Mount Lofty - part 3

A story in pictures.

Do not judge please.

Number of kangaroos: 2

Number of foxes: 1

Time to summit: 1hr 20 mins

Weight: 15 kg

Vain pot moment #1

Stoppinng in the middle of a mount lofty run to blog (and think) about how cool your legs look in your running shorts.

And so it begins

Come this november, I will be going to an Advanced Mountaineering school taking place in New Zealand. This school is important in many ways, most of which I will not mention here yet, for fear of jinxing them. Nevertheless, I'm going to New Zealand! Again! for an Advanced Mountaineering school!

Rejoice! Wait, no.

Train!

For Aconcagua, i trained twice a week by running uphill on the only hill in Singapore, Vigilante Drive, carrying what seemed like tonnes of water. That training was extremely convenient as the hill was very very close to the NUS campus. This time, there ain't no vigilante drive, and the closest serious hill is 10 km away from school. This means that at least once (if not twice) a week, i will (again) have to wake up at a crazy hour to get my ass out of the bed and house, in order to go walking/running up what is a very gully. 

This would mean that I won't be able to sleep in (i.e. until 7am) on Monday (lecture at 9am), Tuesday (running), Thursday (running), Friday (Chambers Gully), Sunday (running).  Sigh. 

What I would really wish would be for google to have a hill-finding function such that I could locate the steepest hill in the vicinity of the school - i.e. the hill that gives me the best workout / meter. 

Oh my ...

Last night I had this entire post ready in my head. It was about growing up, getting married, changing etc. I was all glitzy and mature and nice-worded. Well fuck me blind! I can't do it today because I am so truly and utterly shacked from last night's 3 HOUR session of PT.

It started nice and easy enough at 6pm when I met Doris to do her monstrous PT session. We did only 2 half-hour sets of: 10 biceps curls, 10 triceps curls, 10 shoulder curls, 10 lifts, 10 prosperity kitty, 30 wrist curls, 15 elbow curls on each hand, with 5 kg weights per hand; 20 crunches, 20 leg lifts, 6-8 explosive pull-ups (mine were only on crimps so more of the i-will-use-my-momentum-to-lift-up), and then 20 push-ups (for her). Oh yeah, and the 1-minute 90-degrees wall squat, which is the ONLY exercise in this world that I can do better than her (thanks to my monster thighs). My psych had been hovering just a little above zero when I met Doris. However, her psych was minus infinity so by the time we were done both our psyches were minus infinity.

And then Chloe came, and in a while Shaoting came. Now you see, I had agreed to join them for a run since Shaoting had said before that they only run 2.4 km on the track. Seeing how I did 10 km the day before, 2.4k did not sound like such a big thing. Right?! RIGHT?! Well, this is where plans changed and they decided to run the SP route (4.5km). And while inside I was all NO, NO, NO, NO, NOOOO! I kept my cool and just went along with it, in a "nothing you decide to run right now can scare me". And thus went another half hour.

And to continue the series of unfortunate events, we joined Chloe and Judith for their speed PT. And this is how at 9pm I was still doing PT. This time it was 3 sets of: put 0.5 kg ankle weights on each ankle and then bob up and down, trying to lift your knees as high as possible, as fast as possible for 30 seconds. After this Chloe and Jud did their campusing and their dips while Shaoting and I just stoned. And then, it was the lunges. After 3 sets of lunges (20 each leg) I have to say that never ever has my butt hurt soooo bad. I never knew they were so effective!!

The battle of the Fatts

With my upcoming uprooting (ha!) from the singaporean soil, i have gone a mass-frenzy eating spree, in which i stuff my face with everything asian but mostly thai food, especially tom yam. This is because after my recent trip to Sydney to get my wedding dress I have found that thai food in Australia is a) expensive and b) guaranteed not spicy (at least not for me). As such I have proceeded to eat as much as possible whenever possible. Needless to say, this has an enlarging effect over my soft bits, which is to say that my butt is truly getting bigger because I have not seen any improvements in cleavage.

And since the PT done on Monday with the bird did not totally killed me, I am insisting that I do the same today. And since the PT itself is too boring to be done by any sane person by herself, I have guilted the bird into staying with me and counting my sets. She is now learning to count in Romanian, and hopefully we will move on to food names by next week. For now, it is:

OONOO ...
DOY ...
TREY ...
PARTOO ...
CINCH ...
SHAHSEH ...
SHAHPTEH ...
OPT ...
NOAH ...
ZECHE!!!

A different kind of training

Sure, as a climber you get a lot of hand-foot coordination. And balance, and core control, and resolution, determination, and commitment (some of us a bit less on the last one - oh my god what am i going to do in Fontainebleau?!?!) And of course, if you are a member of a team or willing to improve yourself, you are all too familiar with training, doing infinite amounts of pull-ups and so on. And of course, if you really want to improve and do harder routes, you are left to intensely contemplating for what seems like eternity how to grip a handhold in a particular way, how to shift your (stately) butt on a tile etc. And all of these will help me in this particular situation.

