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As April drew to an end and we moved into May, and a month closer to the "Big Walk", we decided it was time to step the training up another notch. To achieve this we decided to move away from walking generally up and down various hilly streets as we had been doing in April and to look to maximise altitude gains with the shortest possible walking distances. Trouble is we live at a massive 88m above sea level and the highest hill in the area is only 145m above sea level. And a lot of that is a very gentle gradient over quite a large distance. So what to do? Our task was helped somewhat by the fact that we had treated ourselves to an altimeter and began taking it with us on our training walks to look critically at gradients and overall height gains around our locality. Using this we found a fairly steep and short section of hill, on an old road that has been converted to a footpath, with a 30m height difference. Not massive but rather than walking up the hill and around some sort of loop, which spends significant periods on the level we decided to treat that 30m section in the same way an athlete might treat the running track and to aim for 10 "laps" up and down this steep section for each of our training sessions. This takes a couple of hours and gives us 300m up and back down again. Taking this circuit training approach also provides opportunity to push different muscle sets by, say, walking backwards, taking extra long strides, exercising arms while walking or not using the waste belt on rucksack to put more weight directly onto the shoulders and through the torso etc. The total distance walked in those 2 hours is not much less than it would be on the old loops but the height gains are 2 to 3 times greater and while we might look as though we have completely lost our marbles it is actually an effective way to simulate mountains where there are none and it wasn't long before we began feeling the benefits. We also decided to increase our pack weights again from about 14kg to 17kg for Gary and to about 8kg for Barbara. Again, the intention is two-fold. To allow the body to become accustomed to far heavier weights than we will carry on the mountain and also to simply make the training tougher and therefore more effective per hour spent. Local training is OK as far as it goes but nothing can completely replicate the effect of walking in real mountains. To this end the beginning of the month saw us once again driving over to our nearest mountains - the Brecon Beacons - this time to do a horseshoe trek encompassing Corn Du, Pen-y-Fan and Cribyn from the south side, rather than our previous visits to the north side of the range. While windy, the weather was this time much better than our previous two visits and by the time we had taken in all three peaks the shiny new altimeter was registering something in the region of 850m altitude gain for the day. Although the drive to the Beacons takes a couple of hours in each direction it certainly made a change to be in real mountains rather than manufacturing them as described above! For the next couple of weeks we were back to the local circuit training but the national holiday weekend towards the end of May graced us, for once, with good weather and the Sunday was exceptional. Following our monotonous up and down the local circuit on the Saturday we rose early on the Sunday at about 6:00 and drove for about 3 plus hours to North Wales to "bag" the Principality's highest peak - Snowdon. In this context it is worth remembering that apart from the general enjoyment gained by being in the mountains the object of the exercise for our training is to maximise altitude gains and losses. We therefore took a close look at the map and decided to approach the climb from the south side using the Watkins Path because from this side Snowdon really does pop up out of the sea with the Watkins Path starting at about 50m above sea level and rising over just a few miles to the summit at 1,085m, giving at least 1,000m of quite strenuous climbing to reach the summit. This time we took the camera with us and a selection of our pictures are included here to give you something else to do other than reading all this text! Click on a thumbnail to pop up a new window with a larger image.
Watkins is a really good path and coupled with the absolutely fantastic weather - blue skies and scorching sun all day - we had a fantastic day. Our total height gain, and of course loss, was over 1,050m. For some, with the benefit of hindsight, totally inexplicable reason we decided to carry our fully loaded packs, to which the weight of the cameras, trekking poles and food had to be added. Had we bothered to weigh the packs before we left we may have changed our minds because upon our return we realised that this brought their weight to about 19kg for Gary and 10kg for Barbara. Not surprisingly this began to weigh very heavy by the end of the day and we certainly knew what we had been doing by the time we arrived back at the car tired and slightly reddened from 7 hours in the unforgiving sun. We then, of course, still had the long drive home to "look forward to" but overall had had a great time and achieved far more in terms of training than a few circuits would have done on the hill behind our house. Holiday Monday brought less pleasing weather, though we did manage a short walk to unwind our tired legs. We both had the remainder of the week off work and were able to get back out on Tuesday and Wednesday, dodging rain showers, to fit in another 900m on a couple of "manufactured mountains" by walking up and down to a couple of local beauty spots four or five times in the same way we would do on our local circuit training. Indeed, one of these new circuits proved quite a valuable find because while it is about a 30 minute drive from home it provides really steep inclines and just over 100m height gain in just over half a mile. Fortunately there are also loads of path variations on the circuit without adding any real distance, so that it is not too boring and facilitates about 550m altitude gains, over a distance of about 6 or 7 miles, in just over 2 hours, which is far more than we can achieve locally. Although not something that we can do every night of the week it does mean that we can now average between 1,000m and 2,000m altitude gains per week for the last 8 weeks of training. Add to this the 7,500m we "climbed" during training since purchasing the altimeter and we could be looking at something approaching 20,000m by the time we get to Africa, which is not only a mind boggling number but also more than twice the height of Everest, though, of course, spread over a number of weeks and without the affects of extreme altitude! Indeed, in the last week of May alone we climbed a whopping 4,000m, which is of course similar to our task during our week on Kilimanjaro. Will this make that experience a piece of cake? We doubt it but we are both seeing the benefits of more toned muscles and the loss of the odd pound here or there! If we don't feel fitter after all this training then I guess we'll just give up...
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