Warrior Training (20 page)

A perfect day for trekking on Mount Kilimanjaro.

I stood there a moment and examined the cliffs, my heart beating hard. The weight and speed of that rock was one of the most powerful things I'd ever witnessed. I felt okay so I walked back to the ice and touched it.

Yep, the ice is hard and cold
, I thought.
No different from the stuff in the freezer. You're an idiot
.

Access to the summit via the Arrow Glacier was closed for several months in 1996 after three Western climbers were killed by a rockfall. Sometimes people contribute to their own demise, but sometimes, despite the utmost planning and care, Mother Nature just wins out.

We went to bed early as we knew we'd have to set off in the middle of the night. With the sun gone, the temperature had dropped to well below freezing. Col had to go to the toilet, but venturing outside meant throwing on several layers of clothing.

‘Just hang your bum outside the tent,' I said. ‘There's a fly, so no one will see.'

‘You reckon?'

‘Yeah, go for it.'

I waited until I heard the trickle of fluid hitting gravel before calling out to one of our guides: ‘Hey, Thomas, can you come here, please? Colleen wants to show you something.'

Col was mortified and the casual trickle soon turned into a fire hydrant as she forced the fluid out and dived into her sleeping bag.

Colleen dived back into her sleeping bag after our guide, Thomas, nearly caught her in a compromising position.

‘What's up, Mr Keith?' said Thomas.

‘Nothing, Thomas,' said Col. ‘Mr Keith's just being an arsehole.'

I laughed and pulled my head inside my sleeping bag.

Throughout the night a strong wind lashed our tents. None of us was able to sleep; I was checking my watch constantly. We rose just after midnight, slowly got dressed and readied our gear. It was cold, but by 0050 we were on our way. We'd been walking for a couple of hours when Col needed a toilet break.

Alex became frustrated because he was cold.

‘Why don't you put your Gortex jacket on?' I asked.

‘I don't have one.'

‘What do you mean? Liz showed me the jacket she bought you – it was perfect.'

‘I took it back,' said Al. ‘I thought 400 bucks was a waste.'

‘You tightarse. Is that all you've got, a $30 spray jacket?'

‘Yeah.'

‘You dick.'

Al had been sweating underneath his spray jacket, so when we stopped moving he was crippled by the cold. Col was missing, Al and the guides had the shits because they were cold, and Liz was crying because she was afraid of heights. Adventurous holidays with friends and loved ones can be such fun.

I went to look for Col so we could get going. Not knowing that she had diarrhoea and stomach cramps, she took offence with my tone and lashed out with a left. I offered her a drink of water but my camelback hydration pack was frozen. We laughed and shared a Mars Bar instead.

From that point on, Col set a cracking pace. Despite the thin air, she was powering up the mountain. By 0515 we had reached a plateau and began skirting around a large glacier. Al and Liz had been suffering from altitude illness for a couple of hours and both had severe headaches. As we scaled the final 200 metres, my brain also felt like it was being cut in half.

By the time we reached 19,000 feet, all of us except for Col were dizzy. We could only walk 20 to 30 paces before having to sit down. My heart was pounding as if I had just completed a running race, and our lungs had to suck hard for air. There never seemed to be enough oxygen to go around. The air was cold, the coldest my lungs had ever inhaled. The guides said it was somewhere between –15 and –17 degrees Celsius.

As we approached the summit, Col started jumping up and down.
Where in the hell is all this excess energy coming
from?
I wondered. To our right was a thick glacial wall rising above a frozen body of water. To our left was a brown box with three metal poles jutting out of the top. The rock beneath our feet was uneven but not slippery.

Colleen as the highest person in Africa.

As we got closer we noticed the box was covered with stickers. There was also a brown piece of timber, a metre
long and 20 centimetres wide. Carved into the wood in yellow letters were the words:
YOU ARE NOW AT THE UHURU PEAK, THE HIGHEST POINT IN AFRICA. ALTITUDE 5895 METRES A.S.L.

It was a euphoric moment, and we were the first to summit that day. No one was more excited than Colleen. She had trained hard and was ecstatic to have achieved her goal. In fact, she was so excited that she insisted that she sit on my shoulders and get a photo – proof that she was, at that moment, the highest person in Africa.

Six months after joining an SAS sabre squadron, I was given the task of coordinating the physical training (PT) for a troop of 20 SAS soldiers. I was offered this task during my first year in the troop because of my passion for physical fitness.

