Conquering Schiehallion

Schiehallion is the shortest (only 1,083 m / 3,553 ft) of all the Scottish mountains/munros and can be found in Perth & Kinross.

On 5^th June 2013 after being house/bedbound (when if I managed to walk up my stairs it felt like walking up a mountain) for over 6 years I walked my first mountain/munro (for a local ME/CFS charity) with two dear friends.

I had known I was well for some time by then, I’d walked a number of the Edinburgh hills and walkways over the previous year, but still I felt I had to prove to myself I was REALLY after all this time, well.

That need to prove myself still ran deep in me but no longer ran the show!

It was such a beautiful/hard/sweaty/rewarding day, BUT what really proved to me how far I had come was that I recovered from the excursion much quicker than the other two regular walkers I walked with.

People often ask me ‘how will I know when I am fully recovered’ and I always say ‘it’s not how much you can do but how quickly your body recovers from the doing that counts’.  Because even super fit people feel tired after excursion, this is normal.

As people progress through their recovery they notice the recovery time from excursion shortens a lot.  They may still have crashes/blips/dips but they move through them quicker.

The body and more importantly the nervous system is building resilience.  Learning what’s safe again and realising that you are now listening to it rather than ignoring it, so it can loosen it’s protective hold on you a little bit more with each day that passes.

It’s important to keep focusing what’s right each day, instead of what we perceive as being wrong.  When we do this the list of things that are right gets longer, our nervous system becomes more regulated and resilient and eventually we recover.  When we keep allowing ourselves to be consumed by what we think is wrong we stay stuck, going round and around in circles in our head, body and nervous system.

Keep coming back to the moment you are in and ask yourself ‘what’s right, right now’?

Then who knows when you’ll be conquering your very own mountain!