Kitchen table survival skills are survival skills you can put into practice from your kitchen table. I humbly submit my set of tried and tested (and at times learned from bitter experience) non-glamorous, but effective, kitchen table survival skills:

There's not always a choice, but having a good handle on the weather (know your clouds) can mean the difference between a nice day out and a disaster.

As Alistair Humphrey's writes in his book Local, "Unfolding a map is the ritual that launches all good journeys." There's art and science in route planning—considering the needs and abilities of your party, the terrain, the effect of the weather or altitude, availability of water, interest and views, access, timing, trail condition and more. So many varied aspects go into it. When planning a family hike now, we weigh up a very different set of factors than we did for two fit twenty-somethings happy to endure a little hardship.

If you're going to the wilderness, go with somebody if you can, and leave your intended plan with friends or family back home. If you're not back when expected, at least you'll have someone looking out for you, and a rescue party will know where to start looking.

OK, so it doesn't seem like a survival skill exactly, but going with a local guide will work wonders for your survival. You might not need one for a walk in the local woods, but if you fancy hiking on a glacier or venturing down a river, and it's not something you do too often, then hiring a guide will be the best survival decision you make.

Sure, you can head out and figure it out when you're out there, but mountains, and wilderness generally, are capricious places. There's so much a good hiking book, or a recent trip report can teach you before you set out. Is a river crossable? Is there still snow on a pass? Are the mosquitoes out in force? How long is it likely to take? How much up and down will there be? Where can you camp? And on and on.

Whenever I've been on semi-serious expeditions, I've been very impressed with the kit lists provided by our guides. Every item is carefully chosen—like, say, bringing the 10 essentials—and lists are refined and revisited after each trip. It's rarely exciting assembling your kit and running through lists, but if it means you remembered spare batteries, the water filter, mosquito repellent, or a fire lighter it may prove your saving grace in the wild.

More mundane perhaps, but still helpful, is packing your gear in the right places and order in which you'll use it. You're much more likely to stop and put on sun lotion or a warm hat if it isn't stuffed under your sleeping bag in the depths of your backpack.

When we're tired, it's easy to make poor decisions. The best defence I know for this is to plan trips within your limits so you aren't trying to find a camp spot in the dark, feeling too tired to filter the water, or too tired to keep track of where you're going. After a long day, it's easy to start skipping the things that keep us safe, like putting on an extra layer or stopping for water. A guide once told me, "don't be too lazy to be comfortable."

A small, but very useful practice, I've adopted is having a good awareness of time on your excursions. Plan in advance and estimate how long different sections may take. Making a mental note of when you set off from the trailhead or from a rest stop gives you a sense of your progress, lets you know what it might take to get back if you need to, and teaches you how far you might get ahead of you. If your pace is changing, you'll have a good idea of how strong everyone is still feeling. Knowing when the sun rises and sets and how much daylight you have left means you're less likely to find yourselves in the dark without a headlamp.

I'm sure you might have more to add to the list.

This set came from reflecting on our survival skills before a brilliant chat with Brendan Leonard of the excellent Semi-rad about all things Ultra on the Sketchplanations podcast (episode out in Autumn 2024). Growing up in the 80s, for me survival skills were things Crocodile Dundee had, or perhaps MacGyver. More recently, Bear Grylls would demonstrate making a shelter in the jungle, starting fires, or catching salmon to survive in the wild. However, I realised that my survival skills were much less glamorous, but still rather effective, and most of them are used before I head out on a trip. In other words, my survival skills are ones that mean (touch wood) I don't get into a scrape that need the traditional survival skills most of us think of.

As with so much in life, it's often the unglamorous stuff that makes the difference, like showing up every day, replicating before innovating, writing a rubbish first draft, or re-writing.

I hope this set may keep your expeditions Type I or Type II fun, rather than Type III.

Don't make important decisions on an empty stomach

Perhaps you were really expecting something about a kitchen table: how to set a table

Kitchen table survival skills

Anchors and tugboats. One holds you back, and one pulls you forward.

Negativity can act like an anchor holding you back, narrowing your focus and restricting your potential.

Positivity, by contrast, acts like a tugboat pulling you forward. It's expansive. It opens us up to the opportunity we have, gratitude or joy.

