Historic Strides

I haven’t written much in this category (Training), and that’s mostly because…. well, I haven’t done any. But that changed today.

Having bad knees, and lots of things to do makes it easy for plenty of excuses not to get out and get moving. Keira herself even provided an excuse, given that it’s not always easy to take an 11-month old along while hiking and mountain-biking. This time I think I’ve devised a decent game plan though. The evenings after work while I’m watching her, she simply get’s packed up in her backpack and we go for a hike. All the other evenings, I go mountain biking. Rain might be the only issue when she’s in the pack, but I’ll gladly mtb in the rain.

Keira and I enjoying today’s hike in our local woods

Today we walked at a nice pace for nearly an hour, so I’m estimating that we covered approx 1.5 - 2 miles. That would be a typical speed and the trail was mostly flat. When I ride that same trail with my mtb I’ll check the odometer to see just how far it was. Of course on the mtb I can go even farther and take some side “single track” trails.

This was a good start. But in the upcoming weeks I’ll have to push farther, faster and locate some areas that can offer some additional hill climbing too.

Just doing some quick calculations; I’m at 210# now, and I want to be at 170# (which was a ‘fit’ weight for me when I was rock climbing and mtb’ing in my 20’s) by the time we go on Historic Strides. So, with an average safe weight loss of 2# per week it’ll take me 20 weeks to lose the weight and it’s 26 weeks to Historic Strides. JUST enough time, whew.

Well, we finally got to put our hudfats to a real world test.

On Friday May 4th, after we had set up camp at the Celebration of Celts Pan-Celtic Timeline (pictures) we camped out on site. The night saw temperatures dip into the low 30’s (F), and the ground was very damp. Although, it first appeared to be reasonably dry, the ground was saturated enough that if you knelt or sat on it for more than 30-40 seconds your clothes would have a wet spot. This became the biggest issue for the hudfats. Although they did keep us warm enough that we didn’t have to abandon them and sleep in our cars, they didn’t keep us comfortable enough to allow us a continuous sleep.

Currently, the hudfats’ outer canvas is not water proofed with anything. Although they never became “wet” from sleeping on the ground they were thoroughly damp. Whether water proofing would have helped in that situation or not I don’t know. Another possible solution would be to bring a “ground cloth”, perhaps in the form of wool.

Well, all things considered this trial run was an excellent learning experience. The temps and conditions were pretty close to what we might be dealing with in early October. But, some more testing will be needed.