Joining the dots

Trying to remember the Chinese word for something
or other. But where will it lead?

Today I had lunch with my counterpart in the Hong Kong learning and development team of another international law firm.  Simon is unassuming: quiet, thoughtful and understated.  You'd never guess that this year he swam from Hong Kong to Macau, 35km across one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, setting a new world record in the process. Simon has just extended his stay in Hong Kong by another year and now works a four day week. He spends his non-work day studying for a Master's degree in psychology and is starting a not-for-profit initiative to teach domestic helpers how to swim. Our conversation meandered, as it tends to when you're talking to someone interesting. Towards the end he asked me where I go from here. What's next? Where do I want all this lead me? 

An interesting question.  The short answer is I don't know. At the moment I'm having too much fun to think seriously about what the future holds - at least in career terms.  Without much thought I could give several possibilities - a more senior role with HSF, a 'head of' role somewhere, my boss's job one day, freelance consultancy.  Or perhaps a year or two off work - house husbandry, full time father, renovate a house or two.  As I was offering up these disparate possibilities I was reminded of the story Steve Jobs told students during his Stanford University commencement address some years ago about joining the dots. 

Jobs tells about the time he dropped out of college, uncomfortable with wasting his adoptive parents' hard earned cash on an expensive education that wasn't teaching him anything.  As Jobs tells it, he 'dropped in' - liberating himself from a fixed curriculum, he would sleep on friends' floors and attend whichever classes looked interesting. His days were spent sitting at the back of lecture theatres listening, absorbing, thinking about whatever captured his imagination on any given day.  During this time he became obsessed with a series of handwritten posters appearing around campus - each itself a beautiful calligraphic work of art.  The posters led him to join a calligraphy class, through no desire greater than curiosity and the fact that it seemed - in that moment - something worth doing for its own sake. Years later when Apple were producing the first Macintosh operating system - the daddy of all 'windows' type graphical user interface systems - he insisted that users should be able to choose from a wide variety of fonts.  "But why?" his bemused software engineers would ask him, "its just a computer. You're just typing." Steve Jobs knew differently. In his view you were no more "just typing" when you sat down to write at a Mac keyboard than you would be "just writing" when you sit down  to craft a handwritten letter, a poem, or a beautiful piece of calligraphy. Writers were free to choose their own handwriting and in his view it should be no different just because the medium is keyboard and screen rather than pen and paper.  But this story wasn't about fonts or handwriting, it was about joining the dots.  His point was that when he took that calligraphy class he had no idea that many years into the future he would use the knowledge, appreciation and artistic sensibility of his calligraphy class to redefine personal computing. It was only afterwards that he could join the dots. 

Earlier this year Anita and I debated the merits or otherwise of enrolling Lara in a pre-school nursery programme that would be conducted 60% of the time entirely in Mandarin Chinese.  Its a notoriously difficult language to learn as an adult, yet as a three year old Lara seemingly picks it up with ease, happily singing to herself, counting to ten, and pointing out to us the Mandarin words for household objects.  But will she learn enough for it to be of use in her future? Will she study at SOAS, or grow up bi-lingual? Will it lead to a career in international law? Or as a translator at the UN? Or even an MI6 spy? Will she return to the UK in a few years and forget everything she's learned? 

Who knows. And frankly, who cares.  Only when Lara looks backwards fro her future will she know whether she can join these and myriad other dots.  For now, they're random, and I'm convinced that's the way it should be.  The future is unknowable, and it's pointless trying to predict it.  Let's stick to whatever feels like it's worth doing in the moment, for its own sake. Or for no other reason than curiosity and adventure. 

Slow Down!

Lara and Iliya take it slow, Chiang Mai, October 2014.

In July I turned 37. Anita asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday and on a whim I said yoga.  I'm not sure why, it just appealed. Perhaps I'm becoming more aware of my stiff and creaky body when I ease myself out of bed the morning after a big day of exercise. Perhaps its something I read about Ryan Giggs attributing his longevity as a footballer to Yoga (and look what he achieved - ON the field at least). Whatever it was, Anita booked us in for a free taster session and we dutifully trooped down to Pure Yoga in Causeway Bay for Dana's Hatha class.  In a nutshell: the class was great; Dana was very forgiving; we're both hooked; we signed up to a year's membership.  But the thing that blew me away more than anything was how it forced us to slow down. 

