This week’s question came from several different people. For example,

• How do you balance family time with adventure time? I wouldn’t be allowed so much time off!
• I constantly want to go on a huge expedition (if only bigger than a week) but it conflicts with work and family.
• What I always wonder as I watch your videos is how do you juggle your family responsibilities with doing trips? 
• How do you manage to do adventurous trips while leaving a partner and child at home?
• What kind of impact does adventuring have on your family life and what efforts do you make to ensure the balance is redressed with extra family time & opportunity for your partner to have time out? Husband &I have been listening to your podcast and pondering this!

Some people, I suspect, ask me this question from envy: they’d love to have more free time (so would I!).

Others ask it an accusation of selfishness. I don’t deny that motive, but I hope my answer will soften it a little. I spent a morning cycling aimlessly but happily around Paris, thinking about this question and looking for the next boulangerie* to sample.

The matter of spending time away from your family is a very personal one.

I see some people living very trapped, boring lives and suspect it would benefit not only them but also their family if they went away on an adventure occasionally and bloomed and thrived a little.

On the other hand, I look at some other adventurers I know and consider the time they spend away from their kids to be excessive or reckless.

In other words, this whole topic is similar to driving on a motorway: anyone driving slower than you is a moron; anyone who overtakes you is a lunatic…

*

My first reaction to this question was “mind your own business!” But seeing as I have started a series inviting people to ask me anything this isn’t a very fair or helpful response!

I hope then that you might find this article useful if you’re trying to work out how to get more adventure time in your life.

I generally keep my ‘work’ life and my ‘real’ life completely separate for two reasons:

1. One, because internet life is not real life. My internet persona is my job (all things adventure) and therefore I keep my friends, family, football, food and politics out of it, just as you might do if you are a physiotherapist, plumber or, indeed, the prime minister.
2. And two… well, go and read My Midsummer Morning for the full story. The short version is that I have found the struggle between family time and adventure time to be the single greatest challenge of the last decade!
   Indeed, I very much empathise with everyone asking this question. I am well aware of the difficulty of trying to fulfil your commitments whilst also getting your selfish adventure kicks in tiny windows of free time.

In basic terms my scope for adventure has decreased massively with family life. Of course it has – more often than not ‘adventure’ is linked with ‘freedom’, ‘time’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘selfishness’. For various reasons it’s not possible for our family to go and cycle round the world together or walk across the Outback with a baby.

So I am doing my best to combine an ‘adventure life’ with a ‘normal life’ (and becoming increasingly convinced that it is better to pursue a lifetime of living adventurously rather than aspiring to an adventure of a lifetime.)

For example, whilst my wife was on maternity leave we hired an au pair to help at home and then I set off to row the Atlantic Ocean. A succinct summary of that experience would be to say that I was wracked with guilt to be leaving my wife with the burden of a baby in order to go and do something dangerous. And let’s just say that the expensive satellite phone calls I had with home were terse!

So the short answer to today’s question is that it is very hard, both practically and emotionally (and, in my situation, professionally) to balance family time with adventure time.

We had been dropped off by ski plane, hundreds of miles from the nearest human. I was in Greenland with two friends. There we were in our tent, just the three of us. We carried a rifle because of the risk of polar bear attacks. It was cold, it was remote, and there were potentially dangerous crevasses all over the place. But it was such a happy tent – one of the most beautiful, harmonious, remote, thrilling, laughter-filled expeditions of my life. I was so content out there. 

Everything was coming together. I was doing what I loved, doing epic stuff, I’d managed to turn my hobby into my job, my passion into my whole life, and I was mixing it now with the best of the best. But suddenly in that little red tent, my dreams of an adventure-filled life came crashing down.

We had just finished a long day hauling our heavy sledges. We’d set up camp and wriggled into our sleeping bags, tucked up warm against the cold. The stove was on, that delightful low roar that promised hot food and drinks to come. It was my turn to cook so I was fiddling about with the stove, melting snow, preparing dehydrated chicken curry. We were laughing together. It was wonderful.

And then in that little red tent hundreds of miles from anywhere, my good friend Ben made some lighthearted throwaway comment. I don’t even really remember what the context was. But he made a joke about how I was a terrible dad for being out there on this expedition rather than being at home with my wife and children.

