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June brought a return to work after our days off over the Bank Holiday week and it was a struggle to get motivated in the evenings and to continue the training programme but we forced ourselves to get out for a couple of hours on a couple of evenings. By the end of the week, having dodged the heavy rain storms over the weekend to fit in our circuit in the pictures below, we were beginning to get back into the swing of it and had amassed another 1,500m and something like 20 miles, so not that bad really.
A colleague suggested we might like to visit Great Malvern to help relieve the monotony of traipsing up and down the same few hills, so we looked it up on the 1:25,000 map to find that it is quite something, rising about 400m above its surroundings in a very short distance. At the end of the second week in June we therefore jumped n the car and drove the fifty odd miles to take a look. We left the car in the town and didn't really need a map, instead simply heading up hill. Given the purpose of our visit was training, not sightseeing, we took the straightest possible route to get us to the top, knowing full well that it would also be the steepest way to get there. To describe this as very steep is something of an understatement as it rises 340m over a horizontal distance of just over a kilometre. Indeed, it is so steep that we had to make a couple of stops to catch our breath, which at this stage in our training is unusual to say the least as we can usually pace ourselves well to cope with even the steepest inclines! Anyway after about 50 minutes we were on the top with fantastic views of the Severn Valley and following a small detour to take in the second highest point we dropped back to the car and headed home, with our legs letting us know they had been worked hard to carry us and our weight packs up and back down some 450m. While quite a long way to drive for an evening "stroll", we are likely to pay this little hill at least one more visit before we conclude our training and head off for Kilimanjaro in a few weeks time. On the way home we came up with another idea as we drove up the steep hill at Birdlip that we drive so often when heading for or returning from the M5 motorway. On this occasion we realised that this little beauty is also about 200m high, so it was once again back to the map for a closer look once we got back from our usual Saturday morning circuit training at the monument in the above pictures. We found what looked to be an interesting possibility where numerous paths and tracks crisscross through woods and across meadows where we could first descend and then climb back up something like 200m. Repeat this a few times and we have a new circuit training opportunity, so on the Sunday we headed back to Birdlip to try it out. At this time of year traditional meadows are really beautiful and this, mixed with the dark woodlands made for a really enjoyable walk, which despite the heavy packs did not feel like "just more training" and we spent what turned out to be 4 hours exploring the paths and heading down, then up - a little like canyoning rather than climbing - and racking up well over 600 vertical metres in the process. The weekend of the Summer Solstice saw us back at the monument on the Saturday and trying a new variation of the Birdlip walk on the Sunday, very close to the hill that is famous for mad, mostly young, people chasing a Double Gloucester cheese down a very steep hill. Again, we planned to "circuit train" up and down this hill a few times but on our last circuit we also took a small detour to look at the famous cheese slope as have to say that while we are "up" for climbing Kili, neither of us can comprehend how or why people would throw themselves down this scary looking hill chasing a rolling cheese - totally eccentrically British! Training continued pretty much on track for the rest of June and at the end of the month we had clocked up another 6,500 vertical meters, bringing our total to a whopping 14,000m. Although we didn't feel that much fitter, when we looked back at how we felt at the end of each of our circuits and how tired the legs were, we realised that all of this physical activity was paying dividends. Just July left now and then it will all get very real!
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