I have said it before in this blog: life is fast. Hong Kong life is particularly fast. With so much to see, do and experience, I worry that I won't fit it all in. We fill our mornings and our evenings, our weekends and our calendars.  Yet inside the yoga studio - no sound, no talking, no phones - life slows down. Breathing slows. Movement slows. It feels almost guiltily indulgent. 

Don't misunderstand me: yoga is hard.  I sweat profusely. My body protests at the contorted positions I ask it to adopt. My legs scream in lactic-acid-induced pain after a couple of minutes of Warrior II. There can be no mistaking that it is a thorough workout.  Yet at the same time it is undeniably slow - in stark contrast to so much of life. And perhaps therein lies the appeal. 

In his seminal book "In Praise of Slow", Carl Honore uses Yoga of an example of the counter-intuitive benefits of taking things, well, slowly.  Western exercise philosophy tells us that fast is right, fast is best.  Yet much eastern philosophy says the opposite. Yoga, Tai Chi, and even 'fast' martial arts like Aikido and Karate are based on an underlying philosophy of slowing things down and being aware in the moment - what would currently be labelled with the buzzword 'mindfulness'. 

I can't rate Honore's book highly enough and I'd urge anyone who feels their life is speeding out of control to buy a copy and enjoy a leisurely few hours indulging yourself in his wisdom.  The idea behind going slow isn't to become a slacker, or a layabout, or to be lazy for laziness's sake. Sometimes one needs to go fast, sometimes slow. But Honore urges us to get away from the idea that fast is always best. Its about balance, about finding the right speed for our lives in each moment - what musicians would call the tempo giusto.

Honore's central point is this: we have been conditioned to equate speed with productivity. In our drive to be productive, efficient and competitive we strive constantly to achieve more in less time - none more so that in the workplace, but increasingly at home and in our leisure time.  Yet as Honore points out, this equation is fundamentally flawed: "when everyone takes the fast option, the advantage of going fast vanishes, forcing us to go faster still. Eventually we are left with an arms race based on speed. And we all know where arms races end up: in the grim stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction."

Nothing, and no-one, is immune form the 'fast is best' mentality - not even children: in the East, and increasingly in the West education starts ever earlier and involves cramming more and more into early years. Children are in a race - often driven by their parents - to hit milestones earlier: talking, walking, reading, writing, swimming, riding a bike, or learning their times tables. Earlier this year Anita and I found ourselves comparing pre-schools for Lara (who had just turned three) based in part on their academic curricula - what would she be learning? And by when? Yet perhaps we should take a leaf out of Plato's book, who several hundred years before the birth of Christ recognised that "the most effective form of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things."

Whether its eating, exercising, reading, working, raising children or having sex, Honore argues there is always a benefit in going slow. Do less; give yourself more time. Focus on quality over quantity.  Its a mantra echoed by all sorts of people, including the dean of Harvard University's undergraduate school - hardly a bastion of laziness or under-achievement. 

Its only when we slow down parts of our life that we make time for the other parts that matter - taking the kids to school, reading them a story, enjoying a slow meal or a good novel, reading, thinking, or simply daydreaming. As Einstein always maintained, we're at our creative best when we give ourselves time to do nothing at all. But perhaps the last word should go to Ghandi:

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."

You've got to make a change...

My job has a strong organisational change dimension to it. This makes my job paradoxically both interesting and challenging for one reason: organisational change is hard won. Whilst organisations consist to some degree of processes, systems and rules, they largely consist of people and behaviours.  And behavioural change is particularly hard won because given enough time behaviours become habits. We all know that old habits die hard: a cliché, but also a truism.  Depending on which dictionary you prefer, a habit can be defined as "a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up", "an established disposition of character" or "an acquired behaviour pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary".  

In fact, behaviours become so engrained over time that we start to confuse behavior with personality –  we persuade ourselves that it is not just what we do, it's who we are.  "I can't change who I am" is a familiar refrain to anyone concerned with behavioural change.  To which the response is: true – but you can change what you do. 

A fundamental issue that needs to be understood by anyone wishing to change behavior is that "making a change" implies it is a one-off event. That in itself is misleading.  Change is a process, something that has to happen continuously, over time, with a degree of consistency and discipline until the new behavioural state is attained.  Some studies have suggested that 30 continual days' worth of the desired behaviour is the minimum required to engrain it as a new habit.

