Doing It Scared – a film and lecture night with Paul Pritchard
The Foundry, Sheffield, Sunday 18 December 2016
in aid of Climbing For All sheffield
This is a lecture about an extraordinary man on an inspiring life journey, his continuing recovery from a crushing injury and the never waning desire for adventure. This is a lecture about determination and acceptance, patience and humility, grace, and ultimately, freedom.
British climber - and award winning writer of Deep Play, Totem Pole and The Longest Climb - Paul Pritchard, was one of the leading climbers and mountaineers of the 1980s and 1990s, renowned for his hard and extremely bold first ascents.
When he won the Boardman Tasker Award for mountain literature in 1997, with his book Deep Play, he spent the prize money on a world climbing tour that found him in Tasmania climbing a slender sea stack known as The Totem Pole, a route that was to change his life forever…
Abseiling into the route, a TV-sized boulder fell from 30 meters and struck Paul’s head, inflicting such catastrophic head injuries that doctors thought he might never walk or even speak again. During a year in hospital Paul learned how to walk, feed and dress himself again whilst the doctors struggled to get his post-traumatic seizures under control. The aftermath of the accident left him with hemiplegia, which means he has little feeling or movement in the right side of this body. Yet, despite this disability, Paul has continued to live a life filled with adventure.
During the show Paul will lecture alongside showing his recent film Doing it Scared. You will join Paul on adventures that took him from Wales to the Himalayas, the Karakoram to Patagonia, Baffin Island to the Pamirs. You will also be swept along with him as he describes how his life of adventure was brought to a screaming end at the bottom of the world, and through the course of the show you will come to understand how Paul sees this, the most catastrophic of injuries, as a precious gift. And finally, you will hear about how he returned 18 years later in 2016 to attempt the Totem Pole with a brain injury, paralysis and epilepsy.
Show time.
Date: Sunday 18 December
Venue: The Foundry Climbing Centre Unit 2, 45 Mowbray St, Sheffield S3 8EN
Show time: 8:30pm (café open, bring a warm coat)
Tickets: £10.00
Book tickets here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/paul-pritchard-tickets-29712013432
The lecture is raising funds for:
https://climbingforallsheffield.com
There will be a raffle for prizes donated by the climbing community.
