I was brought up on a wild and windy Pennine hill in Yorkshire. My Dad’s a farmer and I blew around that hillside for 20 years growing up.

Weary of my pestering for a horse – it was a dairy farm and cows are a poor substitute for horses – my parents borrowed a Shetland, a spotty pony and later horses (which got bigger as I grew taller).

There’s nothing more to add, it was just fun, I didn’t compete and I didn’t go onto riding fame and glory.

After Uni I settled in Leeds and found a job. Then, in my late 20s a relationship break-up catapulted me off to somewhere, anywhere, a long way away. The Andes in Ecuador, South America picked me up. I worked as a volunteer for a riding holiday company. It didn’t pay, but it was an awesome life for a while. My Mum says it’s where I found my smile.

This is me and Patricio – my Ecuadorian boss – with my Mum and Dad (both non-riders) who came out to visit me.

That’s a long time ago now. These days I’m living outside York, married and a step-Mum, but still hanging around horses for fresh air and gallops.

My life is only horsey around the edges. I’ve worked too. For large and small companies with lots of different clients. I’ve been employed and self-employed, delivering projects all over.

At the age of 42, mid-project, I had a brain haemorrhage.

My life stopped overnight.

This is what a bleed on the brain looks like. The blob of white on the left is blood. (FYI – there isn’t space for this to happen inside your skull without a lot of pain.)

It turns out I was born with some malformed veins in my head.

People in my life who are normally very calm were quite worried. I don’t remember too much about it… morphine… lying down on beds… being wheeled around for a time.

Time passed and I was released to convalesce back on the windy hillside, in the farmhouse of my childhood.

It was a weird time.

I was tired (but doctors called it ‘fatigued’) a lot. A side effect of trauma to the brain.  

I stayed in bed, watching the weather race past the windows.

I had hours and hours just to sit, to think or to sleep.  

I lost a close friend to cancer in her 30s. We were already down two mutual friends by this point, one in a car accident, and another dropped down dead wallpapering. Three is a number, not always magic.

I remember being with her after she got her diagnosis, she turned to me and asked,

“What would you do? If you knew you didn’t have long left”.  

Good question.

As I convalesced, my utterly under-estimated body did amazing things. It re-wired and re-routed the damaged parts of my brain and totally fixed itself.

I made a full recovery. Went horse riding, started pulling my weight around the house again, stopped taking naps every afternoon, life went back to normal and they all lived happily ever after.

Not exactly. I do still have a bit of my brain that’s not as it should be. I’ve had some treatment, take some daily meds and the docs have signed me off to live a normal.

I don’t think they were expecting I’d ask…

… can I go to the wilds of Patagonia and ride horses for 10 days in a hard-as-nails race where I have to find my way around mountains for 500km, camping and purify my own water en route. Read about the Gaucho Derby.

But what’s normal for one person, might not be for someone else.

What I’m trying to explain here is… (and it’s quite philosophical, so if that’s not your thing, skip a paragraph)

…it’s not just one thing that’s made me sign up for this craziness. It’s a thousand little pebbles of moments, conversations, happenings, things I’ve done, places I’ve been, all coming together into an unlikely heap of experience, ideas and dreams that is so perfectly equal to the thing that the Gaucho Derby is. The heap of pebbles just toppled over when I read about the Gaucho Derby and I had to do it.

(rejoin here) I think a part of me is proving to myself that I can do it. A part of me doesn’t want to die of a brain haemorrhage just waiting at the bus stop.

I’m also using this leviathan of a trip to raise money for two fantastic causes. Autism Angels UK and Cool Earth. So if you can give even a £1 to raise funds for the amazing work they do, they (and I) will really be grateful and promise to use it wisely to improve life for someone else.

www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/shirleyhaywood

If you think what I’m doing is the kind of thing you want to support in a bigger way, then please get in touch, I’m looking for sponsors. There’s a whole pack of stuff I can give you in return for donations of kit I need to get to the end of this incredible (and dastardly tough) race.