Intense physical training has always been an integral part of my life. When I'm training hard, I feel there's nothing in life that I cannot achieve. I feel in control, in charge of my own destiny – proactive, rather than reactive. The endorphin rush that comes from an arduous workout gives me an addictive natural high that I would struggle to live without. It makes me feel alive. My senses sharpen and life's stresses become less significant. They don't disappear, but they are re-categorised – refiled in order of their real priority.

Running the PT for a troop of SAS soldiers was hardly a challenge, as all the guys were highly motivated – many already were at an elite level of fitness. My job was to ensure we achieved a balance between cardiovascular fitness, strength and endurance, and that the sessions were
controlled; in an SAS water troop, where alpha males dominate, physical training could easily become a testosterone-charged dick-pulling contest. In writing this, however, I know I've been guilty of running my fair share of sessions like that, especially during my first couple of years in the troop.

Seeing the way my three children approach exercise takes me back to the type of child I was growing up. Children are motivated by what they see and hear, but if a child has no interest or desire to do something, then it's not going to happen. Our eldest daughter, Tahlie, who is eight, often rises early, throws on her swimmers and a jumper and sits next to the garage door in the dark to ensure I don't leave for a session down at the beach without her. When she was seven she conned me into letting her paddle her nipper
board from our local beach to a distant headland – a return trip of 3.5 kilometres. Colleen wasn't happy and said, ‘If she doesn't come back then it's probably best that you don't either.'

Tahlie doing what she loves most: catching waves on her paddle board.

The journey saw us negotiate some deep sections of water about 500 metres from the coast. On the way back I noticed that a lot of the time Tahlie's forehead was nestled on the front of her board – her neck wasn't strong enough to cope with the demands of such a long paddle. At one stage she peered at me through her stringy fringe and I saw that her forehead was chafed. I smiled to myself.
Bet you won't be bugging me to do this again for a while
, I thought.

What came out of her mouth surprised me: ‘Dad, can we do this every Sunday?'

Her younger sister, Sian, aged seven, is no different. When she was six we went for a jog; I was thinking she'd be content with a couple of laps around the oval. After the first lap she told me we'd be doing it 20 times. And as for our son, Reyne, who has recently turned five: he's yet to start school but has asked his mum, Colleen, if she will train him for the school cross-country races.

So when did my passion for training begin? My parents weren't really into it. Ma played tennis and Dad played a little touch football. He also curled a piece of steel he kept in the garage, which gave him a set of arms that intimidated all my friends. I was probably nine or 10 years old when I told my organ teacher about an impending sports carnival. He was a young guy who didn't care about teaching music, and I was a kid who had potential but didn't wish to learn – perfect! Our 30-minute session was usually filled with him talking about girls and cars while I played
a song or two. I told him that I wanted to beat a guy called Jamie in the 100-metre sprint as I was sick of coming second. He told me I needed to do sprints on the road to strengthen my legs.

‘Can we go for a run, Dad?'

The next day I rose early, threw on a pair of sneakers that probably had very little padding, and sprinted up and down the road, from lightpole to lightpole. Apparently, my shoes slapping against the bitumen made quite a racket as my neighbours soon asked my parents what I was doing. Not one to do anything in moderation, and having no clue about recovery, I pounded the asphalt every day for a couple of weeks.

After smoking Jamie, I ran to my ma, who was watching from the hill, and blurted out: ‘Mum, I did it! I beat Jamie!'

Her face instantly changed colour. ‘Keith, this is Jamie's mum …'

Then my face changed colour. Although I'd beaten him, the poor bastard had been suffering from a chest cold so shouldn't even have been running. At the time I attributed the victory to my preparation on the road, rather than
acknowledging the wheezing chest of my adversary. Nevertheless, this is one of the earliest memories I have of setting a goal and following through.

About a year after that I started martial arts. As I progressed through the belts, my interest and enthusiasm began to soar. My taekwondo instructor, Charlie, was a good man who took a keen interest in my progression. I didn't have any more natural ability than my friends, but Charlie identified in me a sense of determination like his own. I would rarely miss a class, which is something that I have maintained to this very day – consistency. I refuse to let things such as the weather dictate how or when I train.

My general fitness level has barely changed over the last 15 years. Besides spiking for the occasional event, I maintain a regular and diverse training program – a sound base to launch from – because it is far less violent on the body and minimises injury and illness. My most severe injury – a knee reconstruction – was the result of overtraining and fatigue after a deployment overseas.

