In a period of five days, I did what I consider to be probably the most significant thing of my life. Significant not because it was challenging or physically difficult; not significant in any particular way that was unique to me being there, but significant because of the efforts of others. Literally millions of people donated money to Sport Relief as a direct result of those five days, and it was they who made something that could have just been a celebrity challenge into an event that raised enough money to ensure that some people are alive today as a direct result of it.
The challenge had been adapted to start in Paris and end in London. This meant that the first day was a 185-mile bike ride. I had not slept well in anticipation, but now I was to be seen off by Lisa and a small band of friends, as well as a contingent from BT, who were the sponsors, and Sport Relief.
I was wearing all the appropriate Lycra Sport Relief-branded clothing to let the world know I meant business. I was to have a phone call with Chris Moyles on Radio 1’s breakfast show, whose support proved integral to the success of the event. He was to sound the klaxon that signalled the start of the challenge. As my feet were clipped into the pedals of my bike, in order to talk to Chris on the phone and leave promptly when he sounded the klaxon, I had to continually ride around in circles. This meant the obligatory photographs and video links would not work, so I ended up being propped up by Sport Relief staff. I looked like I was being taught how to ride without stabilisers, rather than being prepared to face the biggest sporting challenge of my life.
I rode the first few miles with Olympic Gold medallist Chris Boardman, before setting off towards the coast. It was so well organised, we had motorbike outriders holding back traffic where we needed to. Behind them rode two bicycle outriders, Andy and Gordon, who, along with Greg, acted almost as targets for me to try and reach, although they were usually more than a kilometre ahead of me; I was not allowed to ride too close to anyone in case I was seen to gain an advantage from a drag in their slipstream. If I was going to do this, nobody wanted to be accused of making it easy.
After 90 miles I was joined by mates Martin, Bomber, Chris and Andy from The Big Dogs cycling club. It only seemed right that they should take part in the ride since they had helped prepare me for it, and it was a great lift to see them at the point where I was really starting to tire.
The ride was taking longer than anticipated due to factors that were out of our control, such as the need to pause and do radio interviews and press – all things that help raise money but which interrupted the progress. The distance of 185 miles is also a very long way, so if you are behind on time at the 90-mile mark it’s very difficult to pick it up; you can only go as fast as you can.
What made it worse was that in rural France there are no street lights, not even cats’ eyes in the road, so as night fell we were riding into complete darkness. You had no idea you were going uphill until you started to slow down; then you only knew you had passed the apex when you found yourself suddenly going faster.
Like everybody else, I had assumed the road to the coast would be flat, and it probably is if you’re sitting in a car. But if you are getting there by peddling it may as well be the Alps after the first hundred miles. We eventually rode into Calais at 4 a.m., at least four hours late and with a wake-up call at six, which didn’t leave much time for rest and recovery. On the one hand, I was pleased one leg was over, but I knew it represented only a fifth of what I had set out to do, so there was no time for slaps on the back.
I went to the hotel room and started what was to be my nightly routine: I had an ice bath for 10–15 minutes, before putting on compression tights to stop my legs swelling. This part was never captured by the documentary crew; a man in his forties wearing compression tights is not a sight that would encourage people to donate to Sport Relief; instead, they would be more likely to want to help the poor fellow with rickets and squashed genitals. Then I had a massage from the physio, Dot.
When I say ‘a massage from the physio, Dot’, I mean a proper massage. Dot is not, as his name may suggest, a dainty lady, but a six-foot-three ex-serviceman who is built like a barn door. If ever you need someone to straighten your body out, he is the man, whether your body wants it or not.
The second day, I was woken after an hour’s sleep. I was tired but excited: I was going to row the English Channel, which was never something I could have even conceived of doing when I was at school. I was going to do this once-in-a-lifetime experience with four great people: Freddie Flintoff, Davina McCall, Denise Lewis and Mike, an experienced cox who had done the Channel crossing a few times. We’d trained for half a day with Mike near Portsmouth so had some grasp of what we were doing, but we four rowers were in a boat that normally needed six oarsmen.
The recommended way to cross the Channel is with a team of 12 people, six rowing, and rotating with the other six every 2–4 hours. It made an afternoon on the water seem not very much preparation at all, but it was all we’d had time for, so there was no turning back.