A recent article in Harvard Business Review suggested we could do worse than look to the painter Pablo Picasso for inspiration. Picasso famously said his approach to becoming great at his art was to ensure that he practiced continuously.  For him this meant committing to painting every day. Crucially though Picasso said that rather than have to decide, every day, that he would paint, he decided just once that he would paint every day, and then consciously and deliberately structured his daily routine in such a way that he could easily do so.

This logic can be applied to anything: whether its committing to exercising more, keeping in better touch with friends and family, interacting more with colleagues or giving regular feedback at work.  Constructing a routine, putting in place rituals and setting up your working day so that these things happen as part of your routine as a matter of course mean that behavioural change needn't become a battle of willpower or a matter of self-discipline.  Some of the most famous "change" programmes in the world involve twelve steps, but maybe three steps are all that's required: first, decide what you want to do more of, less of or differently; second, construct a routine and introduce rituals so that it becomes easy for you to do that. Third: enjoy the feeling of change.

Willpower and discipline or routine and ritual? I'd say less willpower is required than we might think, but perhaps a wee bit more creative thinking.   

So the question is, what will you change? 

Reinhold Messner's six lives.

This genuinely feels like a different life - not better,
or worse, but certainly different. Young, free and
climbing in the Pyrenees some time in 2006.

I'm home alone this week. Anita, Lara and Iliya are visiting the Johns clan in Traverse City for two weeks and, short on holiday, I'm limited to joining them for the second week.  What to do?! Faced with some rare time alone I am, as my MBA-holding friend Paul might say,  suffering from analysis paralysis.

It isn't actually even that long since I was last home alone.  Anita took the girls to the US last August, which was less than a year, but seems like a lifetime ago. So today, for the first time in almost a year, I slept in until 9am.  I woke feeling dreadful! I think my body has genuinely adapted to 6.45am starts.  I've realised that this will be a weekend of other strange sensations for me: reading a novel during daylight hours, lazily digesting the morning paper over a bacon sandwich and a coffee in a local cafe, sunbathing without having to supervise small children, simply doing nothing without any pressing requirement to do anything, writing my blog. And there's an equally strange - and certainly lonelier set of experiences to be had - coming home to a silent house and not being able to ask Anita about her day, walking into Iliya's room at 10pm to find an empty cot, waking up this morning to my alarm clock rather than Lara asking for a mango smoothie.  

Time on my own has given me a glimpse back to a previous life - a quieter, more relaxed, more carefree time before children and responsibility and deadlines and bedtimes.  But that life was also less entertaining, less challenging, certainly less full and definitely less fulfilling.  A friend asked me recently whether life with children was better or worse than before.  He's expecting his first child later in the year  so I had to think carefully about my answer. I decided in the end just to be honest. In someways it is worse: less spontaneity, less flexibility, more planning, more responsibility.   But in infinitely more ways it is better - specifically it is richer in ways I still can not adequately define, but can only really be experienced.    

Life goes in stages, and one of the best things about life is knowing that whatever stage you're in right now, you can choose at any time to move into another stage. And - and this is the best bit - you have no idea what that next stage will be like. It can be anything you want!  Reinhold Messner, the famous alpine and Himalayan pioneer, mountain legend and all-round grumpy Italian famously declared that he would live six lives.   Life one was his youth - his rock climbing life.  Life two was his high-altitude life, completed when he realised the pursuit of ever-more challenging and extreme mountaineering (including the first ascent of Mount Everest without oxygen - completed solo no less) was probably only going to end one way. Life three was spent as a polar explorer;  life four was devoted to investigating the myth of the Himalayan Yeti; and life five was lived as a politician, serving a term as a member of the European parliament.   Messner's sixth life will, apparently, be his retirement, which will include amongst other things building a museum and possibly crossing a desert.  An eclectic life-career to say the least.

