July 6th 2014 – Day 147
Day 1 Weight: 256lbs Day 1 Fitness: Nil
Day 147 Weight: 222lbs Day 147 Fitness: Very Good
Weeks 19-20
On the whole I consider myself to be a glass half full kind of person. The contradictory sides of my personality are that when I am in work I am focused, organised and confident in my ability. Outside of work I focus only on what's coming up in the next 5 minutes, plan nothing unless it is absolutely essential and, as I have said before, demonstrate a 'can't be arsed' attitude far too often. Is that due to lack of confidence? I don't know you tell me!
However, I often look for things that inspire me, whether it be quotations, songs, stories from the news or history, something that reinforces the optimistic part of my personality. I have a very simple app on my iPad that displays a positive message and changes every day. It doesn't do anything else. I got up this morning and after the last week that I have had the message of the day was very apt.
The last fortnight started well. For the second Saturday running I hiked up Snowdon using the Rhyd Ddu path. This is nowhere near as difficult as the route I took the week before but does have some steep tricky bits. The weather was glorious and the views spectacular, probably the clearest I have ever seen it.
I managed the whole trek up and down in about 5 hours including stopping to eat my lunch at the top. It did teach me one or two things about how far I have progressed. Firstly, I was overtaking some younger people on the way up and passing them again when I was on the way down and they were still going up. Some people more or less ran past me but I ended up overtaking them, going at your own pace is a good thing. Even though it was a gloriously sunny day it can still be bloody cold on the mountain. Best of all though, I was still relatively fresh when I got back to my car. The bonus when I got back was this coming in to the railway station just as I got there.
The following day I got up early and went out for a bike ride, just a quick 45 miles. This despite somehow having managed to knacker the gears so that I could only either pedal furiously, without getting very far, or struggle over the slightest incline as though I was tackling Alp D'Huez in the Tour de France. Not to be too disheartened I dropped my bike in for some TLC the next day and went to the gym before having my hair cut very very short. I was going to shave it almost all off but bottled it at the last minute. It may have had something to do with the fact that the girl cutting it was gorgeous so I wanted to prolong the experience. Sorry but I can't help being very shallow.
Now the question I get asked the most since I started this whole shenanigans is who am I doing this with and the answer is that I am doing this on my own. All the training, walks, bike rides I am doing on my own. This not because I am antisocial, okay it partially is, but because my innate laziness has to be overcome if I am to stand any chance of getting to the peak of Kilimanjaro. That means that I can't have anyone to blame for dragging me an extra five miles on the bike, or pushing me up Snowdon faster than I want to go. The Kilimanjaro challenge is, I am to understand, as much about pushing yourself mentally as the physical effort needed to get there. I need to find my own limits and push beyond them without help. My thinking being that when I get to Tanzania I will need the help of the others in the group when it is really needed not when I am climbing the steps to the plane at Heathrow.
So after all this positive progress I was about to find out the hard way what I was or wasn't capable of. The weekend after the 2nd attempt at Snowdon I went to the gym on the Saturday morning; mainly due to the weather being miserable I thought I would stay indoors. Before doing my workout I decided to retry the fit test on the exercise bike to see if it recorded my improvement. I set the test at level 12, as I had every other time, and pedalled along for 5 minutes keeping at the pace dictated by the machine. At the end of the 5 minutes it reported that my heart rate hadn't reached the required level so I should increase the difficulty. So, I moved the setting to level 13 and set off pedalling. After the 5 minutes was up I received the same message as before. Did this mean the machine was broken? Did it mean I was now dead and that's why it couldn't find a pulse? Anyway, not to be beaten I upped the level to 14 and had another go. This time it came back with a score and recorded my fitness as excellent. I wouldn't go that far but a real boost.
Full of confidence I got up early Sunday morning, saw the sun was shining, checked the forecast which said it was going to be dry all day and decided to go for a walk. I focused on a route in mind that would be 20 something miles and was away from public transport for the most part. Therefore, I would have to keep walking no matter what if I wanted to get home. Mistake number 1 was to put on a pair of old trainers. Mistake number 2 was to put on trainer socks rather than hiking socks. I made these wrong decisions on the basis that the chosen route was almost entirely flat.
