By: Blonde Two

I think I may have just about got away with shedding a sneaky tear in front of one hundred or so young people today.  We have been gathering them together all week for our annual Ten Tors recruitment drive.  We have been working quite hard in recent years, at promoting Ten Tors and bigging-up the students who do it and it has grown enormously in popularity.  I think our promotional success is down to a fancy notice board with dangerous looking Dartmoor pictures, the annual Ten Tors video that I put together after the event and a feisty Welsh chap with a booming voice.

It was the video that did me in.  I would love to be able to show it to you but I can’t. Setting the thing up to run was a bit stressful – they say “Never work with children and animals” but “Never work with IT in front of children” would, I think, be more appropriate.  I choose a song to go with the video each year (Mr Blonde Two is very good at this) and this year’s was Hall of Fame by The Script.  If you don’t know it, the best lyric is, “You could go the distance, You could run the mile, You could walk straight through hell with a smile.”  So appropriate for Ten Tors, especially in last year’s horrendous weather conditions.  I am sure that all of the teams experienced their own bit of “hell” and many of them did walk straight through.

I was ok all of the way through the pictures of training, the funny pictures of camping and the ones of the teams standing under our flag kitted up and ready to go (sadly not the Two Blondes’ flag).  Just at the end though, I started to lose my composure.  I had included some pictures of our 55 Mile team crossing the finishing line.  If you had any doubt about the “… straight through hell” thing, there could be none left after looking at their faces.  They painted a picture of pride, triumph and complete and utter exhaustion.  I felt even prouder watching it again than I did on the day of the event and they are certainly in my “Hall of Fame”.  I am hoping that no-one noticed my sneaky tears.  Luckily, I wasn’t the one doing the talking.

We shall see next week, how successful the promotion has been.  One more day of showing the video.  I am considering wearing sunglasses just in case!