The Doorstep Mile

If you have enjoyed this book, you could help me a great deal by:

• Leaving a review on Amazon. This is so helpful.
• Sharing a photo of the book cover on social media. Use the hashtag #TheDoorstepMile.
• Giving your copy to someone who might benefit from it. 

Thank you.

If you’d like to follow me online you can:

• Sign up for the Living Adventurously and Shouting from the Shed newsletters on my website. 
• Follow me on social media: @al_humphreys
• Subscribe on YouTube: search for Alastair Humphreys
• Visit alastairhumphreys.com/thedoorstepmile for resources

About the author

Alastair Humphreys is an English adventurer and author who finds it weird to write about himself in the third person. He has cycled around the world, walked across southern India, rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, run six marathons through the Sahara desert, completed a crossing of Iceland, busked through Spain and participated in an expedition in the Arctic, close to the magnetic North Pole. Alastair has trekked 1000 miles across the Empty Quarter desert and 120 miles round the M25 – one of his pioneering microadventures. He was named as one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the year for 2012.

Alastair is a patron of the Youth Adventure Trust, Hope and Homes for Children, Outdoor Swimming Society, Yorkshire Dales Society and the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust.

The Death Clock

You have decided that you want to live more adventurously. You've got a head full of exciting ideas. You even know what your Doorstep Mile action is. 

But you can't begin it today, because you're tired. 

Actually, all of this week is pretty busy, so maybe it's best to wait until the first of the month to kick-start it. 'New month, new me!' 

The trouble is that next month, and the one after that, you will still be tired and busy. 

This is my final attempt to shake you into action, to remind you that time is ticking and that the harshest deadline of all is looming. Memento mori and all that. I want to finish by sharing with you one of my favourite websites... 

Check out www.deathclock.com. 

Death Clock calculates the date of your death. If you're the sort of procrastinating person who needs a deadline to get something done, well, there it is. Your deadline! Stick it in your diary now.

We had better get on with life, there's not long enough left, however old we are, and it is later than we think. 

Those of us reading this book are at the lottery winning end of the human spectrum. We are so lucky. We have a degree of choice over our lives. The course of our life will depend upon the decisions we make and the paths we walk. We can choose our own story and make it happen. Dust off your violin and stand in your plaza. Face the crowd, smile and give it your best shot. You might be surprised by how warmly the world responds. 

Above the desk in my shed is a quote. I see it every day.

'The life that I could still live, I should live and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.'

OVER TO YOU: 

• What date does the Death Clock predict you'll snuff it? Put it into your diary.
• What story will you choose to live before then?

Beginnings

*

I felt nervous and longed to change my mind. A clock ticked and tocked on the mantelpiece. The small office smelled of magnolia paint and aftershave. I felt nervous because the first year of my teaching career had gone well, and this dramatic change in direction was not a sensible career decision. That small moment in that everyday setting was the beginning of a radical new trajectory for me.

'I am sorry, but I have decided to leave.'

'Oh dear. Where are you going?'

'The South Pole.'

'St. Paul's? Lovely school.' 

I never did make it to the South Pole. But it has been a fascinating journey to where I've ended up nonetheless. We never know where we will end up, nor even if the destination we aspire to is the best one. 

All we can do is choose what seems to be the most fulfilling turn in the road, and see where it leads. 

I walk across the dewy grass to my shed carrying a cup of tea: my morning commute. I'm going to work hard on the writing that I love for a few hours before picking up my kids from school and perhaps going to climb a tree together. 

*

Ahead of me, the sky was huge and empty. A sea sky. The sun was setting. I passed beneath a final row of palm trees and out onto the beach. I took off my pack and walked slowly down the warm sand into the sea. Ending a journey at an ocean was very satisfying. It felt definite. I could go no further. The beach stretched away in both directions, white, straight and washed clean to the high tide line. The heat had ebbed from the sun, but it still shone golden on the water. I stared out to sea, beyond the wooden fishing pirogues and out to the horizon. And I wondered what might lie on the other side.