Everything was going well for about 6-7 miles when my feet started to hurt. Unusual I thought to myself as I have walked much further than this with no problem. Carrying on, as I had to I reached about 14 miles when I stopped to have some lunch, By this time my heels and toes were hurting and I thought taking my shoes off for 20 minutes or so would help. I set off again eventually reaching the train station at Freshfield. Now any sensible person at this point would have hopped on to the train. Nobody ever accuses me of being sensible and gets away with it. Onwards I went down to the Squirrel reserve, treating myself to an ice cream at the car park before walking on towards Formby. Eventually I reached a point where I was about 500 yards from Formby train station. I made the only sensible choice and took the path to Hightown. By the time I got to the end of the path just by Hightown Station any last vestiges of common sense had now been completely discarded. 'I have got this far' , I thought to myself, 'so I may as well carry on', to the Coastguard Station at Hall Road. As I set off I was thinking should I carry on beyond Hall Road to the Swimming Pool at Crosby as it would only add another 2 or 3 miles on to the route. Even though my feet had been troubling me for the previous 4-5 hours I was still think of going further. The final decision to make the last mile home came when I got to the Coastguard Station and could not justify walking like a Neanderthal anymore with my knuckles scraping the floor. I arrived at my front door and checked my phone app which had recorded I had walked 25.5 miles in just under 8 hours.
Whilst having a long soak in the bath I was feeling very proud of myself for keeping going no matter how much my feet were hurting. I was also realising that on Kilimanjaro after a day's trekking there would be no hot bath, no comfy sofa and no cold beer in the fridge waiting for me. My toes were recovering but my heels were tingling, like really bad pins and needles, but I just thought it was down to the fact that I had been walking for 8 hours. It was when drying off I saw the real damage. Imagine a hard boiled egg, Slice it evenly down the middle and put the two halves on the back of your heels. That was pretty much the size of the blisters. I have had blisters before but nothing like these.
The next morning I could not get any shoes on, no footwear of any kind. Even flip flops were painful because of where the blisters had formed. I managed to hobble round to the pharmacy were one of the assistants took pity and gave me a seat whilst she went round as my personal shopper. So there I was sat with the pensioners getting there prescriptions just to add a layer of embarrassment to the pain.
Just to compound the problem the blisters were so sore I didn't do any training for 5 days. It is amazing after just a few days how hard that first training session is but I am back on it now.
There is a positive to take from this. I know now that I can keep on walking for many miles even when my body is telling me to stop, something I am probably going to have to do. I found a way of focusing on little targets to keep on walking, something I would never have done before. Which brings me neatly round to the positive message displayed on my iPad this morning.
'Sometimes you must fight and win, just because all the pain and suffering you experienced up to this point on your quest would be rendered futile if you were to surrender now.'
You see, sometimes there a point to this drivel.
Please help keep me motivated by visiting Marks Just Giving Page
Day 147 Weight: 222lbs Day 147 Fitness: Very Good
Weeks 19-20
On the whole I consider myself to be a glass half full kind of person. The contradictory sides of my personality are that when I am in work I am focused, organised and confident in my ability. Outside of work I focus only on what's coming up in the next 5 minutes, plan nothing unless it is absolutely essential and, as I have said before, demonstrate a 'can't be arsed' attitude far too often. Is that due to lack of confidence? I don't know you tell me!
However, I often look for things that inspire me, whether it be quotations, songs, stories from the news or history, something that reinforces the optimistic part of my personality. I have a very simple app on my iPad that displays a positive message and changes every day. It doesn't do anything else. I got up this morning and after the last week that I have had the message of the day was very apt.
The last fortnight started well. For the second Saturday running I hiked up Snowdon using the Rhyd Ddu path. This is nowhere near as difficult as the route I took the week before but does have some steep tricky bits. The weather was glorious and the views spectacular, probably the clearest I have ever seen it.
I managed the whole trek up and down in about 5 hours including stopping to eat my lunch at the top. It did teach me one or two things about how far I have progressed. Firstly, I was overtaking some younger people on the way up and passing them again when I was on the way down and they were still going up. Some people more or less ran past me but I ended up overtaking them, going at your own pace is a good thing. Even though it was a gloriously sunny day it can still be bloody cold on the mountain. Best of all though, I was still relatively fresh when I got back to my car. The bonus when I got back was this coming in to the railway station just as I got there.
The following day I got up early and went out for a bike ride, just a quick 45 miles. This despite somehow having managed to knacker the gears so that I could only either pedal furiously, without getting very far, or struggle over the slightest incline as though I was tackling Alp D'Huez in the Tour de France. Not to be too disheartened I dropped my bike in for some TLC the next day and went to the gym before having my hair cut very very short. I was going to shave it almost all off but bottled it at the last minute. It may have had something to do with the fact that the girl cutting it was gorgeous so I wanted to prolong the experience. Sorry but I can't help being very shallow.
