|
February of course brought snow, and lots of it, bringing large parts of the UK to a stand. While this provided the perfect motivation to begin thinking seriously about training for our summer expedition the trouble was we couldn't even get the car out of our front drive let alone contemplate doing anything other than walking around our not particularly hilly neighbourhood until the snows subsided. However, once the snows began to subside we jumped in the car and drove the 100+ miles to the Brecon Beacons in South Wales to do a quick dash up and down what turned out to be a still quite snow swept Pen y Fan. This was our first real hike, apart from our stroll on that windy Sunday morning in January, our first real exercise and the first time in any sort of mountains since our holiday in the Canadian Rockies in the summer of 2008. Perhaps not surprisingly our muscles let us know what they thought about being dragged up some pretty steep inclines to just short of 900m without any prior warning but despite being somewhat breathless at times and taking more frequent rests than usual we made it to top, trotted over to Corn Du and descended round the rest of the horseshoe and back to our car. The day in Wales provided a great opportunity to take out the camera and the new video camera to compare the quality of still photos on the video camera with the quality of the Canon 300D and to begin trying to work out how many pictures the Canon would deliver from a fully-charged battery across a range of temperatures.
The interesting weather conditions also allowed us to test a different selection of our new cold weather kit as the day was bracing to say the least but once again we were so warm that we had to delayer as soon as we started to climb, which all bodes well for the choices we have made. As the snows finally melted away and fired up from our Welsh experience we had great intentions of getting out on the trail as often as possible and to develop an intensive programme to get fit for the big climb but to be honest the whole Kili thing still seemed a very long way off and "thinking" is about as far as it got. This was in part due to the fact that the days were still short and generally pretty inclement, both of which tend to have a negative impact on ones motivation to be outside in the cold, dark and probably wet streets just for the sake of it. But at least we were thinking now about how we might get fitter once the evenings became a little lighter, the weather hopefully better and walking the local streets a little more enticing. Roll on March...
|
|
)
)
)
)
