In my talks I always try to emphasise the importance of adventure and endeavour in our placid, padded, 21st Century lives.

Adventure is a loose word, encapsulating a spirit of trying something new, trying something difficult. Going somewhere different, leaving your comfort zone. Above all it is about energy, enthusiasm, ambition, open-mindedness and curiosity.
If all this is true then “adventure” is not only daft things like rowing oceans, climbing mountains, cycling round the world. Adventure is everywhere, every day and it is just up to us to make the effort to seek it out.

You don’t have to have huge adventures all the time: I accept that we all have to pragmatically juggle our “real lives” too. You can have a small adventure, I say. You can have a very, very small adventure. And so the idea of microadventures was born.

They began as provocatively mundane “expeditions” – microadventures documented through microblogging (Twitter). I walked home for Christmas. I walked a lap of the M25 motorway.

I genuinely felt that these little trips gave me many of the same benefits and rewards as proper adventures. I decided to spend a whole year practicing what I preached: a year focussed solely on small, simple microadventures exploring my own country. I would make a video for each one and share it online.

I was worried about this idea. My “job” is writing and speaking about big trips, big plans. What on earth was I doing planning to mess around on overnight jaunts and commuter bicycles? And from a personal point of view, would I find it frustrating, boring and too easy?

How wrong I was! I have had a lot of fun, learned a lot about film making and discovered wonderful new corners of Britain. More rewarding though has been how the idea has been received. People seem to “get” the idea that, even though we are busy we can still find (must still find) small pockets of time to test ourselves and to get away from the noise and clutter of modern life, out into wildness. To sleep under the stars, stand on a hilltop, swim in a river and swap Twitter for birdsong, if only for a short while.

I have received emails from loads of people, from as far afield as North America, Australia and Japan, from people who have been prodded to go and try something like this for the first time, often taking their kids with them too. Someone even stole the spirit of microadventures and quoted it word for word as his own idea in a speech at a conference. I’mve chosen to see that as a compliment!

It was also a year designed to bust some of the wimpish, pessimistic excuses I often hear. Here’s a few of them with links to my responses.

• I’mm not fit enough to go on an adventure.
• I don’t have time for it.
• I don’t live in a beautiful, wild place.
• I don’t have enough money.
• Britain is boring.
• Britain is too crowded. The roads are too dangerous.
• Microadventure is fine for beginners, but I want something difficult and dangerous.

I’mm going to finish with two final things that confirmed for me that this was a year well spent. To my complete surprise I was nominated as one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the Year (be sure to vote for the two sherpas who I want to win overall).

And I received an email from Mark Twight. I’mve mentioned him often on this blog (here, here and here). Mark is a great climber, he founded Gym Jones, wrote the superb (if uncomfortable) Kiss or Kill and is a self-confessed elitist. Having cheerfully spent the past year encouraging unfit people to wobble off on rusty bicycles to camp for just one night a couple of miles down the road, I opened the message with trepidation. Here are a few excerpts…

“What I fight against is the tendency for human beings to put forth less than our best effort when trying to accomplish an objective we have described as important. I am starting to believe the objective is irrelevant and all that matters is the curiosity, the commitment, the effort and analysis of it because these are the “components” that cause us to grow and change regardless of what we are doing.

Of course, certain objectives force us to overcome ourselves in a very commanding way and these are often held in higher esteem. I could use Hemingway’s big three of car racing, mountain climbing and bullfighting but it could be anything where the physical risk / danger facilitates a limit-shattering effort or performance.

But the activity itself need not be life-threatening to produce growth or change if it is undertaken with requisite commitment, and practiced with the highest level of effort one can muster despite the discomfort and fear it causes. And this is where the microadventure idea plucked a chord. The M25? I looked it up on a map. Are you f-ing mad? Of course you are. But… you conceived the journey and immersed yourself in it, totally. Saw it through, opened your mind to whatever could and did happen along the way. Paid attention. Noticed. And the point was not simply to close the loop so you could say you did it (as so many marathons and triathlons are treated) but to have the experience, to push and pull and participate fully in the process. Apply that ideal to anything and you become something (more) along the way.

“All in, or not at all” is the cure for mediocre performance: headfirst, into the deep end (or the river) and see it through right along the ragged edge of your own, individual potential. Leave the comparisons [with elite expeditions] out of it. If you can look back afterward and truthfully admit to having given everything then the result of any comparison to others does not matter.

Keep doing what you are doing,
Mark

So I will keep doing what I am doing. I’mll keep encouraging people to take their first tiny steps towards starting to live adventurously. And I will keep heading off on microadventures of my own.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and thank you for reading my blog this year.
Al

The Year in Video – a selection:

1. Enter a race

2. Use your weekend

3. Sleep on a hill

4. 24 Hour Bivvy Challenge

5. Back to Basics

6. Exploring Islands

7. Source to Sea

8. River Swim

9. Grab a Map. Close your Eyes. Point. Go

10. Mountain Microadventure

11. Evangelise!