By age 13 I had decided to commit the next 12 months of my life to preparing for my black belt in taekwondo. Physically, I would be expected to perform the same board breaks as men who were aged in their twenties and thirties. Weighing in at less than 50 kilograms, I couldn't rely on brute strength or body mass, so I worked on my speed and technique. I regularly began to kick the back of the house, leaving grimy heel-marks all over the white bricks. Besides the noise, Dad gave me a serve for soiling the bricks and said I would crack the house, so I moved to the barbecue area and continued to slam the wall there. This lasted a day before Dad brought home half a dozen car tyres, sliced
them down one side and looped them around a tree near the railway line at the back of the house.

After achieving a black belt in taekwondo I soon became restless. I wanted to study something more effective, so I began wing chun kung-fu. At age 16 I was driving my shins into those tyres most afternoons, only stopping when the bruises, welts and cuts made it too painful to train. I probably would have been well suited to hanging out in a monastery with a shaved head and an orange robe, and training seven days a week.

A year later I was preparing for my wing chun level one instructor grading – black belt equivalent – when I decided to vary my training to enhance my fitness. I included a couple of weekly circuits at the gym. At 17, after passing my grading, I was running my own kung-fu branch twice a week, and travelling to Sydney three times a week for my own training. I also used to get together with a few mates and spar two or three times a week.

I maintained this demented level of intensity until I was 19, when my enthusiasm began to fade. I was hoping to join the police force, so I began resistance training in order to put on a few kilograms. I gave up martial arts a year later – I was burnt out – to concentrate on weights training and general fitness.

My occupation as a motor mechanic was beginning to wear thin. In fact, it was driving me insane. I wanted a job that was exciting, and where I would be challenged. Each morning I struggled to get out of bed; the thought of putting a van on the hoist, dropping the oil, changing the spark plugs and painting the tyres made me want to pick a fight with my father in the hope he would put me out of
my misery and sack me. My old man was an excellent mechanic. I was flat-out just popping the bonnet. I put all of my hopes on making it into the police force, but when I found out there was a 12-month freeze on applications, I decided to look elsewhere.

In the Regiment, from the second I opened my eyes my body became excited with the thought of going to work. Not everything we did in the Regiment was exhilarating – I'd rather mow the lawns than wash boats, de-service engines or clean weapons, as that was too much like a mechanic's work for me. But in nine years I never felt like rolling over and taking the day off – never! I would rise from bed, do the obvious, get dressed and have something to eat. My heart rate would be slightly elevated as I thought about the physical training session that would begin at 0745.

When employed as a motor mechanic, I probably never arrived 10 minutes early; I usually scurried in the door at the same time the radio announcer said it was 8 am. I wouldn't look at Dad – there was no point. I could feel his frustration burning holes in my back as I slipped on my boots. Sometimes he'd tap his watch, other times he'd look at the spark-plug clock before glaring in my direction.
Give me a break
, I thought.
I'm stuck here for the next eight hours, so there's no way I'm getting here any earlier than I have to
.

In the Regiment, if I wasn't seated in the troop office gobbing off at least 15 or 20 minutes early, then something was wrong. I was never late, but on one occasion it was close.

I pulled up at a set of lights on a Kawasaki ZXR 750 motorbike wearing the usual: a pair of rugby shorts, a
T-shirt and joggers. My reluctance to wear appropriate attire was the reason I eventually sold the bike. At the lights a white Commodore pulled up alongside me and revved its engine. Underneath my visor I just rolled my eyes and didn't even bother looking at the guy.
What a goose
, I thought. The light turned green and I accelerated up the hill.

After 400 metres, I checked my rear-vision mirror and was surprised to see the Commodore having a real go. Rather than letting him drive past, I kicked down a couple of gears and accelerated hard. As my bike revved through the power band I looked in my mirror and felt satisfied – I had opened up a 100-metre lead. However, this ceased when I saw a blue light flashing through the windscreen.
Shit!
I pulled over, got off my bike and removed my helmet. I had no idea how fast I was going.

‘Have you even got a license for that thing,' yelled the officer.

I nodded and presented my motorbike license, which was snatched from my hand.

‘You better have a bloody good reason for riding like that.'

‘I am running a little late, but that's not why I accelerated up the hill,' I said.

Bip, bip, bip, bip
sounded a horn as one of the SAS boys drove past. I didn't wave.

‘Where do you work?' the officer asked.

‘Swanbourne,' I said.

‘Campbell Barracks?'

‘Yes.'

The officer returned my license. ‘Slow down, mate,' he
said. ‘Next time, if someone pulls up alongside and revs their car then at least take the time to have a look. It may also be worth throwing on a pair of jeans and a jacket. If you do come off there'll be nothing left of you.'