There is always a way....

There is always a way….. Is a mantra that has served me well through my life and indeed my career.

That rock-solid belief that it can be done, you just have to keep going at it, trying that obscure approach, idea, thinking outside the box (cliché!) and throwing as much enthusiasm and energy at it to keep everyone of the same belief.

Part of this thinking was forged in the fires of the most stressful day of my working life, hopefully to date and won’t be surpassed. Thursday 28th of February 2002, Albert Park, Melbourne – I was working for the British American Racing Formula One team as the Race Team IT guy. Just a few short days ago, we stepped off the flight, dropped our bags at the hotel and its straight to the circuit for setup, sleep a novel concept!

F1 looks all glitzy on TV but shares the same facilities as club racing! Your blank canvas is a bare concrete garage which needs turning into a hyper connected F1 control centre incorporating TV and press media, Race Engineer and driver encampment and a mobile rack of servers, laptops and what not per car all connected and talking to the HQ in Brackley.

It was my favourite part of the job, three days, head down working though in methodical order, running miles of Cat 5, as neatly as you would install to sit for a lifetime in a building, cables ties perpendicular to one another, exacting F1 standards throughout everything you did.

Once the mainstay of the garage is completed, you move onto the other side of the pit lane, a phallic erection affectionally known as the Pratt Perch – Each team up and down the pit lane vying for more TV screens, more chrome, the epicentre of the universe through the race weekend, the sharp end where millisecond decisions would be made, master stokes of strategy as the Race Engineer plays 3D chess with 22 thousand horse power out on the track, an early call for tyres just before the weather closes in dropping their driver in line for victory.

Pic: Some of my colleagues assisting during setup of the perch.

Multiple information feeds to the 36 TV screens, 5 laptops and 10 monitors for our perch at the time, so a big deal… The window to the world – proudly emblazing title sponsors emblems and logos.

For obvious reasons, you cannot run Cat 5 out to the perch, decapitated drivers are so bad for business should a cable in-avertedly go slack at the wrong time… The solution is to use metropolitan WAN infrared laser links, normally used to connect line of sight buildings over a couple of kilometre distance. Our links had been de-tuned to work across 20ft – Now, across a couple of kilometres the links are designed for convergence, the IR beam has a degree spread of coverage making lining them up relatively easy…. Trying to line two pin pricks of light up, usually in the rain and howling wind made the laser link install one of the least favourable jobs…

Pic: Top - Carbon pole fixed to the metal frame of the glass surround and concrete lower down but out of shot. Bottom, Brazilian GP, some of the early running fans in the Sao Paulo grandstands reflected in the glass of the laser.

Not to mention that there are no fixing points, a great big Hilti gun with an explosive charge was needed to blast a fixing into the hardened concrete wall designed to withstand the ferocity of a race car and all its kinetic energy smashing into it and garage side, steel you would have to drill through to mount the bloody thing….

It was with great relief that I finally approached this job on Thursday the 28th of February around three o’clock in the afternoon, first day of cars running on the track the following day. All other components of setup had to be completed to enable the test of sending a couple of MB file (this was 2002!, that was a decent sized file!) from the garage to the laptop on the pitwall, once that was done a rare early finish in sight and a couple of beers to be had in party town Melbourne…

Copy, paste…. SHIT! The file took an age to make the 20ft what was now appearing to be a Grand Canyon sized chasm…

Check the alignment of the lasers, signal strength good, server and laptop system resources ok? – Recycle the power on everything (yes, switch off and on again) – Same result….

Hmmmm, start switching components out, spare laser head – different laptop on the wall – same result…

The laser links are notoriously fickle, and can suffer from refraction off the garage, the convergence of beam being reflected from angle points behind and around the opposite laser back into the originating device, I ran some extra-long Cat 5 cable, and sat the two laser heads lengthways on the pit straight opposite each other with nothing behind them, same result…. 

Darkness had encroached, both atmospherically and in my head, a sliding doors scenario was building where I had to tell Ron Meadows, the team manager that there was a bit of a snag… bit of a prob…. The 600 million worldwide TV audience wouldn’t be seeing him and the Race Engineers conducting the orchestra of F1, but a deafening silence of 7 empty seats, most likely 7 very pissed off individuals sat on stools, in the way of the pitstops in the main garage… Not palatable….

