And so, the training began in earnest. Sunday mornings, 8.30 am meets outside the Roundwood Inn, beetling off to parts of Wicklow previously unknown, Tom & Gary consulting their walking books, maps, compasses, all manner of things mountain. The walks were a lot of fun, very sociable events, sometimes strenuous but always with a recirculation back to the Roundwood Inn for goulash soup. This is the most extraordinary concoction, but delicious and warming and the perfect foil for a morning on the mountains.
Prior to the plans for Kilimanjaro, I’d been a stranger to walking poles but had the chance to borrow a pair for these excursions. I was slowly becoming accustomed to them.
Following from this, two things became apparent on these training walks:
1. I wasn’t the slowest, fastest, fattest, thinnest, oldest or youngest and
2. Some people are more interested in gear than others (I am a bit less).
There had been frequent and determined visits to shops such as Great Outdoors, 53 Degrees North and online stores like Jackson Sports in Belfast. We should all have bought shares on GO since there must have been thousands (if not tens of thousands) spent in there for this escapade. Gear isn’t cheap and I was lucky enough to find someone who was about my size from whom I could borrow a load of equipment. Thank you Jack! You saved me hundreds.
In parallel with the Wicklow training, I was also ramping up my visits to the gym, where I met an acquaintance, Richie who had a good laugh when I told him I was going up Kili in September. Richie is amongst other things a kickboxer, snowboarder and general merchant of mayhem and I rather thought he was a bit dismissive of my chances of making it to the top.
I was hoping to prove him wrong.
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