Now the question I get asked the most since I started this whole shenanigans is who am I doing this with and the answer is that I am doing this on my own. All the training, walks, bike rides I am doing on my own. This not because I am antisocial, okay it partially is, but because my innate laziness has to be overcome if I am to stand any chance of getting to the peak of Kilimanjaro. That means that I can't have anyone to blame for dragging me an extra five miles on the bike, or pushing me up Snowdon faster than I want to go. The Kilimanjaro challenge is, I am to understand, as much about pushing yourself mentally as the physical effort needed to get there. I need to find my own limits and push beyond them without help. My thinking being that when I get to Tanzania I will need the help of the others in the group when it is really needed not when I am climbing the steps to the plane at Heathrow.
So after all this positive progress I was about to find out the hard way what I was or wasn't capable of. The weekend after the 2nd attempt at Snowdon I went to the gym on the Saturday morning; mainly due to the weather being miserable I thought I would stay indoors. Before doing my workout I decided to retry the fit test on the exercise bike to see if it recorded my improvement. I set the test at level 12, as I had every other time, and pedalled along for 5 minutes keeping at the pace dictated by the machine. At the end of the 5 minutes it reported that my heart rate hadn't reached the required level so I should increase the difficulty. So, I moved the setting to level 13 and set off pedalling. After the 5 minutes was up I received the same message as before. Did this mean the machine was broken? Did it mean I was now dead and that's why it couldn't find a pulse? Anyway, not to be beaten I upped the level to 14 and had another go. This time it came back with a score and recorded my fitness as excellent. I wouldn't go that far but a real boost.
Full of confidence I got up early Sunday morning, saw the sun was shining, checked the forecast which said it was going to be dry all day and decided to go for a walk. I focused on a route in mind that would be 20 something miles and was away from public transport for the most part. Therefore, I would have to keep walking no matter what if I wanted to get home. Mistake number 1 was to put on a pair of old trainers. Mistake number 2 was to put on trainer socks rather than hiking socks. I made these wrong decisions on the basis that the chosen route was almost entirely flat.
Everything was going well for about 6-7 miles when my feet started to hurt. Unusual I thought to myself as I have walked much further than this with no problem. Carrying on, as I had to I reached about 14 miles when I stopped to have some lunch, By this time my heels and toes were hurting and I thought taking my shoes off for 20 minutes or so would help. I set off again eventually reaching the train station at Freshfield. Now any sensible person at this point would have hopped on to the train. Nobody ever accuses me of being sensible and gets away with it. Onwards I went down to the Squirrel reserve, treating myself to an ice cream at the car park before walking on towards Formby. Eventually I reached a point where I was about 500 yards from Formby train station. I made the only sensible choice and took the path to Hightown. By the time I got to the end of the path just by Hightown Station any last vestiges of common sense had now been completely discarded. 'I have got this far' , I thought to myself, 'so I may as well carry on', to the Coastguard Station at Hall Road. As I set off I was thinking should I carry on beyond Hall Road to the Swimming Pool at Crosby as it would only add another 2 or 3 miles on to the route. Even though my feet had been troubling me for the previous 4-5 hours I was still think of going further. The final decision to make the last mile home came when I got to the Coastguard Station and could not justify walking like a Neanderthal anymore with my knuckles scraping the floor. I arrived at my front door and checked my phone app which had recorded I had walked 25.5 miles in just under 8 hours.
Whilst having a long soak in the bath I was feeling very proud of myself for keeping going no matter how much my feet were hurting. I was also realising that on Kilimanjaro after a day's trekking there would be no hot bath, no comfy sofa and no cold beer in the fridge waiting for me. My toes were recovering but my heels were tingling, like really bad pins and needles, but I just thought it was down to the fact that I had been walking for 8 hours. It was when drying off I saw the real damage. Imagine a hard boiled egg, Slice it evenly down the middle and put the two halves on the back of your heels. That was pretty much the size of the blisters. I have had blisters before but nothing like these.
The next morning I could not get any shoes on, no footwear of any kind. Even flip flops were painful because of where the blisters had formed. I managed to hobble round to the pharmacy were one of the assistants took pity and gave me a seat whilst she went round as my personal shopper. So there I was sat with the pensioners getting there prescriptions just to add a layer of embarrassment to the pain.
Just to compound the problem the blisters were so sore I didn't do any training for 5 days. It is amazing after just a few days how hard that first training session is but I am back on it now.
There is a positive to take from this. I know now that I can keep on walking for many miles even when my body is telling me to stop, something I am probably going to have to do. I found a way of focusing on little targets to keep on walking, something I would never have done before. Which brings me neatly round to the positive message displayed on my iPad this morning.
'Sometimes you must fight and win, just because all the pain and suffering you experienced up to this point on your quest would be rendered futile if you were to surrender now.'
You see, sometimes there a point to this drivel.
Please help keep me motivated by visiting Marks Just Giving Page
or TEXT code MPTC50 £amount to 70070 e.g. MPTC £5
You can also follow me on Facebook
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Mark