*

I feel excited rather than nervous as I stir my tea. The end of an adventure is always filled with relief. I'm in McDonald's, the only place in town still open this late. Hard plastic seats, piped pop music, weak tea, the smell of chips. A very ordinary setting for a small moment that might lead in an intriguing new direction, though I have no idea what. It felt right to return to Maccy D's where this book began to work through my final thoughts. I've already given it all away online for free, and now I am about to click 'go' and publish this book. I don't know how it will be received. But it is time to find out.

– The End –

Dust off your violin

After many years of cajoling myself towards an adventurous life, I had a pretty solid grasp of what I was looking for. All I needed to do was get on with it. 

But if adventure is about uncertainty and risk, there comes a point when more of the same no longer counts as living adventurously. I had ended up in a comfort zone, even if it involved deserts and wild places. It was time to change direction.

For many years my favourite travel book had been As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Laurie Lee walked through Spain in the 1930s, playing his violin to fund the journey. It is a beautiful story and the idea of recreating it tantalised me. 

But for 15 years I kept chickening out. I couldn’t play any musical instrument. The thought of having to perform or sing or dance in public is my idea of hell. 

But I could never quite get the idea out of my head. The thought of busking seemed horribly vulnerable. I had never attempted anything like it before. I would probably fail. It was ridiculous. Or, to put it differently: it sounded like an adventure and precisely what I needed.

On a whim, I took out my phone, Googled for a local violin teacher and dashed off a quick email. That was my Doorstep Mile action – one email set everything in motion after 15 years of barriers and doubt.

I quickly learned that the violin cannot be quickly learned. I had wildly overestimated how much I would be able to learn in seven months. But I worked hard at the infernal instrument, concentrating only on the day’s homework rather than the nerve-wracking ultimate challenge of depending upon the violin to earn my next meal.

I had to face the sorry fact that I was terrible: nobody would give me any money! The trip was going to be an embarrassment and a disaster. The sensible compromise was to take my wallet and just busk for a bit of fun. More sensible still was to postpone the trip for a year or two until I could actually play the violin.

Fortunately in life, however, the only sensible options are not the only options. I turned up in Spain, and I began.

I emptied the final coins from my pocket and piled them on a park bench. Then I walked off into Spain one midsummer morning to see whether I could survive for a month with no money.

The first time I set up my violin to play was the most scared I had felt since the day I set off to row across the Atlantic. Isn’t that crazy? Rowing an ocean is a frightening thing to do. There are storms and salty buttocks. But what was I scared of on that sunny morning in Spain?

What I was afraid of was all the vulnerability inside me, the most significant stuff of all. The baggage we hide away and hide behind. The demons that stop us living as adventurously as we dream of. The things that I hope this book has provoked you into exploring within yourself.

I stood alone in that plaza, sawing away at the violin. I could hack my way through five terrible songs, each about 30 seconds long. I looped round and round while my heart sank lower and lower. I was embarrassed, sure to fail and dreading having to acknowledge that to myself and the world.

An elderly gentleman had been watching me from a bench in the plaza for a long time. Eventually, he stood up and walked over to me, leaning on his walking stick. I thought, ‘Uh-oh, I’m in trouble now. He’s going to say, ‘Señor, enough. Clear off. Please, give us back our peace.” 

But he didn’t say that. 

Instead, the man reached into his pocket. He pulled out a coin, and he gave it to me. I thought my heart was going to explode with delight, relief, amusement and surprise. I’d done it! I had earned a coin from playing the violin. 

Before the trip, when I was on the verge of backing out of the whole venture, I made myself a deal. ‘Don’t worry about the whole trip. Just go out there and earn one Euro. That’s all you need to do. With a Euro, you can buy a bag of rice. With a bag of rice, you can walk for a week. After that, we’ll talk…’

I spent a month hiking cross country through the beautiful landscapes of northern Spain, dropping down into villages every couple of days to earn enough money for the next stage. It was a magical experience. But the hundreds of miles and the nights under the stars were not what made it special. I’ve done that stuff half my life. 