What we didn’t know was that the Channel crossing had been a problem right up until the night before the start of the challenge. What I didn’t realise is that you are not allowed to cross the Channel from France to England in anything less than a suitable ferry or boat. If you want to swim it, row it, water-ski it or cross it in whatever fashion is deemed unusual, you have to start in England – the French simply don’t permit it.
Perhaps the fact that the destination is England rather than France means that nobody has been incentivised enough to challenge this law. At least if you go the other way, there will be a chance of a topless woman on the beach or decent wine and cheese at the end. Climbing out of the water in Dover to a bag of chips and a nursing-home day-trip is hardly the same.
Kevin had reassured me that this would all be sorted before we started the challenge but, as I was learning, Kevin had a habit of being reassuring about things that were not yet in place; after all, if he didn’t take those chances, a lot of things would simply not happen. However, if we could not row across the Channel, we would have a real problem.
Kevin had asked Gordon Brown – with whom he had a good relationship since he had taken part in a Smithy sketch for Comic Relief a few years earlier – to help, by calling the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. This was done and, unbeknown to me, it was only the night before I left for the challenge that Kevin had received a message that the Admiral of Calais (a title which sounds like a name you give a pub) had given approval for us to row on Tuesday morning.
It is a great illustration of the respect that the organisation commands that Kevin was able to ask a former prime minister of the UK to help, and that he was then prepared to pull his weight with his counterpart in France. I am not so sure this would have happened had Nicolas Sarkozy been aware that my first ever joke as a comedian was about the French not stopping the Germans in 1939. Still, let’s not mention the war.
We boarded our boat and started rowing at around eight in the morning. It was to be some 13 hours before we would climb out of the boat again. Thirteen hours is a long time doing anything; 13 hours rowing seems even longer, like dog years. The reason is that rowing a boat in the sea quickly becomes boring. Mike was counting our strokes, which after an hour also starts to get dull, but he was using this technique to keep our pace up. The problem with the Channel is that as soon as you reduce your pace you start to drift off course and then have to work hard just to get back to where you were in the first place. After the first hour, during which we were happy to joke and laugh, we settled down to the slog of the row. Freddie summed the tedium up perfectly: ‘Rowing is shit. No wonder they give people knighthoods for doing it.’
A few hours in, and fatigue was beginning to take its toll. As I was rowing, I was falling out of pace with the other three and even Mike shouting to keep me focused didn’t seem to help. I kept shaking my head and trying to concentrate on the rowing action, but when I looked into the water at my oar I was beginning to see double.
The problem with seeing two oars is that you don’t know which one to put in the water. If you get it wrong, as I did, it has the same effect as a boxer throwing a punch that does not connect – you just carry on going. I fell back and was helped back into my seat by Freddie, who was very nice about it: if only four of you are rowing and one keeps falling out of his seat, it must take a lot not to want to throw him overboard. But all three of them just kept encouraging me on.
After four hours I had to take a call with Greg James for Radio 1. The phone was handed over from the support boat and I recall hearing Greg’s voice, but I have no idea what I said – the tiredness was such that I could hardly speak. Davina quickly intervened, took the phone from me and did the interview on my behalf. My accent is not great on radio at the best of times, but, four hours into rowing the English Channel after an hour’s sleep, I sounded like I was walking out of the dentist with that silly pink water still dribbling down my chin.
There is a moment when exhaustion and drunkenness have the same effect. You start slurring your words, you start rolling your head, your blinks become 20-second naps and you are useless in a boat. The support boat was summoned and, after a quick look and a discussion between Greg and the doctor, Matt, a bunch of tablets were put in my hand.
To this day, I don’t know what they were, and perhaps the discussion between the two was to see if we had reached international waters, so that everyone knew what laws were being broken when I took them. I ate an energy bar, drank some fluid and let the pills kick in, and we started rowing again, us band of four with our cox, Mike.
The reality was that I could not have given up; I knew I would have let so many people down. I am sure the charity would have managed to salvage something from the situation, but these things are not set up to fail. Who wants to donate to someone who nearly did something? Knowing the benefits the money could bring spurred me on; not wanting to let my kids or Melanie down by failing spurred me on; not wanting to face the world as someone who couldn’t complete something spurred me on; but, most of all, the four people in the boat spurred me on. Mike did his job admirably as a cox, but the bond between the rowers was something that moved me. In that boat and on the day, I could not have wanted to be with better people.
