On July 29th, Bear Grylls talked with fans during a live, personal chat via WebEx. This is part of our on-going event series promoting our new beta, WebEx Meet - which you can get and use absolutely free.
The recording from the even is here. Below, you can read part one from the transcript of his talk. We have lightly edited it to make it an easy read. You can get part two here tomorrow.
Bear Grylls: Cool. Hello. It's great to be with you. To me this is brilliant. WebEx is a really fun way of reaching people who want to get to chat a little bit, but also none of us have to leave home, which is always nice. I've come across from a little island that we live on in Wales in the U.K. It's kind of hard to get to the mainland sometime. I'm at a house on the mainland looking back at the island, so let's see if this will work. Hold on, here we go [he used his webcam to show us the island out his window]!
Thank you to Cisco WebEx for making this possible.
What I am going to do is tell some personal stories and what really what happened to us on Everest. The good, the bad, and sometimes the ugly face of it. It's a simple but interesting story and I hope that you will enjoy this.
A Father Inspires
I guess really for me as a young kid growing up, I did grow up with a real dream to climb one day at a time and what I found when I started to climb, age probably about five or six, really, I found it was one of the few things that I could do okay and that felt natural to me.
But also it brought me very close to my dad, and I think, , really, to me if I'm honest, at that age it was as much about just wanting to be close to him as it was actually about the climbing. It wasn't that I liked being cold and scared up the mountain, because I didn't. But I loved hanging out with my dad and sometimes literally, and really my way of being close to him was to climb.
I remember when I was about eight my late dad gave me this beautiful picture of Mount Everest and I just remember as a kid at that age, I always was just lying in my bed at night looking at the picture silhouetted and just trying to imagine what it would really be like to actually climb on those icy faces up there.
After school, I joined the army. I spent three years then with the British Special Forces, and during this time I had a freefall parachuting accident where I had a canopy rip in two at about 15,000 feet over Southern Africa as it was getting dark.
Freefall Parachuting Accident Grounds Bear
I came spiraling down very, very fast and blacked out and smashed into desert. I broke my back in three different places and spent the next 18 months back in the U.K. strapped up in braces and plaster in what they call military rehabilitation - which is really just a posh word for horrible hospital.
I remember knowing that during those months with the doctors or nobody really knowing whether I'd be able to walk again properly let alone do this one thing that I could do well, which was to climb.
And suddenly this dream of Everest, it just seemed out of what I could believe in, and I remember very clearly taking these pictures of Everest I'd dragged around with me everywhere, taking them off the wall of the hospital and just dismissing it as something childish I guess. Something that I had now lost. What I found then when I started to recover my strength and in many ways I think more important, my confidence, I found that I had this urge just to climb again, and Everest became the real focus of that recovery.
I knew that life had given me that precious second chance. You don't always get that in life and the doctors told me how close I'd been to being paralyzed. They used to call me the "miracle kid" in the hospital. They said I'd been under a millimeter from severing my spinal cord, but I could walk again and I would climb again. I was determined to try and find a way, however hard that way was going to be, trying to make this dream of Everest a reality.
Come back tomorrow as Bear Grylls continues with his story of the climb.
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