The adventure out in Spain was standing in a plaza in front of a handful of people and declaring, ‘here I am. This is all that I have got. This is my best shot.’ 

Play the next song. Earn the next coin. That is all we can ever do. The violin was the adventure. 

***

I spent most of my 20s and 30s chasing a specific manifestation of an adventurous life. That carefree vagabond dream changed as ‘real life’ arrived and I evolved from carefree AdventurerTM to busy Dad. 

I still try to live adventurously but have had to modify how I do that. Sometimes it works fantastically, at other times it frustrates me. This year I have merely scheduled time in my diary to climb a tree once a month. But that has made a far bigger difference than I could have imagined. 

So as someone who exchanged ambitious dreams of a life on the open road for a cup of tea up an oak tree, let me finish by saying this. I don’t think we should pin our hopes on one adventure of a lifetime. Instead, we should strive for a lifetime of living more adventurously every day. Do something daily that excites you, makes you happier, fulfilled and curious. Something that scares you a little. It is the process that is important, the direction you walk, not the notional outcome at the end of that journey. 

An email to a violin teacher. A morning text message to your friend about that idea you always dream of late at night, a meeting at work about a new project. However ambitious your ultimate dream, whatever you decide to start with and build into a habit ought to be really small. So small that there is no reason not to do it today. 

What step will you take right now to get you across the doorstep and set you in motion towards living more adventurously?

Good luck. 

Over to You:

• What would be your personal equivalent of busking through Spain? 
• When will you begin it?

Ten lessons from the road

We are amongst the most fortunate people who have ever lived. What excuse do we have not to try to maximise our potential and our opportunities in an adventurous, worthwhile, fulfilling life?

The times I have rolled the dice and gone big with my dreams have always turned out to be fascinating, informative experiences. You learn so much about the world and yourself when you step out your front door and dare yourself to have a look around.
Here then are ten lessons from the road.

1. Shoot for the moon. Set yourself an outrageous goal. 
2. Just do it. Make it harder to ignore your dream than to overcome the risks and obstacles.
3. Failing is a normal, acceptable and unavoidable fact of life. Giving up easily need not be. Keep taking one more step and you might be surprised how far you travel.
4. You are the only person who controls your potential. Everything is up to you. The choice is yours.
5. A bad day is a good day. Earn the good times. Embrace Type 2 fun. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
6. Be brutally honest with yourself. Do you believe your own excuses?
7. Does this year matter? Then use it.
8. Think like a goldfish. Do not think about the end. Focus on the next step to keep you moving forward.
9. Take care of yourself. Physically and mentally. Being fit feels good. Anima sane in corpore sane – a healthy mind in a healthy body. 
10. The world is a good place. Trust. Smile. Boldness and relentless passion will be rewarded. 

Over to You:

• What ten lessons has your road in life taught you?

The habit calendar

Books about habit forming usually refer to well-worn examples of incremental improvement and compound interest. 'Improve by 1% a day, and in just one year you will be a 3678% samurai ninja hunky millionaire!' 

There is no denying the power of accumulated marginal gains.

Increase your daily run by a minute per day, and you'll soon be running for miles. Save £20 a week, and you'll be able to afford a £1000 adventure in a year. If you have a good idea, write a short blog post every day. You'll eventually have written a book. 

But it can be hard to remain inspired by a distant goal when you contemplate the number of tiny, tedious sacrifices required before you reach that point. It is helpful then to decide to do a specific thing today, just once. Do it. Tick it off on a piece of paper. Done. Nice and easy. The day after that? Do it again. Tick it off. Done. 

Deciding to eat healthily today is far more fruitful than a pie in the sky plan (or a no pie plan) to 'lose three stone'. It is the difference between discipline and a mere tweak of your habits. Our idealism is greater than our willpower. A small, specific daily deed is more achievable than vague goals with wiggle room and get out clauses. Eat a carrot, not a carrot cake. Get up tomorrow and repeat. 

I have used a habit calendar to cajole my lazy ass into 100 consecutive days of doing 50 pull-ups and 100 days of meditating. I'd never have kept those up without the chart. 