I like Messner's philosophy because it tells us that we can do whatever we want, and be whoever we want to be.  And that thing - that person, that identity - is dynamic, not fixed.  It can change over time, and that change is within our control.   I don't know how many lives I've had - the first life of my youth, spent studying and learning (often the hard way); my second life as a city worker, lawyer and materialist; my third life of my late twenties and early thirties spent falling in love, getting married, learning to become a climber and a father; and my current life, in which I take my career in a totally new direction, move to Asia and strive to keep everything in balance.  I'm hoping this life will also involve more flexible working, more exploring Asia, more climbing and more adventure.  My next life will hopefully involve buying a mountain retreat, spending as much time with my family in the outdoors as possible, and continuing to learn.  As to what comes after that - who knows.  That is I guess what makes life so exciting.  As Reinhold Messner himself said, if the outcome of the journey is known, then it isn't an adventure. 

Fortunate

Is she making her own luck?

Anita pointed out the other day how lucky we are to be in the position we are in: living in a great city, earning enough to enjoy a comfortable way of life and two beautiful healthy children to share it all with.  I disagreed: I firmly believe you make your own luck - or at least, you take your own opportunities as life presents them to you. In other words, we are where we are primarily because of hard work, not chance.  In idle moments I sometimes trace back my own personal history to work out how I got to where I am (this isn't narcissism: I never expected even five years ago that I'd be living in Hong Kong and coaching high performing lawyers for a living - it is a genuine source of bafflement).  My path no doubt has much in common with many others: working hard to get decent high school and then A-level results led to the opportunity to get a decent degree from a great university, and then a fantastic job at a leading law firm. It was all looking quite conventionally linear until around 2011 when my career path started taking some unexpected twists and turns - all absolutely for the better as it turns out. But thinking in this way allows me to reassure myself that I'm in control - that I am making choices and that Anita and I should not be ashamed to take credit for the work we've put in and the sacrifices we've made to build the life we now live. 

But perhaps I'm missing the point.  The grades would surely have been harder to come by had my parents not instilled in me the value of hard work and perseverance and pushed me towards academic success. Taking things back a step, had I not had the good fortune to have been born into a democratic meritocracy in the late twentieth century rather than, say Bangladesh in the 1950s, things would no doubt have worked out even more differently.  Maybe I'm dancing on the head of a pin, or playing semantic games, but whilst I maintain that you make your own luck, I will concede that on a fundamental level I, like many of my generation born into western capitalist democracies in the late 1970s, am very fortunate indeed.  

This all came to mind because I was clearing some old draft emails at work and found the following. I recall drafting it some time in early 2012, obviously intending to post it on my blog, but for some reason never did. I have a rule never to work on my blog at work - I obviously felt strongly enough about this to make an exception. Anyway, here it is now, in un-edited form.

"Another ten years then. I guess that's it."
 Those were the words of Bonnett Taylor, currently residing in the Tower Street Adult Correctional Facility in Kingston, Jamaica.   He has already served 15 years of a life sentence for murder. He was 27 when he went into prison. This morning when I telephoned him I spoke to a 42 year old.  He'll be 52 before he has any chance of early release.   The phone call took place in the hallway outside Court Number 3 in the Supreme Court building on London's Parliament Square, where moments before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had, by a majority of four to one, dismissed his final appeal. We had reached the end of the road.
 We had tried to argue – unsuccessfully – that his conviction was unsafe.  That key evidence from a crucial witness was never made available to the jury at his original trial.  That in the absence of that evidence there was nothing to contradict the account of the only alleged eyewitness to the murder. That there was a real possibility that the jury, who convicted after only ten minutes' deliberation, might have reached a different verdict had they heard the missing evidence. That whilst that real possibility remains, the conviction must, by definition, be unsafe.  With the exception of one, the Justices disagreed, and at 11.07am I called Bonnet to tell him we'd lost. It was a call I don't want to have to make again anytime soon. I had no idea what to say, except that we tried our best, and that I was sorry.
 Did he do it? I have no idea. Maybe. Am I convinced he is innocent? If I am being honest, I can't be 100% sure. Am I convinced he's guilty? Absolutely not.  In the taxi back to the office I tried to think back to what I have done in the last fifteen years, a period which represents almost my entire adult life.  Or what I will do in the next ten years whilst Bonnett awaits his first opportunity for parole. What a charmed life we lead.
 One final observation: before hanging up, Bonnet thanked me, repeatedly, for everything I and the rest for the legal team had done for him.  I don't know whether I would have the presence of mind, having just been told that there is no possibility whatsoever of being released from prison for another ten years, to say thank you. 