At my lowest point, Freddie leaned forward and patted me on my back: ‘Don’t worry, mate, we’ll get you home.’ Had it been Denise or Davina who had said that, I would have kissed them, such was my gratitude that I had these special people with me. But as it was Freddie, I just said, ‘Thanks, mate,’ and attempted to carry on rowing.
The sun was setting as Dover came into sight. Being in a rowing boat and seeing your eventual destination is almost worse than not seeing it, because for ages you feel that you aren’t getting any closer.
We had been rotating around the boat every hour to balance out who took the front position and set the pace, but for the final three hours we just sat and rowed as Davina set the pace, showing all those fitness DVDs are the real deal, and we kept up as much momentum as we could.
Freddie and Denise have been world-class athletes because they have that thing inside that makes them winners. They would never have stopped until we reached England, no matter how long it took. Davina is one of the most determined people I have ever met, and led us into the port under Mike’s direction. Meanwhile, I was doing all I could to not let them down.
As we neared the dock, we saw a small crowd had gathered. Then, as we approached, we realised it was not such a small crowd at all, but a sizeable contingent to welcome us home. This was a surprise, as I had told my friends and family that I would see them at the end of the challenge – if I made it – and not before. However, when I saw the other members of the boat greet their friends and family, I wished I had asked them to be there. But then I realised I was not even halfway and, for me, the time to celebrate had not yet arrived.
We rowed up to the berth where we docked the boat but, before we climbed out, we shared a moment. A cricketer, an athlete, a television presenter and a comedian had just rowed the Channel. None of us had ever thought we would do something like that, and we all knew we were likely never to do it again. I also knew that in the middle of the Channel, when I had had nothing left, they had carried me through. To the press, this may have been four celebrities in a boat; but to us, it was four friends, and I will always owe a debt of gratitude to them all. I kissed Davina and Denise goodbye, then I turned to Freddie, looked in his eyes and shook his hand.
He may have saved me in the middle of the Channel, but there was still no way I was going to kiss him.
After an ice bath and a heavy night’s sleep, I was woken up by Dot bringing his treatment table into my hotel room. I had a massage, got dressed, ate breakfast and prepared for three days of running. This was a daunting task, as I had never run more than a half-marathon prior to training, but I felt confident that I had a chance to do this. Running is putting one foot in front of the other. I had been doing it for most of my life, so I convinced myself that this was all I had to do.
It was not to be too long before I realised it would not be that easy. As a surprise, Comedy Dave from Chris Moyles’s show turned up to run the first five miles with me. A small crowd had gathered to send us on our way, and we started the journey towards London.
Within the first few hundred metres I noticed vehicles on the road were beeping their horns at us: cars, school buses, lorries, motorbikes – it seemed like everyone was beeping at us. At first, I just thought that this was what people in Dover did: a kind of early warning to signal to anyone who had just driven off the ferry to let them know what side of the road they were on. It was Dave who told me that the beeps were for me.
Having spent the last two days out of the country, I was unaware of how many people knew what I was doing. Of course I had done interviews, and Radio 1 was playing a massive role in supporting the challenge, but you don’t think that will automatically result in people being bothered. Everyone has a busy life, so you could easily miss a radio interview. I wouldn’t have blamed anyone for wondering why two blokes were being filmed whilst they ran, particularly as the pace they were running at hardly meant that they were training for the Olympics. It was a great lift to have people beeping their horns as I passed, and it continued right till the end, although at times I was almost too tired to acknowledge it.
After Dave left, I continued to the halfway point, where I was to meet Dermot O’Leary. Dave I knew from going on Chris’s show; Dermot I had only met once before, but he is one of those people it is virtually impossible to dislike. We ran together for 10 miles.
I realised that the advice of running with someone made sense. Gordon was still ahead on his bicycle checking the route was OK, and Greg, for his sins, was also running virtually the full distance – just for fun, and to be there in case I needed a pep talk, a quick reaction to an injury or simply company.
However, there is a point, I find, when you are running long distance, that it is best to be alone. I never trained with headphones, so even when I had nobody with me I never played any music. I just wanted to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. As I had done all those years earlier on the bike ride home from Australia, I wanted to get to the state of mind where I moved without thinking about it.
