People ask me, “How do I succeed?” Whatever it is they do, I say, “Go and find 20 ways of messing it up. By 21, you’ll be getting there.” Life is an adventure, go back with cuts, scars and bruises.
The lesson is, the rewards in life don’t always go to the biggest, or the bravest, or the smartest. The rewards go to the dogged; and when your going though hell, to the person who just keeps going.
A friend once asked me what qualities were needed for SAS. I would say to be self-motivated and resilient; to be calm, yet have the ability to smile when it is grim; to be unflappable, be able to react fast and to have an ‘improvise, adapt and overcome’ mentality.
There is little faith involved in setting out on a journey where the destination is certain and every step in between has been mapped in detail. Bravery, trust, is about leaving camp in the dark, when we do not know the route ahead and cannot be certain we will ever return.
I train five days a week hard – but it is short and sharp – 30 to 40 minutes of functional and pretty dynamic body-strength circuits, then I do a good yoga session on the sixth day, then I rest.
Textbook survival says stay still, don’t take any chances, wait for rescue. That’s a boring TV show. My thing was always, “Listen, shoelace, dead squirrel and no other way down this rock face. You can do this!”
I joined the Army at 19 as a soldier and spent about four and a half years with them. Then I broke my back in a freefall parachuting accident and spent a year in rehabilitation back in the U.K.
When I’m filming, survival requires movement. You need your energy, and you’ve got to eat the bad stuff, and survival food is rarely pretty, but you kind of do it. I get in that zone, and I eat the nasty stuff, but I’m not like that when I’m back home.
When I’m in ‘Man vs. Wild’ mode, it’s not pleasure. Every sensor is firing and I’m on reserve power all the time and I’m digging deep – and that’s the magic of it as well, and that’s raw and it’s great.
Textbook survival tells you to stay put. Stop. Wait for rescue. Don’t take any risks. But there’d been a whole host of survival shows like that and I didn’t really want to do that.