Pic: Top - Fisheye view of a pit stop, big hairy chest pit stop that included fuel - was a beautiful thing to be a part of.... Bottom: The equiv of my suit and tie now....

 It was now 2am – Each garage has a security guard assigned and the lovely bloke in ours had periodically came out to check on my head scratching and bring me a coffee…. A perfect storm had ensued, each of the 17 races I was the sole IT person apart from Australia as it was the first of the season and Monaco as we had split garages, unfortunately a set of circumstances had prevailed that I was singled crewed for the inaugural race, so no one to bounce ideas off, another set of eyes, sanity check and rueing that we had changed most of the underlying infrastructure, laptops, server etc in the offseason.

Hands up, I was panicking…. The knot in my stomach of epic proportions, heartbeat in my throat… What next? What hadn’t I tried? 

Then it struck me… Fly away weight is always a consideration, only take what you need and make it as light as possible… Fortuitously I had packed one of the old laptops with the original configuration “just in case” – I retrieved it, opened the pit wall, and performed open laptop surgery, the sense of relief as the file fluttered through the heavy night Melbourne air was immense – a rush of adrenaline and relief…. Compare and contrast and I found a setting deep in the NIC config that was different, I set the new pitwall laptops the same and it worked….

The lovely security guard alerted by my jubilation, set a folding table and chair up on the pit straight and microwaved me some left-over curry and opened a freezing cold bottle of Victoria Bitter, it was 3am, and the best meal I have ever had, and as the warming sensation of the alcohol in the VB calmed my aching senses, I slid a little further into the seat with the sliding doors reality hitting me…

Tiredness pricked my eyes and I traversed across Albert Park to the hotel and got a couple of hours’ sleep, back to the circuit for 06:30, tired but relieved the excitement of first day of running kept the adrenalin running through the system and I got through the day.

Pic: Using all the track, and more....

 Fast forward to 2013 and I was firmly caught up in the mud running movement, OCR world…. 19 Tough Mudders under my belt, I read a book by Joe De Sena, founder of The Spartan Race – He talks about the concept of frame of reference – push your boundaries, reset your frame of reference and what you once thought difficult or challenging becomes manageable when looked at in context. Joe focuses on exercise to push the boundaries of stress which I agree with and practice, but it is equally applicable to general experiences, Auz 2002 set my frame of reference for stress and keeping going in the face of a cataclysmic outcome should I be unsuccessful.

There is always a way….

I’ve included some excerpts of Spartan Up below, you don’t need to be an OCR (Obstacle Course Racing) nut to enjoy the book, its got some great generalised life insight – get out, use your body and make the most of every single moment…. Not bad guidance at all….

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spartan-Take-No-Prisoners-Overcoming-Obstacles-Performance/dp/1471137686

When you push your body to its limits, when you are out of breath and in pain, when you are lying on the ground exhausted—that’s the kind of experience that reveals to you how bad things can be. By doing this, you’re changing your mind’s frame of reference to set new standards. When that challenging workout is over, the small worries of the day seem like nothing.

If you never want to get sick again in your life, do 30 burpees a day. This works assuming you eat healthier as well.

The easiest way to convince your body that sitting in traffic is not worthy of a stress-induced freak-out is by showing your body what real stress feels like in the controlled setting of a daily workout.

You can either go to bed satisfied with your efforts today or stressed about what you left for tomorrow.

Be extremely physical and use every minute of your time. My wife thinks I’m nuts, but I will exercise in public if I have time to kill. She gets embarrassed, for example, if I am doing burpees in the airport. Being healthy should never be embarrassing. 

Preparing for the unexpected is easy. You just need to do the unexpected. Break out of your routine. Go for a run at night. Swim in the open ocean. Stop and climb a hill in the distance. Go farther during that bike ride.

You can talk all you want about mental strength and positive attitude… Mind over matter only takes you so far before you find yourself beyond your body’s literal control.

The pain of regret, the pain of failure—the drive to avoid feeling this pain ever again is what pushes us to work harder, to be a better person.

A good training partner can push you farther and faster when things are going well, but they can become essential when you’re burned out or training or skipping workouts and start slacking. You are conspiring against your own laziness by having a friend help hold you accountable.

The alarm goes off at 5 a.m.—what do you do? Believe it or not, our success in life hangs in the balance. If we go through life hitting the snooze button, our chances for success plunge.

Work harder. Be better. Do more.