Ten Days of Private Military Training in Georgia: My 2015 Photo Diary

In the summer of 2015 I flew to Georgia for ten days of privately arranged military-style training. I had ultramarathons, an Ironman and Muay Thai behind me, and I was partway through the 21 SAS application process. On paper I looked prepared for something hard. What I actually lacked was any clear understanding of the specific preparation I needed — and I was about to spend a first night in a Tbilisi flat with no working phone, no internet and no idea what the morning would bring.

1. Tbilisi, dinner, and a first night I didn't plan for

The journey itself was smooth, though I had worried about being stopped and searched while carrying military gear. A local contact collected me, and we headed into the city for dinner. Over Georgian dumplings I met the man I had previously known only through a screen. My diary records my heart starting to pound as that meeting approached.

After dinner came the apartment, and an unexpected first night. It was a small place — a bedroom that also served as the living room, a bathroom, a kitchen. I could see no internet connection or phone, and my SIM card was not working. I slowly unpacked, nervous and wary, clock-watching my Casio as I tried to sleep. The diary ends that night with me gradually drifting off — not with any record of what the next day held, because I didn't know either.

2. Being fit was not the same as being ready

The arrangement had come through a friend with connections in Georgia. There were questions about why I wanted to do it, my physical background and whether I was the right person to train, and eventually those conversations brought me into contact with the trainer through Facebook and Skype. The imbalance was there from the beginning: I was public about my life and knew very little about him. We had never met, and our Skype calls had never lasted longer than about fifteen minutes. Yet a ten-day arrangement was taking shape.

I responded the way I knew how: I started reading. First a US Army survival manual, then a 623-page book on surviving in different environments, then more books over several weeks. It was substantial work — and I was mistaking the amount of preparation for its relevance.

“In hindsight, it would have been better if I’d read up more extensively on the entire application process”

That line is from my original Part 1. The same passage admits I should have been clearer about what I needed; I had picked up material better suited to someone already much further into training. As I put it then: you don't know what you don't know. That, more than any endurance result on my record, is where this story starts.

3. A bag packed for the unknown

This indoor photograph brings the preparation down to ordinary objects: a blue and black bag, a hat, camouflage fabric. Assembling kit ran alongside the reading — items bought from Amazon and elsewhere, messages exchanged, the trainer kept updated on my running while I worked through four marathons in four weeks. The physical training was something I understood. The larger arrangement still felt strange, and as the flight approached my nerves increased. I wrote that I had no military points of reference, and it shows.

The open rucksack on a wooden floor is the quieter companion to that first-night account. Its album label is 1 July, so I won't place it inside the arrival scene — but it is the same world: practical stuff laid out indoors while the experience itself still felt beyond my grasp.

4. Out into the open country

Where the arrival diary leaves us indoors, the pictures open up. A broad dirt track slopes through grass towards water and distant hills; in the next frame a narrower path climbs between grassy slopes. Looking at them together now, I move from the contained world of bags and rooms into a much wider Georgia.

The two paths share a 25 June album label. That is how they sit in the collection — not a route I can reconstruct, and I won't pretend otherwise. Their value to me is the ground and surroundings they preserve. Beside them, the photograph of me in the broad-brimmed hat is the first in this essay that shows I was actually there, standing on that hillside rather than describing it second-hand.

A close view of dark ground and brush changes the scale again — green plants around dry stems and scorched-looking soil. I leave the cause open. It adds texture to the countryside without needing a dramatic incident to explain it.

5. Valleys, water and a wider Georgia

Water and hills give the next group more breathing room: a lake below grassy banks, trees and a long skyline. The valley pictures that follow widen the visual story well beyond the military idea that had occupied so much of my planning.

This green valley was the single landscape in my earlier Georgia overview, and I have kept it here. Beside the kit and the paths it no longer feels isolated — one view within a larger personal collection. The self-portrait beside it, hat and pack above the valley, is the picture I would choose to remember the trip by.

I organise these views by subject and album label: the lake is labelled 29 June, the valleys 30 June. The preparation diary refers to July, while the collection spans 25 June to 4 July. I keep that difference visible. Ten days is the duration I can confirm; a neat day-by-day timetable would go beyond the sources.

6. Wooded tracks, and what the archive means now

The wooded tracks close the scene in again. Dense leaves frame a pale road seen from above; my woodland self-portrait, smiling in a green T-shirt, sits in the same kind of cover. After the open valleys these are tighter views, full of foliage, bends and edges.

Reading the pictures beside the two diaries, the strongest thread is not bravado. It is the gap between being capable of sustained physical effort and understanding an unfamiliar undertaking. My older writing is candid about that gap. The books, the purchases and the sporting background were real; so were the questions I had not properly worked through before leaving.

So I let the photographs carry the surroundings and the diaries carry the preparation and the first night. Together they make the chapter tangible without inventing a missing account of every later day. That is what I want from this retrospective: a clearer view of the experience I arranged, and of the limits of what I understood when I arranged it.

Original Part 1: introduction, reading and preparation · Original Part 2: Tbilisi arrival and first night · The Georgia overview and chronology · My separate British Army preparation