At first, Marian and I decided to dance the tango for our wedding. But then when I couldn't find a short dress, we decided against it because there's nothing like a big white whale gliding on the dance floor. Good thing we did because even trying to learn the waltz is proving a different kind of training. Oh don't get me wrong, we are very very good on hand-foot coordination. And on tempo, and at least one of us remembers what we have to do (we found a video on the web and we are copying that). Endurance we have since we're also runners.

The problem is grace. I for sure will not be the most graceful bride what with the defined back muscles (THANK YOU JENSEN!!) and the gung ho - "we can move any mountain!! ROAR!!!" - attitude. And Marian has a tendency to bend his knees and stay on his heels (a direct consequence of the national dances he's so good at) that he's miles away from tall, stiff, austrians dancing the waltz.

And so, we train ...

One picture Tuesday

Recently, the NUS climbing team has grown to a number that is approaching 40. Gigantic! I remember the days when the girls' team had seven members, namely: Sandra, Mei Fen, Nita, myself, Eli, Kayilin (hope I got the names right) and Cherlyn. Then we grew into this:

And then four of us left (san, me, zx, keok) but many many more came. Hell, I still remember when Regina could not do a pull-up (and did not want to try), Ely was heavier and harder to help during campusing ... but I digress...

What I wanted to say is that the team is ginoromous and it needs the gym. Full stop and that is that. And as such, the rest of us can only climb on Monday/Tuesday before 8 pm, and on Friday. This is really a bummer because if we end work at six, by the time we get to the gym is 6:30 (AT LEAST - san has to travel 1 hr or so), so we only have around 1.5 hours of climbing time. That being said, we tried it last night to see how it would be.

We arrived at 6:30 sharp and started climbing right away, but had to stop because the girls needed to warm up for their training. Five minutes later we could resume again. I must say we really climbed intensely: one warm-up route and after that it was full-on with hard routes (for us ahem), no excuses, no resting, TRY TRY TRY TRY quickly! I can still remember the routes, which is something that has not happened to me in a while. It worked pretty well and by the time the girls came to claim their gym we went upstairs to do some strength training. The two sets we did were horribly hard, as we had been climbing a bit harder and our skin was rebelling. Or we are weak and haven't been doing this in a while. We came down again and the girls were shacked thanks to Jensen's training ( you know when the training was good when the gym is quiet, despite there being 15 or so girls in there). Thus we could do two or three more tries, but by this time I was out of juice and so was san and we had a work day coming up so we left.

That being said, it was nice and intense but I don't think our Mondays will be as cool if there are suddenly 10-15 of us that want to try the routes quickly, without stop, because we only have 1.5 hours to climb. There were some random team people as well in the gym. They were climbing on one wall and really not disturbing us, but I do think that if there are more dinos the team people will get lynched for hogging the walls :)

Also, I want to do endurance on Fridays during lunch or so. First, set up the endurance route, and then climb it ... am taking this opportunity to ask any of the girls reading this (and willing to climb on fri during the day) to tell me what time!

The little engine that could

Sort of.

Two weeks until nepal and my training still focuses on rock climbing. My aim is to climb harder these days because I won't touch a handhold for three weeks. The problem with climbing just a wee bit harder is that my unaccustomed body rebels and gets injured. Sure, you would say (and so did I), injury is ok because anyway you are going to rest for three weeks, wether you want to or not (usually not). Sadly, this is not the case.

On Friday we climbed mostly on slopers and pinches. I set a route that Sandra said was shouldery, but I did not see it as such and I tried a few times. Lo and behold, by next morning I was experiencing the first signs ever of a shoulder injury. I am hypothesizing here that a shoulder injury is much freakish than your usual torn pulley tendon (been there, done that) or your golfer or tennis elbow (been there, done that), specifically because you experience a weird disconnection from your limb. Something like: before you and your limb were happily connected and doing all right, and then suddenly there's a painful something that seems to pull your arm (left, in my case), away from you. It has gotten better but I am not climbing today - responsible, I am! (yeah right)

Thank god for modern backpacks though, because I was still able to train on Saturday morning. This time it was MacRitchie (10+ 2km) with a pack that weighed around 12 kg. Managed to finish it without major events, but I don't think I could have had i not had most of its weight on my hips. I also noticed that my performance on Saturday morning trainings (12 hours after climbing) is worse than my performance on wednesday night trainings (24 hours after climbing). It could be that either I am accumulating fatigue or that I am getting older and as such need to rest more. I AM looking forward to sleeping on the plane to Kathmandu (7 hours mofo!). In view of this, tonight is light running rest night!

