Take one dog, add a large hill....

Although it's been quiet on the blog front, we've been up to stuff in the back ground. Linz and I went to visit family up in Scotland and took the opportunity to do some hill walking as training for the big climb. We settled on Dumyat since it's close to where we were and we've been talking about climbing it for years. Dumyat (pronounced dum-eye-at) is 420m tall and rises above Stirling from the flat river plain of the Forth so we pretty much climbed the whole 420m. It forms part of the Ochil Hills and overlooks the Wallace Monument and down onto Stirling and surrounding towns. The image on the left is Dumyat taken from the old Devon Colliery.

The weather was changeable and we were grateful that we had the perfect sort for walking on the day of our climb. It was mostly overcast with a few breaks for sunshine, which came around pork-pie o'clock when we stopped by a little burn for a snack about an hour and a half or so into the walk.



Now,don't be fooled with how idyllic it looks, to get to this pretty little area, we had to walk through 6ft tall bracken which was alive with flies and spiders and all the sorts of things I don't like. Hence, for about the first 100m up, which covered about 2miles I did a little fly swatting jig all the way since I can't stand things with lots of legs.

After coming out of the bracken, we crossed a couple of burns and started to approach the summit from the back, which, let me tell you, was extremely steep! The last stretch up is quite challenging on the thighs, but this is exactly the sort of training I'll need to be doing. Once we were in the open ground, I became less convinced that I was being stalked by an army of horseflies and started to enjoy it a little more. The dog was fascinated by the sheep that graze on the open ground and there were lots of ruined farm buildings for Linz to take picture of, some mostly everyone was happy.

The summit was extremely windy so we didn't linger too long, but the views were spectacular!



We did a couple of other walks while up north, but mostly quite gentle ones. I wasn't nearly as sore as I was expecting to be after Dumyat, which is a good indicator that the training is doing something! The whole walk was over 6miles (since we got lost on the way back down) and we did it all in 3.5 hours, which is pretty good considering we stopped for snacks and rests along the way.

Given the height we're climbing on Kilimanjaro, I figured that Dumyat is probably about half of what we'll do in a day, which I'm now a little more confident about since I didn't think I was absolutely going to collapse at any time - although, add in some serious altitude and I'm sure it'll be a different matter!

Off to the gym this evening. A local gym owner has sponsored us by way of membership and training advice until our climb, which is very generous. I fully expect to make myself sore all over using the cross trainer!

See you soon,
k xx

Some Good News, Some Bad......

Been a bit quiet on the blog front the last few weeks, sorry about that. So we're in June and the weather is lovely and warm. Lots of BBQs and friends round, but unfortunately, none of that lovely stuff gets money raised and people fit for a mountain!

The good news is I have a legitimate reason to not go running any more - hurray!!! The bad news is, I've got osteoarthritis - booo!!!

I won't bore you with too much dull, depressing, medical stuff, but I've mentioned before that I have the knees of a 90 year old, and I was only half joking. I thought I'd better get myself off to the Drs to get my achy joints sorted before attempting to climb anything bigger than the stairs. Apparently I have something called Hyper Mobility, which is posh talk for being a bit double jointed. This isn't usually a problem for most people, but a few unlucky folk suffer damage to their joints because the joint moves further than it is safe for it to do so. I'm one of those unlucky few and the damage I've been causing, by being a bit too bendy, has now developed into osteoarthritis in my feet, and thumbs and likely to develop in other joints where I have pain too. Which is something to look forward to! Not at all the diagnosis I was expecting and there's no magic pill to make it go away, which was what I was hoping for, just control the pain with pain killers.

What does this mean for the mountain??? The Doc says I shouldn't do any running as high impact sport will exacerbate the problem, but walking is fine. I can do lots of training by walking and any pain can be controlled with painkillers, since there's no treatment once osteoarthritis has set in. It's also only likely to get worse so I'd better get myself up that mountain before I'm unable to later in life. I'm quite pleased that I don't have to drag myself running around my three mile circuit on a Saturday morning so every cloud does have a silver lining! The unfortunate thing is the worst affected joints are in my feet, and I'll kind of need those, but as long as I'm sensible I really don't think it should pose a massive problem. I suspect my insurance premium for the trip has just trebled though!

Most importantly, what does this mean for all of my beautiful, beautiful shoes???? I may resort to sleeping in my very high heels if my feet get to sore to actually wear them!

So other news is we've done a leaflet drop for our next event - a Hog Roast with Rum Shack!! I'm quite exciting about this one. Hopefully the weather will be warm and England will win their group, which means their quarter final match won't clash with the Hog Roast. When we put the date in the diary in the middle of a long, dark winter, the World Cup was but a distant dot on the horizon, but now, unfortunately, if England are only runners up, the match will clash with our event!! How inconsiderate!! I hope that Green fellow sorts his butter fingers out from now on, I need England to win their group, I can't be having any schedule clashing!!! It would be terribly unpatriotic to hope that they don't go through to the next round at all, wouldn't it? - Although, by July 3rd, I might be sick of all the footy and that annoying, endless droning of air horns and noise that seems to accompany every game -what is that about???

So, off now to pour myself a glass of vino de collapso and drown my sorrows at being a prematurely aged 31 year old, with an old persons condition - I wonder if it'll get me out of washing up and cutting the grass from now on......