Notes on the Hong Kong climbing life.

Lara tests herself on F7a+. Tung Lung island, Hong Kong.

The weather has taken a turn for the worse in Hong Kong.  I appreciate that if you are reading this in the UK - or even Northern Michigan -  you will have little sympathy for my plight.  And yes, if I’m being honest we’re not experiencing floods, hurricane-strength winds, blizzards or endless days of torrential rain.  But I suppose its all relative - after three months of consistently warm days and blue skies, and a lot of chat about this being the start of summer, a week of persistent drizzle and temps in the low teens has provoked a mild sense of outrage.  It is amazing how quickly perceptions change - in the UK I would routinely accept periods of weeks, if not months, of not climbing outside due to the weather.  Now I find myself irritated that last week's saturday morning trip to the crag - a newly instituted outing for Anita and I that is quickly becoming part of our routine - was thwarted by wind, rain and general dampness. 

High up on any list of Great Things About Climbing must be the places it takes you to. A sea-cliff in South-West England, a freezing blue-sky autumn morning in the Peak District, an alpine north wall in Italy, Yosemite Valley in spring, the Arapilles or Blue Mountains of Australia, Kentucky's Red River Gorge - climbing gifts us opportunities to see all of these places from a perspective generally denied to the masses. Our move to Asia has opened up new vistas - from beach-side limestone sport cliffs in Thailand to newly-discovered areas of China, Vietnam and Laos, to granite crags overlooking central Hong Kong skyscrapers. Being able to share these places with Anita and hopefully, in due course, with Lara and Iliya, is a joy I don’t think I’ll ever tire of. 

When its not raining, Hong Kong is a pretty good climbing venue - at least for a city state of seven million people.  Within a ten minute car ride of our apartment there must be four or five different venues boasting everything from beginner slab climbs at F4 to world class F8a+ sport-climbing test-pieces. There is, at least when its dry, no excuse not to climb outside. I really ought to be climbing in the high sevens. I’d better start trying. 

My efforts to get strong are not helped by the fact that Hong Kong is not a place for morning people.  I officially start work at 9.30am but unless I’m out on my bike I’ll generally try to get into the office around 8.45 to deal with overnight emails from London. I am, usually, alone - it seems that whilst Hong Kongers work long hours that generally means late nights rather than early starts. This mentality extends to my local bouldering wall, which opens for business at noon. In London my twice-weekly pre-work bouldering sessions were a key part of my routine - the unpleasantness of the 6.30am mid-winter cycle to the wall always outweighed by the joy of espresso-fuelled climbing sessions with friends whilst most people were still in bed. Best of all, I could climb for two hours, do a day’s work and still pick Lara up from the child-minder.  Now I generally try to fit in two midweek evening sessions a week at the local wall, where the enjoyment is tempered to a degree by the knowledge that I’ve missed Lara and Iliya’s bedtime. I am plagued by feelings of not having the balance quite right. 

Unless you exclusively boulder, or you are Alex Honnold, then climbing is partly about partnerships.  Since entering the world of live-in domestic help Anita and I have been reacquainting ourselves with our pre-children life, including climbing together.  In London, a night out together meant a babysitter - if we were lucky a freebie from our downstairs neighbour. A midweek night out was for a special occasion, not to be squandered on a night in a sweaty climbing wall.  These days, date night at the wall with Anita - my first and still my favourite climbing partner - followed by a bowl of noodles in our local Vietnamese is a regular fixture. 

It is one of climbing's peculiar paradoxes that grades simultaneously matter and don’t matter.  I climbed F7b in Thailand.  Is F8a really that far away? Then why does F6b+ on my local crag feel so hard? Chasing the numbers is addictive, certainly, as anyone familiar with the Great Grade Obsession will tell you.   What’s your redpoint grade? What can you on-sight? If you’ve climbed one F8a does that make you an  F8a climber?  Do we care? Should we care? I spend two nights a week testing myself to exhaustion against a selection of small coloured plastic blobs arranged on an overhanging wall by a complete stranger. I am currently pushing V5, a full grade below my limit in London. I reassure myself by calculating that grades here are approximately one harder than in London, where I’d be sending V6 by now.  Why this matters is totally beyond me. 

