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......

Messing about on the river

In the interest of actually being able to drag myself up a mountain, I thought I'd better do some proper distance walking. My other half diligently got out the OS (previous map reading, when left to me, has not had the desired outcome) and plotted a nice walk along the Basingstoke canal. Since I've had achy joints the last week or so - I wasn't joking when I said in an earlier post that I have the knees of a 90 year old - we thought a canal walk would be sensible since it would be nice and flat and so wouldn't put to much stain on my poor knees (and lately, just for some variety, my ankles).

We parked one car at Odiham and then drove up to Fleet in the second car, with the small, furry beastie on board and off we went. The route was about 10 miles, which would push me and also wear the dog out. It was an absolutely glorious walk. Lovely sun shine, people messing about in canoes on the canal, or having picnics on the grassy verges. There are some stunning properties along side the canal bank and I love a good nose so there was plenty to keep us occupied on our little trek. What a lot of bugs there were though! I'm not really good with flying things. They tend to make me have weird impulse spasms as soon as I hear anything buzzing anywhere near me, especially when they get tangled up in my hair - yeulch!! So there we were, walking along the canal on a beautiful, English spring day with me doing what would look from a distance, like a jumpy, out of time dance as I swot flies and a variety of flying insects away from me. Goodness only knows what I'll be like in Africa - Justine thinks it's hilarious that I'm so rubbish at being out doors, but since her only pre-condition to climbing Kili with me was that I didn't snore (we'll be sharing a tent) she seems to think she can live with some of my more ridiculous qwerks!

There's lots to see along the canal, it was built around the 1790's and has some lovely old bridges over it. The stetch that we walked along has many war defences to stop German tanks during WWII, it would seem that Basingstoke was the place to get to for the 3rd Reich so needed a pill box every 10 feet and lots of dragons teeth (anti tank lumps of concrete to the uninitiated). Further along, past Odiham is King Johns Castle, which is an ancient relic, apparently there are 2 other castles in the area, but I haven't spotted them yet.



We've received lots more donations for the next car boot, which will be next weekend, so hopefully that'll add to our total.

I'm off to put my slightly achy feet up now. I'm not nearly as sore as I thought I was going to be and managed to complete the 10 miles without a total sense of humour failure, which is an improvement for me! The dog, however, is still pooped and refuses to move off the sofa!

We're on the way....

We've had a very busy few weeks! First there was the cream tea, which was held in our local village hall. People were very generous with both their cake donations and their time and we raised £300, which was excellent for our first event. The spread looked really good and everyone that came really seemed to enjoy the afternoon. It was a proper, old fashioned afternoon, with big pots of tea and scones galore! Hopefully the word is now out that we put on a good show and we'll attract even more folk to the Hog Roast, which is on the 3rd July. We're really looking forward to that and are trying to organise a bit of a carnival theme, with a limbo competition and steel band music. Although, getting in a live band is probably going to be prohibitively expensive as the aim is to raise money, not spend it on entertainment. If anyone knows someone who can play a steel drum and doesn't mind coming along to bang out a few tunes in return for food, please let me know!

We're in full organisation mode for the next event now and Justine has become the Queen of Lists! She's got a list for everything, it's quite astounding! Now there's talk of spreadsheets and databases since the money has started coming in and it's a real motivator to see the Just Giving total creeping up. Very exciting!

We had our first car boot sale on Sunday 9th May and it was an education - to say the least! I quite enjoyed all the hustle and bustle of it, but was a little shocked when we arrived, the first visitors you get are traders who do car booting (not sure that's an actual verb) for a living and good grief, they were climbing about in our car before we'd hardly had time to put the handbrake on! They don't even let you get set up before they're raking through boxes of stuff and asking "how much for the picture love?". It was very bizarre, although, one chap did ask permission before he clambered into the boot and disappeared behind a box of old baking trays, I wouldn't have been too surprised to have found a lost trader stuck behind the back seats once we were all done and at home unpacking, but they seemed to disappear and move onto the next arriving car as quickly as they'd swarmed over us.

There was one moment when I thought Justine was going in for the kill. There was a rather round chap with an attractive grease spill down his jacket who came around and bartered us down on the price of DVDs. He gave us some old pony chat about his 6 kids and yadda, yadda, yadda. Anyway, the upshot was he wanted to pay 50p per DVD and we wanted a £1. We came down in the end just to get rid of some stuff and thought every penny counts. We had our Naomi House posters up and had told him all the money raised was going to charity so he knew what we were about. Anyway, later on, Linz (my other half) was wandering around and found same round chap on his own stall selling the DVDs he'd just bought from us for £1 each!!!! The bloomin' cheek of it! Well, Linz came back and mentioned it and Justine marched straight over and ripped a strip off him! Good for her, some people are unbelievable! But then, that's a lesson learned and we won't fall for that trick again when we do our next car boot in about a fortnight. We raised £117 so we did quite well and have lots more donations in the garage ready for round 2!! More are always gratefully accepted of course!

So, that's about it for now. Trying to tie in training, with car boots plus organising and running events is turning into a full time job, but we're well on the way to raising our first £1000 which will be brilliant! I might pop a bottle of bubbly when we do!

MY LEGS HURT!!!!

So, training is going quite well, except for last weekend when I might have accidentally drunk to many glasses of pinot and couldn't face going for a run. This weekend we were back on schedule! 3 mile run on Saturday, 3 mile walk on Sunday followed by another 2 miles to deliver leaflets around the village. I'm feeling quite virtuous, if a little stiff. Luckily, we had some glorious sunshine to walk/run in so it was quite pleasant.

I'm very aware that now our basic level of fitness is up - and by that, I mean I don't think I'm going to die if I run for 3 miles - we really need to start doing some more serious uppy downy type walking. We're going to reattempt Watership Down in a couple of weeks, I wonder if I'll have to notify some sort of rescue agency, given our previous with map reading????

I'm off on holiday at the end of next week (23rd) Icelandic volcanoes permitting, naturally. However, there's a gym in our hotel and I'm planning to take advantage of this and try and get up to 4, maybe 5 miles (perhaps a little optemistic) of running by the time I come back, I figure I can run every other day in the gym, and if I get stiff, well, I'll be in Turkey, so I can go have myself a Turkish bath!!

No such luxuries to be had up a mountain! We sent off our deposits this week so our places are now confirmed, we fly out Feb 24th 2011 (if Iceland are still at it then, I'll be VERY cross!) so it's all become a bit real. We'd like to get up to a respectable 6miles each day on the weekend as we'll have to do similar mileage for 6 days straight on the ascent (up nearly 20,000ft! eek!) so we'll need to build on the good work we've done.

Our first event, a cream tea afternoon on Sunday 2nd May is all organised and folk have been very generous with donations for our bootfairs, for which we will be eternally grateful. Now the ball is rolling, hopefully, some pennies will start coming in!

Hey ho, I'm off to bed to rest up ready for another Monday morning! More pictures to follow next post.