Dave and I just finished reading Kissing Kilimanjaro: Leaving it All on the Top of Africa by Daniel Dorr.
Dorr offers an invaluable tip: everyone who climbs into thin air brings along three buckets at various levels of fullness: Bucket 1 is physical training; Bucket 2 is mental training and Bucket 3 is your physiology and how your body reacts to high altitude. Of course, Buckets 1 and 2 are filled by a climber's personal training regime. Bucket 3 is a throw of the dice. You can help acclimatizing by hiking slowly, drinking tons of water and taking diamox, but ultimately personal physiology rules the day.
We have pulled out all the stops for Buckets 1 and 2.
Bucket 1: Physical Training: We got a glimpse of a full Training Bucket on Wednesday's stair climb with Martina. She is one fit 53-year old woman! Thank goodness Kili can also be climbed by ordinary 60-somethings! This is how we have tried to fill our first bucket in the past twelve weeks: hiking, cycling the hills around the Helderbergs and sometimes in the gym, stretching (never enough on this part!), resting (short here too!), and tweaking our diet. We could train harder but we risk old and new injuries. We look for the balance between strenuous workouts without overdoing it. Lately we have dropped back from 12 mile treks to 6-8 mile treks
Bucket 2-Mental Conditioning: Filling this bucket has been very exciting. I try to replace the old No Pain No Gain style with different approaches. My latest one is based on the Law of Attraction: a completely positive mind, body, spirit attitude will bring a completely successful Kilimanjaro expedition. That means eliminating negative thoughts and feelings and replacing them with joy and gratitude. For example, no trash-talking in my head. When a driver cut me off the other day, and I thought, "Damn it" I switched to "Hey--I'm having a great day!" Not always easy but lots of fun to practice!
Bucket 3: We will see. We will see. We drink lots of water. Diamoxx may be out for me. I tried it and felt drunk for 10 hours. We hike slowly anyway, so we should be last in the pack climbing Kili. That will be a good thing!
Happy Trails,
Linda and David
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