About Me

So lets start at the beginning, my name is not Primal Pete, it’s just plain old Peter. I’m 56 years old and live in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, England. I’m married to Sara and we have three wonderful daughters aged 16,14 and 11. I work as an NVQ Assessor/Training Advisor.

As a boy and a young man I was very fit, I was, and still am, into Judo, swimming and boxing. At the tender age of 15 I joined the Army as a Sapper in the Junior Leaders Regiment, Royal Engineers, based in Dover. After leaving boy service and as soon as I was old enough (you had to be 18) I joined 9 Independent Parachute Sqn R.E. After my 5 years with 9 Sqn I served with several other “Airborne Units”  for the next 6 years. I finished my Army service in 1983.

After my Army career was over, I decided that I would like to maintain my high level of fitness. With this in mind I started running, starting with Half Marathons, then moving on to the full Marathon. I was quite a good runner and ran over 30 Marathons in my running career, with a best time of 2 hour 23 mins.

In 1985 I became very ill and spent 11 months in The Royal Halamshire Hospital. Towards the end of my stay in hospital the Doctor told me that I had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). I was 28 years old when I first went into hospital and 29 when I was diagnosed.

I was told by the Doctor to take things very gentle, that I had to finish work, stop the vigorous exercise (not that I could do any at that time). I was also told that I would need crutches to walk with for the rest of my life. The first thing that came into my mind was “my life is over”. This thought lasted about 30-40 seconds, the next thought was “ha, I can beat this thing” and that’s what I set out to do.

Taking my Doctors advice after my release from hospital, I threw away the crutches and walked with out them, okay, I kept falling over, but I’m an ex-para so I am used to falling I also started back to work, only part time, but I was working.

Then early in 1985, after being out of the hospital for about 2 month I started going to my local gym and started lifting weights. Once again taking my Doctors advice I started off very gently, for the first week anyway, but then I started to push myself harder and harder. To my surprise this exercise didn’t make me feel worse and drive me back into hospital, in fact it had the opposite effect and made me feel better (as long as I listened to my body and stopped when it told me to).

I couldn’t run very well at this time due to my balance going out of sync, but I could walk/stagger. The more I walked the better I got at it, until I could run a little. So I started walking from one lamp post to the next one, then try and run to the one after that. Sometimes I had to walk for two lamp posts and run for one, but I was running. Eventually I could run the distance of two lamp posts and walk for just one. Guess what, after a while I could run for about 200 yards then walk for 50, then run again. This took time because of my balance, plus I kept falling over but I got there eventually.

As time progressed I became fitter and stronger. My Doctor couldn’t understand how or why I was recovering so well and so fast, and I didn’t tell him. It really screwed with his brain for months. I had gone from someone who was that ill it looked like I was going to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, to being able to walk up stairs and get around on my own without help from anyone.

My sessions at the gym became more and more intense, until I was lifting very heavy weights. After a year or so I decided that I was going to have a crack at a body building competition, and that’s what I did.

 As time passed I cut down on my body building and concentrated more on the cardiovascular exercises, until eventually I stopped lifting weights altogether. Time to train started to become a problem, I was working full time by now and had small children. I also started at The University of Sheffield doing a full time Engineering Degree. All this made training a low priority.

As the years came and went I did less and less exercise resulting in a spare tyre around my belly that started to spread over the rest of my body. By the time I reached the age of 50 I was over weight and unfit, and I stayed that way until early this year (2011) when I decided to do something about it. As for the MS, it’s still there, simmering away in the background, it gives me very little trouble now, just the odd little kick every once in a while, but I have learned to live with that.

That’s the basic introduction over and done with, now to tell you a little about why I want to try and live a Primal Lifestyle.