Karen Darke | Athlete | Speaker | Author

The Stockholm Archipelago is a mass of small islands like freckles in the Baltic Sea, tide-less and timeless. We imagined calm water, paddling up to beach-side ice-cream stalls and colourful wooden waterfronts, miles of sunshine…a holiday not an expedition. A country that can produce Abba, Ikea, saunas and attractive blonde people, and offer a perfect kayaking destination seemed an ideal opportunity for low-octane adventure, just what I needed to recover from a scary kayaking experience at Cape Wrath earlier in the summer. We left Stockholm in the “worst summer storm for 20 years” and so we fought the winds and waves of the Baltic for a few weeks. It was lots of fun, but a trip that put me on my tummy for a month.

When you’re paraplegic, you have to be really careful about pressure sores. I can’t feel anything below armpit level, so just like you might have a gel saddle on your bike, I have something similar wherever I sit. If you don’t, your backside can get so bad that I know people who’ve spent over a year lying on their stomach, with maggots in their backsides to eat the dead tissue. Anyhow, I was lucky, saw a bruise and a lump, and kept off my bum for a month with a giant wing-mirror contraption to ‘inspect’. 

Being grounded was hard work, and at the same time, the new hand-bike, partly sponsored by Berghaus, arrived. I resisted bar a 20 minute trial ride, but now up and about again, I’ve got an extra month of energy to burn, and have been hand-biking the streets of Scotland ever since. Inspired by the Beijing Olympics and the new go-faster bike, I’ve started a ‘serious’ training programme, which this week even involved a 3 hour ride starting at 6am (when I discovered it’s still very dark), with plans to do some racing next season, just to see if maybe I’ve got what it takes to make the 2012 UK team. Who says 36 is too old? It would be good to look back in ten years time and not think “I wish I’d tried that” so this winter (and the next 4 years?) is all about trying.

The miles of hand-cranking will get interrupted in January though for a few weeks kayaking in Patagonia – the plan to paddle into the fast-receding Laguna San Rafael region. In true Bear Grylls style, it won’t ever be as treacherous as it might look as we’ll have a BBC film crew chugging along in a safety boat. Andy K will no doubt be sweating and panting hard, faking a near-death experience for the cameras.