A habit calendar makes things easier, but it does not make it easy. My 'Write this Damned Book' calendar, for example, keeps failing. But every time I fail, I start again, doing my best to string together a longer sequence of X's than I managed last time.

Once you build up a streak of daily successes, you'll not only find each one easier, but you will also become increasingly reluctant to break the chain. I like the notion of 'no more zero days': do one tiny thing every day to keep creeping forward. Build your habits, and the big goals will follow along behind them. Our hours become our days. And one day we will stop, look back and realise that those hours became our life.

Over to You:

• What habit would you like to build to help you live more adventurously? 
• Find on Google, then print out a habit calendar and stick it to the fridge. Do Day 1's task and put a big fat X in the first box. This is now Day One and no longer 'one day'…

The accumulation of daily habits

You might (or you might not!) wake up during a particularly pointless conference call with the bright idea of running a 150-mile ultramarathon in the Sahara Desert. Unfortunately, accomplishing such a feat is a galaxy away considering your current fitness. The idea of a finisher's medal around your neck is ridiculous. That's why it is a 'dream' not a 'plan'.

The gulf between where we are now and where we dream of is often too wide to leap in one bound. Because there are no stepping stones the crossing can look impossible.

But you remember that you once bought a pair of expensive trainers in a hot-headed and short-lived New Year's Resolution to get fit. Back home that evening you eventually find the trainers, unworn, under a pile of doughnut boxes.

Out of curiosity, you tug on the snazzy yellow shoes. You tie the laces snugly and bob up and down tentatively in the living room, flexing your knees and wiggling your toes.

You step out outside, lock the front door, hide the key under a plant pot and check nobody is watching. Then you sprint off down the street.

By the time you reach the corner, however, you grind to a gasping halt, bent double and retching beneath the streetlamp. What were you thinking? What sort of a daydream was this? How could you have even considered that this was preferable to the blissful ennui of a meeting with far too many attendees and a plate of chocolate biscuits?

You turn around and stumble slowly home with a look of bewildered astonishment on your face. You switch on the TV and your heart rate eventually settles to a safe level. That marks the end of your good intentions. 

But imagine if after the ignominy of Day 1, you wake up on Day 2 and decide to give it another try. You remember that you are middle-aged these days and no longer the King of the Playground. You leave your front door at a more realistic pace.

This time you manage two minutes of running before you capitulate. Encouraged, on the third day you run for three minutes. After a week you can run for seven whole minutes.

You run to the café to bask in your achievement. Your friends laugh at your sweaty enthusiasm.

'Seven minutes?' they scoff. 'That ultramarathon's going to be a piece of cake, mate. Here, have a piece of cake instead.'

And yet, despite their mocking, you persevere, adding a minute to your run time every day. After a month of effort – a substantial 1/12th of a year – you can still only wheeze your way through 30 measly minutes of jogging. 

'Surely I should be fitter than this by now?' you wonder in despair. Your thumb twitches towards the doughnut delivery hotline number on your phone. 

This is a familiar hurdle on big projects. You launch with great fanfare and enthusiasm. But, after an initial flurry, progress is paltry. Success is still so far away. The temptation to quit returns. 

This is where you need to be stubborn and remember only today's Doorstep Mile: get out the door and start running. It is better to measure your trajectory than your current ability. Because if you keep going, if you stubbornly add 30 minutes a month, by the end of the year you will run for 365 minutes. That's a six-hour monster run. You could complete any ultramarathon on the planet with endurance like that!

This is the power of accumulating small steps and heeding only the next daily Doorstep Mile. 

OVER TO YOU:
What can you begin today and then improve by one minute or 1% tomorrow?

To be rather than to seem

Esse quam videri is a pithy, challenging phrase from Cicero. It translates as ‘to be, rather than to seem’. It flew on Birdie Bowers’ sledging pennant as he trekked to the South Pole with Captain Scott. Birdie was one of the most impressive, genuine humans I have ever read about. I use esse quam videri as an opportunity to turn the mirror on myself from time to time and ask myself some questions. 

