Tents

I'm in the market for a new tent. I have a 2-man fair weather one I acquired while backpacking around New Zealand in 2003. I was collecting a hire car, and the couple dropping one off at the same time had a tent they didn't want cart home with them. They refused payment and were glad to be rid of it, whereas I was glad of a tent. Several years of experience with this tent have taught me several things.

My tent is a square, no porch, with telescoping poles which are clipped to the inner and tied to the outer. It has a door, and one guy rope on each panel to the side of the one with the door. It goes up inner first.

Firstly, the British weather requires more than 2 guy ropes. I'm quietly amazed it took until last summer to prove this, but that might be due to my fair-weather camping preferences! Anyway, pitched up on an Atlantic headland last August, my tent bowed so far in the wind and rain that I had less than half the floorspace usable. With one person and a week's worth of beach holiday kit, this was clearly Not Working. Additionally, another member of the party had a fiberglass pole snap in his tent that night while acting as a windbreak for the rest of the party's tents. So, tents for the UK need guy ropes on each corner and at regular points along panels.

Going up inner first. I've always known this was a bad plan but my last trip proved it. After a weekend of sunshine and a night of torrential rain, I'd hoped to get most of my tent down dry: I knew the groundsheet was a lost cause from the rain. As I got to the tent to strike camp, it started to hail. I dived inside, waited out the shower then cleared up other things for an hour while the tent dried. Literally as I got back to try again, it started to rain. With an outer-first tent, you can pitch or strike and keep the inner dry, whereas with mine, if it's raining.and you're pitching or striking, everything gets wet. And it did this time! Next tent must be outer-first!

Not having a porch. Porches are good for putting wet and muddy kit in and allowing you to keep the inside sleeping bit for dry kit and sleeping. Not having a porch means wet and muddy kit shares your sleeping space and everything else getting cold and muddy.

Clipping and tying tent to poles. On the one hand, I like this because there's no faffing around with telescoping poles and fabric sleeves with poles coming part inside them. That said, there is a knack to the sleeve-pole combination and it doesn't require the manual dexterity, which can be a lacking in cold and wet conditions!

Finally, weight. I wasn't too bothered about weight with the old tent (and don't look a gift horse in the mouth!) but for the Two Moors Way hike, packed weight is crucial. Modern 1-2 man tents can weigh in at under 1kg, and mine is considerably heavier than that.

So, in summary, my new tent must:
1) be robust enough to handle the worst of the British weather;
2) go up outer first. This also means the outer can double-up as an emergency shelter if needed;
3) have a porch;
4) have a sleeve system for the poles, although this is fairly standard for outer-first designs;
5) be as light as possible.

These pretty much sum up the Force10 Helium, which builds on the success of Vango's original Force10 design. So subject to an in person inspection, I guess thus is what I'll be buying in the next few weeks.

Why exercise is bad for my health*

Since my last post I had my gym fitness test  & programme written, and I've finally managed to do all three workouts on the programme.  The fitness test on the Friday of the bank holiday proved that my core and upper body strength is non-existence, and my hamstrings are tighter than a violin string, but my BMI, body fat and blood pressure are all excellent. None of this was news, but it does highlight some areas to work on in addition to the cardiovascular endurance I'll need.

Over the bank holiday weekend, though, I went camping and spend 3 nights under canvas, running around a muddy field during the day (in addition to hiking, I LARP with Curious Pastimes).  Courtesy of this and the torrential rain on Saturday night, I picked up a throat infection swiftly followed by a kidney infection.  Thus, long cardivascular workouts didn't seem a terribly good idea since I couldn't afford to get dehydrated.  Two courses of antibiotics and 10 very frustrating days later, I finally started to feel right again on Saturday.

I picked up the fitness regime again last Friday, yes, before I felt 100%.  That one centred around upper body strength, doing 2 sets of each of 2 exercises followed by 5 mins hell-for-leather on a cardiovascular machine to raise my heartrate, repeated three times.  To top if off, the following evening I went to play laserquest, for 3 x 15 min games with a handheld , dual-trigger laser gun.  Two days later and my arms have just about forgiven me!

Today I went to do what I knew would be the hardest of the three workouts, and I was right.  15 mins of biking on a level 10 random programme is the light relief part of this one!  It features cross trainer (5 mins, warm-up, easy), summit climber (10 mins, 1:4 gradient, 5.5kph average speed, HARD), bike (easy) and rowing machine (in which I aim for 2000m in 10 mins and managed 1900. I would have managed the 2000 but forgot to breathe properly part way through and gave myself  a stitch. By the time I'd eased off and recovered, I couldn't make up the distance.)  Then, to complete the feeling of being a wrung out dishcloth, it rounds off with 2 sets of straight abs crunches, 2 sets of upper back extensions and 2 sets of oblique crunches.  This evening, I appear to have succumbed to another throat infection, so it's another early night tonight before getting back into revising for university Finals tomorrow. 

*Would I have got the throat infection if I hadn't gone to the gym?  Probably.  But it made for an ironic post title, so I used it.

