Say Whaaaaaat?!

Our final full week of training went well & I am very pleased to report that there are no pressing injuries or problems that I can see stopping us & that I’m feeling as fit as ever & definitely much stronger & in shape than the beginning of our training.

I also sorted out 99% of my gear this week, it’s been difficult to know exactly what I’ll need & how much of each thing to take, as you don’t want to be lugging around lots of equipment / clothes that you wont need, but in the same instance you don’t want to take too little & end up freezing your nuts off & being uncomfortable / in danger.

I’m pretty sure that I’m all sorted though, & one way I can tell this is that my bank balance is considerably less well off than it was a week ago. I would also like to thank the people who sold me a lot of this equipment who kindly regaled me with tales of people who’d recently been up to the top of Kili & turned temporarily blind & had to be airlifted down, along with the stories of people dying on recent trips up Everest – all good for morale :).

This may sound really stupid, but it’s finally struck home how close this challenge is & what we’ve got ahead of us, bringing a mix of emotions & thoughts to the surface. It was over 6 months ago that Dave & myself decided to take on this task & it always seemed to be ages away, with plenty of time to train, prepare & research… Now it’s strange to think that this time next week we’ll be half way up one of the biggest mountains in the world & in just over 2 weeks we’ll have taken on the Parish walk & it’ll all be over.

It’s been such a massive part of my life for the past 6 months that I just can’t imagine what it’ll be like to not spend nearly every night training. To being able to go out & drink alcohol & eat fast food etc. Admittedly I didn’t need to put all these restrictions in place but I felt it was necessary to really put in 100% & know that I’ve prepared myself & done everything I could with no excuses.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has donated to the charities, it really is greatly appreciated & we hope it will go a long way to help improve people’s lives. I would also like to thank everyone who has supported us over the past 6 months with advice, a kind word here or there or even going out of their way to put on fund raising events for us.

This will be my last blog for a couple of weeks, so, take it easy anyone who’s read this & I hope to see you all in the near future.

P.S. Robin Edds has done a great article on our plight which has been published in the Isle of Man Examiner – page 8.