• Am I a runner? But do I actually run? Often and far and fast? Or do I just trot around the park a couple of times a week at the same pace as last year?
• Am I a cyclist? But do I actually put in the miles? Or do I just own a nice bike or three? When did I last go for a long bike ride that made me proud?
• Am I a photographer? When was the last time I went out specifically to take photographs, with thought and imagination or learned new techniques to get the most out of my expensive camera?
• Am I writing a book? Am I actually writing, regularly and with ruthless effort? Or am I just a dilettante who enjoys talking the talk but isn’t prepared to sit down and grind out a book rather than grinding coffee beans?
• Am I doing what I love with my life? Is it fulfilling and worthwhile? Am I happy? Or am I merely dabbling with the important things whilst drowning in excuses, mediocrity and blame?

These are the sort of questions I ask myself. When I’m on track, I feel proud of the identity they provide and therefore feel motivated to do more. Yes, I am writing a book. I’m making this thing happen… That feels much better than the times when I’m just pootling about wasting my life.

Too often, I don’t like my own answers. But I try to be honest with myself and acknowledge this. And then I work hard to get back on track for a while. That is the most I ever manage to achieve – veering back and forth between optimism and procrastination, triumph and disaster. 

Esse quam videri. What questions should you ask yourself? I dare you to ask them. Don’t shirk the uncomfortable question. Don’t kid yourself with your answers.

Over to You:

• Esse quam videri. What questions will you ask yourself?

Type 2 fun

Mud. Up to my knees. And rain. Heavy rain. A long day trudging with a heavy rucksack, head down, shoulders hunched against the cold wind. The only good thing about today was that it would eventually end.

I was trekking across the lunar highlands of Iceland towards the Hofsjökull glacier. My friend Chris and I were alone in the wilderness, carrying a month’s supplies on our backs. We had endured wading icy rivers and crossing lava fields that bruised our feet, but this evening’s mud was the worst. This was the last straw at the very end of a horrible day. 

All I wanted to do was pitch the tent, escape from the weather and go to sleep. Instead, I was stuck fast and struggling in a soup of mud, stones and boulders. I was filthy and exhausted. 

‘This,’ I growled to Chris, ‘is definitely Type 2 fun.’

Writing this description today in my shed, I looked back at some photos from Iceland to remind me of the details. There’s a picture of me, bent double in exhaustion beneath a massive pack. Retrospectively, the memory strikes me as hilarious. It was an experience I am definitely glad to have gone through, despite how furious and miserable I felt at the time. 

In a similar vein, I found rowing the Atlantic to be mostly a cocktail of nausea, misery, fear and boredom. And yet when the four of us gathered seven years later for a reunion in a small curry house in Cornwall, our recollections were very different. We spent the entire evening convulsed in hysterical laughter, to the bemusement of the other diners. It was one of the happiest gatherings I have ever been to. A gruelling experience had been polished by time into something precious and gleaming. 

The pursuit of retrospective pleasures is a recurring theme in my life: the warm glow of achievement after icy swims and hot deserts. 

Sensible people choose to spend their time doing things that are conventionally fun in the here and now. Eating cheese, Morris dancing, listening to the snooker on the radio – the usual stuff. These activities can be labelled as Type 1 Fun. If you smile while you’re doing it, you’re in the Type 1 zone.

Type 2 Fun, by contrast, is not fun. You embark on the quest for Type 2 Fun when you set out to attempt things that are deliberately hard. These often involve suffering, misery, fear, foul language and repeated vows never to do something this stupid ever again. Tremendous amounts of time and effort and commitment disappear into these endeavours. 

This is something that you are not doing for instant gratification. It is deeper, darker – and ultimately richer and more rewarding. Anyone who has run a marathon or completed a dissertation or assembled flatpack furniture knows about Type 2 Fun. Your version of Type 2 Fun might be very different to mine – appearing on stage in your first play, hosting a street party, coaching the U9s football team…

This is the world of doing something hard in the hope that at some unknown point, in an unknowable future, the endeavour will reward you with a sense of achievement, satisfaction, purpose and peace. Type 2 exploits will one day be a pleasure to recount over a poppadom and a pint. (A friendly word of caution: steer away from the pursuit of Type 3 Fun. Such activities are not fun. And they will never appear so in the future, no matter how warm the fireside reminiscences. The vows to never repeat anything so stupid hold firm even years later at last orders.)