On fitness, or lack thereof

I joined a gym almost a month ago, in part to help me train for the Two Moors Way hike from 19th to 25th July and in part because my skirts were too tight.  I've been a bit half-hearted about going, and I know from the experience of my Gold Duke of Edinburgh's expedition (55 miles in 4 days, with full kit weighing approx 35-40lbs) that hiking is No Fun if you're not physically prepared.  I also know that at the moment, I'm subconsciously dividing life into Before Finals (last exam is 10th June) and After Finals, so the 19th July is not only firmly After Finals, but is a whole month afterwards, so feels too distant to motivate myself to go the gym this week, or next, or probably the week after that.

So, I signed up for the Cotswold Way Challenge, hiking 13 miles on 19th June.  I'm doing it with a full pack, because I could hike the route tomorrow if I weren't carrying any weight.  I could even, probably, hike the route with a full pack through sheer bloodymindedness, but I wouldn't be able to do anything for a day or two afterwards!  To stave off the temptation to resort to determination, I'm hiking the Malverns the following day, covering approximately 10 miles along the spine, also with a full pack.  And then I'm going to go the gym the day afterwards: on past long distances hikes I've discovered that day 1 isn't too bad, day 2 is horrendous and day 3 is the beginning of the currve for my body into "Ah, right, you want me build muscles?  Ok, I can do that." and it starts to become fun again.

Just to remind my body what it's supposed to be doing, three weeks after that I'd going to hit the gym on Friday, go to the Peak District, the Lake District or the Breacon Beacons that evening, do two full day hikes with kit aiming for 12-15 miles a day, then come home and go back to the gym on the Monday.  Two weeks after that, I start the Two Moors Way for real.  These two training days, and three or four of the Two Moors Way ones will count towards the 20 Quality Mountain Days needed to attend the Mountain Leader (Summer) course.  I'm determined to rack up at least 10 this year, so between these & the 5 or so from previous years, I'm well on the way to meeting that target.



Meandering back to the point - my hiking navigation is better than this, I swear! - I discovered a new machine in the gym today.  I'd been toddling along on the rowing machine and the elliptical (cross) trainer, burning around 350 calories in half an hour but not really feeling like I'd done anything.  Today, I noticed a Summit Climber, much like one of these.  And boy, was it hard work!  The calorie counter reckoned I burned approximately half what the elliptical trainer claims, but I'm sure it was much, much harder work.  And, it targets all the muscles groups that you use when,well, climbing summits really.  I've booked a fitness test & training programme creation session for 9am Friday morning (Yuck.  What was I thinking?!) so hopefully I'll persuade the trainer that the Summit Climber should feature heavily in my programme.

On a final note, I realised that if I'm hiking up a hill as steep as that machine was simulating, I stop every 10 mins or so to catch my breath.  The programme didn't allow me to do that, and forced me to keep going.  I guess if I get used to 30min programmes, actually climbing a hill with breaks will seem like a doddle.  That's the theory at least...

The obligatory introduction

I've been hiking, on and off, for about a decade.  For me, hiking is about getting away from everything: there is simply nothing to beat sitting on the top of a mountain or tor or rock, looking around  in the sunlight and seeing no signs of human habitation in any direction.  This makes me fairly hopeless at the traditional English Country Walk After a Pub Lunch, because by definition you're near roads and a pub, and after a proper pub lunch, there's no way I can manage the sorts of ascents leading to the glorious solitude I crave, or at least not without feeling sick, which takes all the fun out of it.

In a fit of "Just Do It" a couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and signed up for the Mountain Leader award.  I've done more than enough days over the years to meet the pre-requisites (20 Mountain days to attend an initial course, a further 20 before attending Assessment) but haven't logged them.  I've listed 5 from the last 7 years which I hope to use as part credit, then gain a further 5-7 in 2010, along with the required first aid qualification.  in 2011 I'll try to rack up a further 10 and the initial course, and depending on how that goes will attempt to complete the qualification in 2012.

Some of my past hikes which stand out in memory are training for the Ten Tors event on Dartmoor, although a sprained groin 4 weeks before the event put me out of the running for taking part.  I've done my Gold Duke of Edinburgh's Award including a week in the Picos De Europa for the 4-day expedition.  I've hiked the Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand, crossing a plateau which found fame as Mordor in the film of the Lord of the Rings. I've climbed Pen-y-fan in Wales and walked around Loch Maree and the Cairngorms in Scotland and walked up a Swiss valley - whose names escapes me - towards the Italian border (and back again).  All of these were either unsupported or centre-based, although in 2008 I went to the High Atlas mountains in Morocco for a 2-day trek supported by a mule and muleteer, and in October this year I'm off to Dana Nature Reserve in Jordan as part of a KE Adventure holiday supported by 4WD.  Before then, I'm hiking the Two Moors Way to raise money for World Vision UK and hiking part of the Cotswold Way as part of the Cotswold Way Challenge.  On my long-term wishlist is to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, but that's an enormous undertaking and it's likely to be 5 years or so before the rest of my life is amenable to a winter of crazy amounts of training and 6 months of unsupported hiking up the East coast of the USA.

It's going to be a busy year!