, ropes and crampons involved. Tina and Billi were fine, but I hadn’t got a clue. We were accompanied by our friend Namgya, who is a Sherpa. Unfortunately, an avalanche meant we didn’t make it to the top, but we were the first to try. A couple of years later the mountain was renamed Baden-Powell Scout Peak, and now they lead expeditions up it.