I heard this analogy from sports psychologist Justin Ross. It's a curious thing, he points out, that we don't actively learn how we should talk to ourselves; it just happens. If you're out running and things get tough, or if you're having a hard time at work or as a parent, our self-talk starts about how things are going and how we got here. But rarely do we consciously think about how we should talk to ourselves. To get to positivity from a place of negativity, he says, the first step is awareness and noticing the negativity anchoring us down. Only then can we think about transforming the negative thoughts into positive ones and starting to feel the pull of the tugboat.

This example is sports psychology, but it applies throughout our lives.

Justin discusses this from 29:40 in the Löw Tide Boyz podcast episode 193.

Anchors and tugboats

Optimism bias is a tendency to believe that things will turn out well in spite of past evidence or circumstances.

It can be extremely helpful. It allows us to attempt things that many may deem impossible. It probably helps drive entrepreneurs even when everyone is doubting them. Optimists are often healthier and happier.

But it can also undermine us. We might overestimate our chances of success because of what we want to happen rather than what's likely to happen. We may feel pressure from others to give a rosier outlook — like when you might underestimate a timeline when speaking with your boss. We might want others to succeed, or they may be paying us money and be hoping for good news. We probably think we'll get more done next week. We probably think we'll be more disciplined than we will be. We might think that this time it'll be different, or that everyone can't be wrong. Or we may be just discounting evidence without realising it.

Related: Hofstadter's Law, survivorship bias, Kitty Hawk moment

Optimism bias

It's something I like to keep in mind after a big workout, particularly on the legs — get the weight off them!

Stand sit lie

The Doorstep Mile is a brilliant Norwegian concept for how the hardest part of a journey can be just getting out of the door.

So, sometimes, as Seth Godin would say, the most important thing is just to start — start small, start now, step by step, day by day, and you can give yourself the chance to make something amazing.

Got something you’ve been meaning to start? Maybe today’s the day?

When I created this sketch, it was my 104th in consecutive weeks — 2 years of weekly sketches without missing — and sketchplanation number 583 in total. And I can tell you that it didn’t start glamorously, and they weren’t high quality or even interesting, but I did start. Sketch by sketch. Week by week.

More sketches about starting and getting started.

The doorstep mile

The fun scale acknowledges that not all fun is created equal and includes the different types of fun, including Type 1, Type 2 and Type 3 fun.

I assumed fun is all the same. Fun is fun. But then, when I first heard about Type I and Type II fun, I had to admit there was some validity in there being different types of fun.

Type 1 fun is like eating ice cream, or skiing with ski lifts to whisk you back up to the top — you love it while you’re doing it, and when you think back on it you remember how good it was. Straightforward— sounds like fun.

Type 2 fun, on the other hand, is the sort of enjoyment you get from something like running a marathon or climibing a mountain. You often have to admit that it wasn’t necessarily all fun at the time. In fact, it could have been quite hard and might have hurt a bit. But when you look back on it, you think of it as often more fun and fulfilling than the Type I fun.

Type 3 fun is usually type 1 or 2 fun that went wrong. Though it was supposed to be fun, things actually got a little hairy – like you got lost, or it got dark, and it got cold, or you had to be rescued — but…it sure makes a great story when you make it back.

The fun scale is probably my favourite sketch that didn't make it into my new book. If you like this one, you'll love the book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

HT: my brother shared this with me having learned it from his mountain guide doing classic Type II fun.

I updated this sketch in 2023. Here is the original fun scale sketch

The fun scale

Swimrun is basically navigating from start to finish through water and over land carrying only the gear you need. What you start with you have to finish with. You will run in your wetsuit and swim in your running shoes. The world championship courses are run by Ötillö. Ötillö means island-to-island in Swedish after the original course created from a drunken bet.

A beautiful aspect of it is that it's a team sport, both run and swum in pairs. Many choose to tether together which dramatically on the swims and keeps you both close.

In 2016 I teamed up with Rob Bell and took part in Ötillö’s UK swimrun in the Isles of Scilly. The Scilly event was a swimrun paradise. Check out the course, and the amazing event photos. The place is gorgeous, go visit sometime. And get into swimrun it’s awesome!

Swimrun

Swim a mile in water 5C or less. The ice mile is hardcore. Respect for crazy, amazing people like Lewis Pugh. Or if you’re in London, check out The Swimmer.

Get my new weekly sketch in your inbox

Category: endurance