Type 2 Fun is both an investment and a speculation. And it is often at the heart of the process of trying to live more adventurously. I encourage you – I dare you – to make the effort to toss a little more Type 2 Fun into your life. In my experience, while fun is fun, the more meaningful, enduring sensations of satisfaction and reward come through gritted teeth and Type 2 Fun. 

Writing this book, I have found it hard to set the tone and expectations appropriately. I am trying to champion small steps – a 5km parkrun before an ultramarathon, your first blog post before demanding a juicy advance from a publisher. But I also do not want this book to be an opt-out, an excuse for settling low or embracing mediocrity. 

I will always applaud excellence, ambition and ridiculous persistence. Start small, yes, but once you are up and running, you ought to be willing to suffer. Stretching yourself hurts, yes. But that is how you grow.

So if these pages have any whiff of elitism to them, let it be here. To champion effort and struggle and those who pour their heart into Type 2 fun, wading doggedly through the mud and storms to accomplish goals far beyond what you thought yourself capable of. 

Over to You:

• What time-consuming Type 1 Fun could you swap for something new?
• What Type 2 Fun activity would you like to try?
• When will you do this?

Push, push, push 

I'm 15 years old, cycling across England with two school friends. We get lost and end up on the summit of Great Gable (the 10th highest peak in England: stupid lost!). I wipe away tears and carry my heavy bike down what feels like an eternity of scree slopes. It's hard, we're lost, and I'm much slower than the others. I don't think I can do it.

I'm 18 years old, driving into a place unlike anything I've seen in all my life. A rough town of shabby homes, bullet holes in the walls and people staring at me. It's my first day in Africa. I cannot imagine living here for an entire year.

I'm outside my Mum and Dad's house on a beautiful summer day. I say goodbye, then climb onto my bike. I've told everyone I'm going to cycle around the world. Can I really do this? Absolutely no chance.

I'm at the front of the living room facing three rows of people, maybe 30 in all. They have come to hear me give a talk about my travels. I feel sweat trickling from my armpits. Not only do I have to remember what to say, I now need to remember to keep my arms clamped to my side as well! Speaking in public is terrifying. I vow never to do this again.

I sit down at my laptop. Open a blank document. Stare at it. It is time to begin writing a book. But how do I turn this blank page into a finished book? I walk to the kitchen to make a cup of tea while I mull over the enormity. The enormity of the blank page has overwhelmed me. 

I'm about to quit my job. Jack in the salary and the pension and the sensible working hours. 

'You're going to do what?' asks my boss.

'I'm going to be an adventurer.'

No, I'm not. Unless I can earn some money, I'm going to be unemployed.

I'm at the cinema. Beer and popcorn. Lights off, film about to start. Comfy chairs. I'm anonymous and surrounded by darkness and people. Strangers who are about to watch my first ever film. What if nobody laughs? What if they laugh in the wrong bits? What if they just fidget, a bit bored? I ought to be happy that my first expedition film has even made it this far. But instead, as always, I'm afraid and out of my depth.

At least this time there is beer and popcorn. So perhaps I am making progress, after all…

***

Living adventurously is about cajoling ourselves to venture beyond what we initially think possible. At each stage in the narrative here, I did not imagine that I would attempt what came next, nor did I give much thought to how many different 'comfort zones' we reside within. There are so many ways to scare ourselves. But each time we dare ourselves to try, we are making progress in the right direction.

Time and again, the questions we ask of ourselves come back with positive replies. I have learned, over and over, that I am capable of more than I realised. We all are. This growth mindset is one of the most precious gifts that living adventurously has given me.

OVER TO YOU: 

1. How has your comfort zone grown over the years? Has it begun to contract with age?