Day 30 : Another Mountain to Climb

This one literally!!

I mentioned going hiking today. I should have used my better judgement and stayed in bed but there were actually some positives out of it.

A friend of mine organises a hike every two months. He grades his hikes into easy, medium and hard but what he grades as medium, I grade as hard so I should have known better. I also should have paid more attention to the location - Oyama means "big mountain" and I should have taken that literally. Japan is a very mountainous country and many times a hike will climb steeply up to a ridge but then once up there, gently wind up and down. Not in this case!

It's alright, he said, we are going part of the way in a cable car. That should also have alerted me too. The cable car went from 315m to 678m above sea level. Oyama is 1,252m at the summit. And the "hike" was all uphill - we rose through 578m vertical height in 90 minutes : that's 1,896 feet!!! I had visions of Nate doing parkour up the slope ahead of me, jumping from rock to rock and leaving me in the dust.

By the time I reached the top, I was really struggling. I had taken my PCP lunch with me and found it very difficult to eat and only managed about 2/3 (the other 1/3 tasted so much better when I got back down to the bottom of the mountain). The apple snack was delicious, though. Fortunately, the route down was marginally kinder - just as well as since going down often gives me more trouble than going up!!

So, what were the positives :

- my legs were actually fine, the skipping must really have had an effect. What I was lacking was stamina and energy.

- my older son came along and we had a good time together

(he's the handsome one on the right, me in the hat at the back).

I managed all this after a really bad night's sleep - went to bed too late about midnight, had trouble going to sleep, woke up about 3am, spent at least 40 mins in front of the computer before going back to bed and waking frequently before getting up at 7.15.

I just had time to check Patrick's email and I'm on specials (well, you don't lead a sedentary life style for years without paying some penalties) but no time to do the exercises before I left so they were still to be done when I got home.

I actually didn't need to skip when I got back because my hike must surely count as an alternative .... but I did. I'm on timed sets and did OK despite the leaden legs. It was dark, of course, by then and although there is a light in the garden, it was a bit of a surreal experience because since last week, I have been trying to skip without my glasses and while this is OK in the daylight, at night　everything turned into various shadows without them. Kind of like skipping on auto pilot.

The Continuous Jumpropes are a bit like time trials. Then Lunges (OK), Push-Ups (a Tim PCP first today - I actually did them properly from my toes, although not dipping down far enough yet), Chest Fly (I've change the elastic band from red to blue which is harder work); Curl (OK); Shoulder Fly (struggled towards the end); Leg Up (OK with my bum on cushions) and Plank (aaaargh - needed two separate attempts to do them).