Around lunchtime, we made a quick pit stop in a village to get some food and for Dot to have a look at some niggles I was feeling in my Achilles’ tendons. Lisa had visited for the day and Melanie was due to come and join me in the hotel that night, so I asked if Lisa had heard from her. Just as I opened my mouth, her phone bleeped on the table in front of me. It was a text from Melanie. We both laughed at the timing, and Lisa said I may as well read it.
The text began with the words, ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell John …’ Clearly, a sentence like that is never going to be good news but I had to read on. It transpired that Joe had been involved in an accident in which he had crashed head-on into a bus whilst riding his bicycle in Cape Town, where he was at college.
The previous few years had not been easy for Joe. He had been diagnosed with a rare auto-immune condition that affected his hearing: some days he would wake up deaf, and this could last for hours or days. The fluctuations meant that hearing aids could not easily be set and the constant tinnitus kept him awake some nights, so that it was difficult to know how much sleep he had had.
Joe was 15, and would raise his voice when he was talking to me, which drove me mad as I just assumed he was being a disrespectful pain-in-the-arse teenager. ‘Who do you think you’re shouting at?’ would be replied to with, ‘I’m not shouting at anybody,’ and then him walking away. Not coming back when I told him to would send me into a further rage. But, of course, he didn’t know he was shouting because he didn’t know he was losing his hearing. You know that you can’t see, but you don’t know that you can’t hear, so what I took to be defiance was just a symptom of his deteriorating hearing. He simply couldn’t hear me when he walked away.
Whilst I had been touring and making television programmes, smiling for promotional posters, signing new DVDs and receiving applause, Melanie had been sitting in hospital waiting-rooms hoping to find someone who could help give our son his hearing back. She had been holding the family together and battling to keep our priorities right. Nobody receives applause for being a mum. Some people have said that being alone on a stage as a comedian is a lonely place – sometimes being at home is a lot lonelier.
Attempting to remain calm, I tried to call Melanie, but her phone went straight to voicemail. I phoned Joe’s phone but it, too, just rang until the voicemail kicked in. Then I realised I had no other numbers with me to call, and my heart sank. In a world with a myriad of communication methods I didn’t know anyone who I could contact.
I didn’t want to make a scene or create a drama because it had become apparent to me that this challenge was bigger than me, but nothing is more important than your own children. We had to start running again to keep up with the schedule, which couldn’t afford any delays – to delay would alert the world to the fact that something was wrong. I had no choice: I had to start running without knowing what had happened to my son.
I asked Lisa to keep calling them and to see if she could discover what hospital Joe had been taken to. Then I went outside, smiled for a few photographers, waved to the crowd and started running. I just didn’t know what else to do.
By the time I reached Faversham, the place where I was going to end the day, two hours later, Lisa had spoken to Melanie. Somehow Joe had managed to smash the windscreen of the bus, but, apart from being shaken, he was fine. After an examination for any serious problems, he had been released from hospital and would make it over for the end of the challenge on Friday, but would not be able to run with me as the other two planned to do.
I ran into the centre of Faversham tired, but feeling so much lighter than the previous 15 miles. The knowledge had lifted a weight of my shoulders, and as I began to allow myself the belief that I could complete this challenge I started to notice the crowds lining the streets, cheering as I went past. And, when we turned the corner, it was clear we had literally stopped the traffic. The town was full of people cheering. I was greeted by the mayor, someone tried to give me a beer and others tried to push cash into my hand. Any doubt that the beeping was for me was now well and truly gone. This was already bigger than I thought it would ever be.
Any charity event is measured by the money it raises and you can only know what this is at the end, but by the time I reached Faversham it was clear that we were capturing people’s attention, and this could only mean that donations would come in. Beyond thinking I could do it physically, I began to believe the support we were being given would result in a decent amount of money being raised. Basically, I began to think it would all be worth it.
That night, when Melanie arrived, it felt as if I hadn’t seen her for weeks, so much had happened. I was stiff and was walking with a slight limp as we approached each other in the corridor outside my room.
She held on to me tighter than I can recall her ever doing. ‘He’s OK. I’ve spoken to him and he’s OK,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I replied.
‘You look shit,’ she said, as she wiped a tear away from her eyes. I am not sure it was there to indicate her relief about Joe or because I looked so ‘shit’, but we both laughed.
