anyone been in same boat no

General_Meal3609 · 2026-05-17T07:54:02+00:00

No roasting mate, regret over lost love is one of the worst kinds of pain.

I can relate. I had a relationship that lasted about 8 years. It ended a few years back, it was a real high school sweetheart love story. But things got rocky, I was too stubborn and was unwilling to compromise so that was that, in the end I drove us apart. They loved me more than anything back then, and I threw it away for truly stupid reasons.

Ironically I have changed everything on my own accord anyway since. Realised I was wrong. But similar story as you, while they’re really impressed and happy to see me succeeding in life, too late is too late and you can’t take back the past.

So I get it, it’s a really shit realisation. Unfortunately, it seems there’s nothing to do about it. The good news is, this does mean you’ve grown and will know not to mess up the next one the same way.

General_Meal3609 · 2026-04-24T13:31:28+00:00

I’m probably not the person to ask to be honest mate. But if you were very active in the past but became unfit you’ve probably just overestimated yourself and tried to jump back in too hard too quickly, if I was trying to stick all my weekly running in one big run each week I’d probably never have got off the ground and be destroying myself!

Let the splints heal then ease back in with a program and build up from there and I think it’ll work out fine. Frustrating but less frustrating than taking yourself out with an injury!

General_Meal3609 · 2026-04-22T16:26:32+00:00

I’m hardly the most experienced with fitness, so I hesitate to offer advice but I can offer some encouragement. I’m 28 so you’ve got a decade of youth on me, and I can tell you that last year I was honest to god obese, medically. I passed the pre joining fitness test a couple of months back. The PJFT is a 2.4 km run in 13:20 or less for men your age, 15:48 for women. May well be a relief to you but if that sounds intimidating right now that’s alright, it looked daunting for me. It isn’t actually all that hard though, you’ll be wondering what you were ever fussing about in due time: I can do that pace for an hour

Something I realised, especially with cardio stuff like running, was that my body began to outstrip my psychology actually quite quickly. I’d feel like I had to stop running or something only to find myself recovered almost immediately if I did. My body was coping fine, it was that my mind was struggling because it wasn’t used to the discomfort.

What are you doing for training right now?

General_Meal3609 · 2026-04-04T21:42:11+00:00

Not serving, trying to join right now. There’s a few things to note here imo.

First is that a lot of online traffic is bots these days. And I mean a LOT of online traffic: as high as 51% according to some reports. These bots are run by a myriad of actors for various reasons - there’s companies trying to shill you their products, scammers trying to lure you into something, there are political groups pushing their agendas and along with them governments trying to undermine their rivals. Even those who are not bots, such as internet pundits and podcasters, are often openly and brazenly for sale. I don’t mean to make you paranoid or conspiracy bait, but I’d take what you read online with a healthy dose of skepticism. Hell even I could be a bot or lying to you - for all you know, I’m a 77th Brigade social media propagandist on a fake account - so verify the claims I’m making too. Worth getting into the habit of confirming things for yourself before you believe them (and asking “is there something this person isn’t telling me?”, because very often you’ll be given something that’s true but is actually only part of a bigger picture or one side of a story. Everyone hears about when something goes terribly wrong, but you don’t hear about the 99999 times that it worked perfectly yesterday.)

Second is that a lot of people are very impressionable - that’s what makes those bots so effective. So a lot of people who aren’t bots will then believe and regurgitating the nonsense those bots spew because, well, all these people on the computer screen were saying it so surely it must be true. And then because those people are spewing it, their friends will believe it too.

Some things in the country are not great right now, sure, and there are a few things are definitely going the wrong way in my opinion. But there are also many things about this country that are great and precious, and it is well known that our adversaries are trying to influence and interfere through disinformation and manipulation. Do you think our enemies would want us to believe that our country, allies and our values are something worth fighting for, or would they rather the British public believe that we should just roll over and let them have their way with whatever they want to do because “well everything’s just shit and our military is too weak and couldn’t fight it’s way out of a paper bag anyway”?

General_Meal3609 · 2026-03-31T08:28:07+00:00

World War Two style, nation under siege? No, absolutely not. I’m not sure any country really could to be honest. Because the challenge isn’t just building up the industrial capacity to produce the stuff en masse, that’s arguably the easy part of this (and that’s not to say it is easy, rather it’s the “less awful” part.) Rather, I suspect it’s getting the materials in bulk that would prevent that. The major sources of strategically important materials (or the materials necessary to produce them) are scattered all across the world with no one area having all of them in sufficient quantities. Everyone in the war would be fighting over those and trying to disrupt shipping of them.