To all of our surprises, not least of all mine, I promptly burst into tears — great howling guilt-wracked sobs. Because, as much as I was living a personally thrilling and fulfilling life of expeditions and travel, it was wreaking havoc with my family life — with my real life I had left behind.

I felt sad at leaving my family, I felt guilty at the extra burden this trip placed on my already-exhausted wife, and I felt vain and selfish chasing adventure dreams that were undeniably dangerous. It suddenly dawned on me, “This will not work.”

Three British guys in a tent aren’t very good at dealing with someone crying, so we all just did our best to ignore the whole episode and get back to taking the Mickey out of each other, strap on our skis the next morning and continue hauling our sleds across the icecap.

And that was it. That is the sum total of my grand life-changing catastrophe story, which I know is pretty feeble and pathetic. What had happened? Real life happened. That was all.

Real life brought all my dreams crashing down, all my plans and hopes and ambitions. I pulled out of the South Pole trip and all future huge expeditions. All of my dreams had gone. I felt ashamed. I felt disappointed. I was so frustrated, and I became really unhappy.

In My Midsummer Morning I wrote,

“You cannot go alone into the wilderness for months and also be a stay-at-home dad. You cannot teeter across a crevasse field without feeling somewhat reckless. And when I do manage to get away – to make a short film, for example – I know people frown on it as ‘going on holiday’ rather than ‘going to work’. This generates resentment on all sides. Everybody except me seems to have a clear idea of how I should lead my life. My life, my work, my hobby: it is all the same thing. It is me. I cannot compartmentalise things in the way many parents do, swapping stuff around, cutting down on hobbies, or pausing bits for a decade. If I am not me anymore, then who am I? I become an Adventurer who no longer goes on adventures.” 

And that, let me tell you, does not feel good.

(Nor – importantly but neglected – is the resultant shell of a man in a strong position to be a good husband and father.)

Not many people ask travelling sales reps or hardworking IT consultants how they “get so much time away from their wife and kids” to go and do their job. It is accepted that some jobs require long hours at the office or time out on the road. But when your ‘job’ revolves around camping, biking and going on cool trips then questions get asked about your domestic responsibilities. Of course they do! Juggling these things is the single biggest source of stress, friction and frustration in my life.

OK, enough of the disclaimers and the ‘woe is me’ – I suspect I’m not getting a lot of sympathy from anyone!

Here is how I attempt to make things work:

Trying to combine my desire for exciting adventures, my need to keep my ‘career’ alive, and the importance of remaining at home for my family ushered in the era of ‘microadventures’.

These days I have accepted the incompatibility of being away and being at home. I have chosen my priority and accepted the decrease in adventures (and with that the earning potential etc.).

These days my ‘adventuring’ generally takes place between 9am and 3pm from Monday to Friday. The rest of the time I’m Dad / family taxi driver / chef / laundry man. I don’t go away at weekends. My wife does have a day off from work most weeks when she does the school run, so this is my chance to dash off for an overnight microadventure.

(That’s how I filmed these, for example – leave home about 9pm, drive north powered by Radio 4 and fresh fruit, get to the hills at 3am, sleep in the car till dawn, run till dusk, then drive back home through the night powered by Haribo and house music.)

I am lucky, yes, to get to do as much as I do. But my circumstances are also not exceptional, I don’t think, beyond my 30 hours of weekly ‘work’ which pleasingly often involves going for a bike ride and putting it on Instagram. I do most of my exercise very late at night when my kids are in bed. You don’t have to queue to do deadlifts at 10pm! I live in boring suburbia far from the hills. I envy everyone who lives in rural places!

The adventures I choose these days are based on questions of efficiency. Not just “will this be fun?” but also “can I use this idea for my work somehow?”

If that sounds a bit grubby, I’m afraid it is often a consequence of trying to earn a living from what you love.

In conclusion, most of what you see of me on the internet these days comes from trying to practise what I preach: the world of 5 to 9 microadventures or lunchtime escapes to climb a tree or swim in a river.

I am highly conscious of how I use the 168 hours of a week that build into the 365 days of a year and the one single life we have been gifted. This definitely alls involves a lot of planning, rushing and striving for efficiency and productivity!

So, that is how I “get so much time away to go on adventures”. Has it raised any other questions you’d like to ask me, or given you ideas of how you might be able to fit some more adventures into your busy life? I hope so.