After the ice bath and massage, I put on my compression tights which, I have to say, did nothing to inject spice into a 19-year marriage. I was like an exhausted Max Wall (again, if you’re too young, Google him), and would have slept heavily had my stomach not decided to reject everything that I had eaten for dinner that night.
At breakfast the next day, when I told Greg and Dr Matt about throwing up, Greg simply said, ‘We thought that might happen.’ Apparently, when your body is exhausted, the blood in the stomach exits to feed the overworked muscles, leaving a higher concentration of acid, too high to digest food.
With that knowledge on board, but nothing else, I started my run from Faversham to Gravesend, a distance of around 28 miles. Melanie joined me for the first half of it, which was good, but without any food inside me I was running out of energy and was also becoming increasingly affected by the pain coming from my Achilles’ tendons. They were both incredibly tight, and each kerb-stone I had to step over sent a stabbing sensation up the back of my legs. What was worse was that the treatment Dot favoured involved the use of blue tape and, when I say blue, I mean Smurf blue. I had the tape all the way up the rear of my legs as I ran. They looked like the oddest varicose veins known to man.
That day I was helped along by Frank Skinner, whom I had never met before but really liked, and Chris Moyles, who surprised me by turning up. He had done so much for the appeal, it was great that he was there whilst I did it.
I was tired when we reached Gravesend, but was also on a high. I knew I only had one day left, and then it was all over. The following morning I started from the town centre in Gravesend where I had finished the previous evening and, as a small crowd waved me off, I began running. Within a few hundred yards there was sharp pain in my right shin – an excruciating stab that felt like a burning knife, but I knew I couldn’t stop: I was still in sight of everyone who had just waved me off. You could call it pride, you could call it ego or you could call a desire not to let anyone down, but I didn’t want to stop after they had all made the effort to come and cheer.
I carried on, then hobbled around a car and, when I was sure nobody could see, I stopped. Greg, Matt and Dot came to look and decided that it was probably shin splints – anything worse and I would need to stop. There was no way I was going to stop, so we decided I should run to the scheduled pit stop nine miles away and see how I was when I got there.
Before I got there, I was joined by Greg James, the Radio 1 DJ who had interviewed me on the boat, when I could hardly speak. He had come to run a few miles, but I think also to see if I was as close to death as I had sounded.
I also had another surprise. As I was running, someone came to run alongside me. This had happened a few times and I had engaged in pleasantries, although this time I was in too much pain. So I just said, ‘All right, mate,’ and glanced over – to see my own face staring back at me. The person running alongside was wearing a mask of my face. Before I could decide if this was funny or not, he lifted the mask and I saw that it was my brother Eddie, who ran the next nine miles with me and gave me a great lift.
I reached the pit stop and received what treatment they could offer. The shin was causing some concern, the type of concern where people say it’s not causing them any concern but then whisper to each other. I heard ‘hairline fracture’ being mentioned and decided to let everyone know that, no matter what it was, there was no way that with 15 miles to go before the end I was going to quit.
Dot did what he could, and I was back on the road and heading to the big city. Robbie Savage joined us for a section, which at first I hadn’t been keen on. Everyone else who had run with me I either knew or I liked, and he didn’t fall into either of those two categories. For some reason, as a footballer he always wound me up, and as a person I always envisaged he would be annoying. However, he is another person to be added to the list of those I got wrong before I met them. He was funny, and had played football against many of the people Eddie had when he was a professional, so I was able to direct my concentration away from my legs to listen to their anecdotes.
The problem with London is that it is simply too big for anyone to give much of a toss about anything that anyone else is doing. After two days where whole towns had seemed to come and greet me, I was now entering London where, apart from the odd shout from a builder on scaffolding – and, to be fair, that could have been directed more at Robbie than me – there was no reaction. We could have been a very slow jogging club who happened to be getting followed by a camera crew for all the people of South London cared.
As we entered Greenwich, my sister Carol met us to hand over Luke and Daniel, who ran with us for a few miles. It was great to see them, as I’d been so preoccupied with maintaining the challenge and what had happened to Joe that I had hardly spoken to them. But although I wanted to catch up with them properly, I knew I just had to carry on going. I was in agony, but didn’t want anyone to know, and I was aware that if I stopped there was every chance I would struggle to make the final pit stop.