I love that on one level climbing is an utterly pointless pastime, and that may just be the best thing about it.  Of course, technical difficulty is only one part of the climbing equation.  For me beauty trumps difficulty every time. Or maybe the two are inextricably linked:  as the climbs get harder the holds generally get smaller, the faces blanker and the lines take on an ever greater aesthetic appeal.  And whilst I may not be much of an athlete, I am definitely an aesthete. 

Such were the things I pondered as my Cathay flight CX614 began its descent into Chep Lak Kok yesterday afternoon at the end of a three day work trip to Bangkok.  It was warm and it didn’t rain, but there’s only so much time I can spend in airplanes, taxis, restaurants, meeting rooms and hotel gyms.  This morning is saturday and it looks like it’s going to be dry in Hong Kong. Lara has her spanish class, Lea is taking Iliya to the supermarket, and Anita and I have no plans for the morning.  And that can mean only one thing...

Moving.

Outside: right where you want to be on new year's day.
Big Wave Bay, Hong Kong.

I came across this great little film the other day.  It features Will Gadd, a Canadian rock and ice climber, talking about the importance of moving.  Not moving from one country to another, but the need to keep moving - literally - rather than staying still. Running, cycling, climbing, kayaking, hitting the gym, even just going for a walk - in his words, "the type of movement is less important than moving itself... a day spent on the sofa should be a welcome anomaly, not than a way of life". The film is short, and definitely worth a look. It's inspiring to me mainly because his circumstances are not a million miles from my own. He may be sponsored - by Red Bull amongst others - but he has a wife and children and works for a living, in his case through writing, teaching, coaching, guiding and blogging.  As Gadd himself says, "I'm 46 years old. a middle aged guy. A dad. Not a youth, not an action figure." 

The film really struck a chord with me because since about early September of this year - ever since I came back from Italy, life was all about moving to Hong Kong, and all the necessary logistical challenges that involved. Planning, list-making, clearing, packing, stressing, travelling, settling, finding our way around a new city, starting a new job, meeting new people and generally getting to grips with our new life. All of that left little time for actually getting out there and moving. As a result I started to feel increasingly lethargic and, well, lazy.  My newly purchased road-bike sat unused in my office - I found I was too busy to find the time to buy pedals, shoes and a helmet - and my excuses to my co-workers about why  I owned a bike that I wasn't actually using started to sound increasingly lame.

But by Christmas things had definitely taken a turn for the better.  We now feel established in our new apartment, we've met a few locals down at the climbing wall, my work travel schedule has calmed down and some routine is slowly returning to our lives.  Its dawning on us just what a great place this is to live in terms of getting into the outdoors. In the last few weeks we've been hiking, running bouldering and sport climbing - all without having to travel more than an hour from our apartment. We spent boxing day on a beach and new year's eve climbing at a crag five minutes from where we live.  Santa very kindly brought me some pedals, shoes, a helmet gloves and a wind-jacket for my bike (thanks Anita, mum and Veejay!) and I've been getting out for some early morning rides to the coast of increasing length, difficulty and painfulness.  On new year's eve I cycled for an hour, went to work, dashed home, packed my climbing gear and spent three hours with Anita struggling to figure out the crux moves on a stiff F6c climb. I ended the day watching fireworks from the roof of our building with grazed arms, bleeding elbows, sore fingers and aching legs.  I couldn't have been happier. On new year's day we went for a four hour hike over a couple of peaks in one of the island's multiple country parks and last week spent a blissful week climbing limestone sport routes straight off a beach in Thailand.  

Over here I've realised it is particularly easy to throw oneself into work. Hours spent in the office, commitment to the cause, career advancement, monetary gain, personal wealth - all of these things are valued highly in Hong Kong.  So I keep telling myself that the value of moving outweighs all of these things by an order of magnitude.  I'm sitting here writing this on the first day of 2014 thinking about the possibilities ahead. Tomorrow I'll get up at 7am, get Iliya up for her morning feed, sort Lara out with her breakfast, and head out on my bike for a ninety minute ride over the steepest hills I can find. If I'm feeling brave I may cycle up to the top of Victoria peak, a ride I've been putting off for a while - and have dubbed "pain for breakfast".   When I'm an hour in, facing the third climb, legs burning, lungs bursting and wondering whether the next corner is the last before the top, that's when I'll know I'm really living.