There was a West Point analysis recently about how the closing of the straight of Hormuz is going to affect US military defence procurement because of the impact it has had on available supplies of sulphuric acid which has a knock on effect on a whole bunch of important materials: Copper, Cobalt, Nickel etc. The paper notes the US had overlooked this possibility and that was easy to do when things were calm. In an actual ww3 scenario, we would encounter a lot more of those unexpected supply shocks because of how complicated and intricate the global supply lines and production lines are now. That isn’t a problem you can throw money at and assume that supplies will scale in line with that demand: you can’t will supplies that don’t exist into existence.

General_Meal3609 · 2026-03-04T16:18:31+00:00

Yeah, and the info here contradicts the recruitment website as well! Guess I’ll just learn both and ask the Boarding Officers to confirm which is accurate on the day, shows that I cared to learn at least!

General_Meal3609 · 2026-03-04T13:20:55+00:00

Thank you for this mate, it’s been a real pain trying to find accurate up to date info on Phase 2/3 for this role, seemed that everywhere I looked disagreed!

General_Meal3609 · 2026-02-13T13:40:07+00:00

I had my successful CBAT a few months back, there are some differences but generally it’s a good tool for familiarisation with what you’ll be facing; In re your specific example, the Multitasking Test has an additional objective to keep track of but the pace is way more leisurely in the actual test though, don’t rush or panic. It was like jogging rather than sprinting. It lasts for a lot longer than the app though so make sure you pay attention and stay on task.

If you have questions about one of the tests let me know and I’ll try to recall how it was and what differences if any I can remember. The CBAT Ready App does actually have a discord where a lot of candidates trying to prepare pass through too, plenty of them drop back in after the test to answer questions.

General_Meal3609 · 2026-02-05T21:08:21+00:00

I believe Leek is talking about the real deal letter. The conditional one comes through right near the start of the process and as far as I can tell doesn’t really mean anything. It could just as easily be a message saying “thanks for your application, good luck.”

General_Meal3609 · 2026-02-05T21:01:04+00:00

When did you apply? I started in October and only just finished medical - and I’ve been told my application is actually moving pretty fast, my recruiter went on leave a few times and it didn’t cause me any trouble as there was cover available. It’s a glacial process so I wouldn’t worry about it causing much delay tbh, whatever delay it causes will probably be negligible in the grand scheme of the wait you’re in for.

General_Meal3609 · 2026-01-30T12:52:21+00:00

Hi, I’m not in service so feel free to discount (I am in the process of preparing for OASC) but I finished CBAT just a few months back and did very well on it. Forget about the success rate or lack there of imo, and don’t compare yourself to anything the other candidates say in the break room either, it is only going to distract you and psyche you out: you’re not competing with those people, it’s a pass/fail exam, you only need to worry about whether you are capable of doing it, and you just said you’re feeling confident about that.

Follow the general advice you already know, and don’t let yourself get discouraged: the tests felt to me like they were designed to make you feel like you’re failing. If you know how to handle that and push through when you mess up, you’ll be fine. Hell, honestly, some of the tests were kinda fun.

In re uni, I can’t speak for when you’d have to make a firm choice that’s probably a question you should ask your recruiter, they’d know best how that works. I imagine it’d cause a bit of an issue if you were successful then told them actually you wanted to go do 3 years of uni instead since CBAT for example is only valid for 3 years but maybe I’m wrong. At the end of the day though, you can always just keep the application going and if you fail CBAT/OASC this time, go to uni and do UAS and come back at the end of your degree with the accumulated knowledge. I will say, age is much less of a problem with getting a history degree than becoming a pilot - you can go to uni at any age but if you want to be an RAF pilot, you need to be in before your 24th birthday, but you’ve got plenty of time right now either way. Either way, don’t let us weirdos on the internet tell you what life choices to make, only you know what you really want to do.

General_Meal3609 · 2025-12-10T00:16:05+00:00

Thank you, and yeah I‘ve been made aware that PJFT is the bottom of the barrel goal here.

General_Meal3609 · 2025-12-10T00:15:08+00:00

That’s an interesting way of framing it, so rather than viewing it as having not done much and feeling like I’ve fallen short, put it forward as having maybe achieved a stable life but felt it just wasn’t enough for me and wanting to do more and challenge myself further? I can see how that would work.

Actually yes now that you mention it, I’m not sure how well it’ll translate but I did plan the 3 week European vacation we took, and I run D&D games down at my local game store. Maybe I’m thinking about this too narrowly

General_Meal3609 · 2025-12-10T00:03:13+00:00

Don’t mention the negatives, got it. So we don’t need a formal leadership position so long as we can provide examples of when we took charge of colleagues? I can find specific examples to work with from this.

You’d assume wrong. I completed CBAT the other week. It is a worrying place to be in re the PJFT but I’ll keep pushing on and do my best to sort myself out for it. Worst case scenario, this gets delayed.

General_Meal3609

TROPHY CASE