However, your kids know you better than you imagine.
‘You OK, Dad?’ asked Daniel, when I grimaced going down some steps.
‘He’s in agony, stupid.’
‘Don’t call me stupid, idiot.’
‘Who are you calling an idiot?’
It’s amazing how quickly domestic life can walk back into your head, even as you come to the end of the hardest week of your life.
At the final pit stop, Joe was there, slightly bruised but mainly unscathed. I had seen a photograph of the damaged bus; he was lucky to be there, and we both knew it. There was a quick hug, I called him a dickhead, and we moved on.
The shin was now extremely painful to touch, but Dot administered whatever treatment he could, and I got up to run the last seven miles into London. Before starting, I thanked as many people as I could who had been with us during the week, and then I set off with just Greg for the final leg.
I would have been happy to have run the whole way and crossed the finishing line with Greg, but the director of the documentary, Matt, kept asking Greg to move aside so he could have a solo shot of me. The third time he did this I told him where to shove his camera, and after he realised I wanted to run with Greg we were left to run side by side until we reached the Embankment.
I knew we were finishing in Trafalgar Square and that all we had to do was turn right. However, Greg said we had to split up at this point as I had to go the long way round to enter it down The Mall, but he would see me at the end.
I had been moving virtually every waking hour for the last five days and now someone had decided to add on another mile to my run so I could run down The Mall. I was fuming, thinking that if this was something Matt had set up because I had told him where to shove his camera, then I would duly complete the task when I had finished.
I had turned the corner in front of Buckingham Palace and started to run down The Mall when I noticed there were no cars on it. I looked behind me, and noticed two police cars holding up the traffic as I progressed up one of the most famous roads in the world – a road that had been closed for me. Normally when I find a road has been closed, I feel like screaming. This time, I felt like crying.
I turned into Trafalgar Square to the sound of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and people cheering. I wanted to shake people’s hands and thank them for their support but I still hadn’t finished. Even though it was few hundred yards, I would not allow myself to stop till I crossed the finishing line, which I could see at the top of some steps. In my knackered state, I remember thinking I couldn’t believe after the week I had just endured, somebody had thought, ‘Let’s just make him climb some steps at the end.’
A yard from the finishing line, I finally stopped running. I took a step and walked over it. It was done. As I raised my hands in the air, Melanie and the boys joined me and we hugged for a moment on our own before turning to face the press and the crowds. It was our moment: for better or for worse, my ‘Week of Hell’ was over.
All of my friends and family were there, and my mum’s was amongst many of the most important faces in my life glistening with tears as I looked at the people gathered there. Jason Manford led me to the podium and revealed that the challenge had raised £1.6 million. By the time I hosted a section of Sport Relief with James Corden, the documentary had been shown and the total had reached £3.4 million, and by the time Sport Relief closed the account the challenge had raised £4.2 million. That is nearly a million children immunised.
A few weeks later, I turned up at the Comic Relief night at the BBC and everybody kept asking me how my leg was and how I was recovering. Then I saw David Walliams who, up to that point, I had only met a few times before. ‘How’s your head?’ he asked. He was the only person to ask that, because he was perhaps the only person who would know what it’s like when you take on such a huge public challenge. You take your body and you train it, prepare it to do a job, to perform a function, and it does it. What nobody sees is the weight of responsibility you try to sleep with for months before; how your whole focus is to do something which is not actually what you do and is actually something you’re not even sure you can do; and yet everybody you know and millions you don’t are going to know if you succeed or not. Then it’s over, and you get back that head-space you had devoted to completing the task. You can now think of something else; the problem is, you don’t know what.
I will always feel proud of my participation in the ‘Week of Hell’ because, while I learnt a lot about myself, I learnt more about people. Nobody had to make a single donation to Comic Relief for what I did. There are many more people who have done much harder physical challenges without the recognition, and I personally don’t think the physical side was that important. My leg wasn’t fractured, and after a few weeks with a plastic cast the swelling went down. A few months later I was jogging again, so there was no significant damage done. What will always stay with me, however, was that people chose to be involved, to phone, to make a donation to help someone they would most likely never meet to have a better life. For one week, people took a second to think of someone else, and I was part of that process; something for which I will always feel humble and proud.