Nature wants me fat

I always eat more in preparation for a longer run. Well, truth be it, I always eat more. But since yesterday's training, when my fingers literally shouted: "Lose weight, bitch!", I have made a resolution to eat more only (ONLY!) when i will be going for a run.

I have recently found a longer run around campus, which clocks about 10km and has two hills in it: one is about 3 km long, the other about 100 m - in preparation for "Nepal OH YEAH 2010" pre-graduation trip (this only implies that at some point in time there's going to be a graduation trip as well) My plan now is to run this route everyday if possible. Today was one of those days when I was supposed to run it.

So I stuffed my face accordingly at lunch, and afterwards, clocking a salmon with salad and mash, humus with bread, one pack of seaweed and one pack of cashewnuts (how the last two are actually good for runners, I do not know! But they are very good for gluttons yum, yum, yum).

Of course it started pouring right after I finished lunch and it has not stopped since, which makes my pre-run stuffing useless. And I literally can feel how everything i ate is meeting back on my behind to discuss layering possibilities. Nature truly wants me fat.

Training with a ZING!

I knew there was another reason why last Thursday I was queen of my flock, chief of my chickens while running to Raffles! It wasn't the oolong tea or anything, it was just that I had resumed hill training in preparation for New Zealand. This time at least I am not the only crazy caucasian carrying heavy backpacks up on Vigilante or in MacRitchie reservoir, I have Marian with me! YAY!

The schedule

Last night we left office about 6:30 pm and reached MacRitchie reservoir about 8pm, totalling 1hr and 30 minutes on the bus! The road was very crowded and the stuffy feeling was not helped by the stoopid chinese drama playing on the bus tv. One of the stupid quotes: brother towards his brother about the latter's daughter-in-law who had bought super nice duck rice for dinner (in front of her and the whole family): "Wha, this scrooge is giving us present, she definitely wants something from us!" - I wonder if this kind of talk is real.

The trek started kind of slow because I had used a regular laptop backpack to carry what seemed like 10 kg of weight. I was feeling super uncomfortable, and the worst for wear were my neck and my lower back where I had tried to tightly tie the lower back straps - yes claudia, laptop backpacks are not meant to carry heavy weight. And we trekked and we trekked in the loud jungle - I swear I could hear the cicada on top of my music - and using the light from my trusty headlamp.

We reached about 4 km into the trek when suddenly, while Marian was busy looking at his iPhone (as usual!), I glance up (and hence raise my head on which my headlamp rested) and ...

The spook
I see a bunch of green things crowded in the middle of the trek. I freak out momentarily and start nudging Marian who was still busy with that damn thing. So we are still walking towards them and I am still super freaked, I put the light under my hand because they are obviously lightless and we slowly walk past them. What were they?

Well soldiers of course! Marching in the middle of the night without lights in MacRitchie Reservoir! We passed the first platoon, glimpsed another one in the bushes (those were roaming and really looked like really big, green cockroaches), and we next reached one of their stops (or whatever) where a voice bellowed from the dark (I guess I had turned the light on by now):"WHO'S THERE?!" at which Marian answered: "Civilians?" and the voice answered in a more normal tone: "Oh! [pause] sorry for my voice just now ... " So we passed another platoon - I made a point of passing them on the right (they were walking in the middle of the track) when I saw that their guns (GUNS!) were pointing on the left. I even asked marian if it was illegal to be in MacRitchie at that time of night - you never know with singapore :)

Ah well, after we passed all the soldiers I could resume light again. We trekked for a bit more when what do you think I found in the middle of the road (Marian was again! busy with the iphone) Sorry for the bad quality movie, next time i'll take my own phone that has a flash! Marian also got confused and recorded instead of taking a picture:



It's a mommy ant-eater pangolin with her little baby ant-eater pangolin on her back!! Or is it on her tail?!

Epic end
The rest are normal stuff, we took 20 minutes to get home, showered and collapsed. Before that however, I stopped at an ice-cream shop close to home. I do not like ice-cream normally but I love rum and raisin! So I bought a scoop feeling I deserved it and said "Nevermind" when the lady said that it was slightly alcoholic ... And what do you know after two little spoons I was super tipsy.

An epic end to an epic night - train in the park, find some soldiers, get drunk on ice-cream!

The hill ...

It has been conquered. And down it went my friends ... Sunday morning when Mihai and Mariuca finally woke up (around 1pm), we went again to Bukit Timah nature reserve. Yup. I did the hill three times, running to the top and walking back. I only stopped the first time after the steeper slope because I had made a tactical error and ran too fast!! Which of course left me dead by the time I reached the nicer part :) When I was coming back from my second run a man in his fifties that was running the mellow part told me that he saw me running the steep part and "Congratulations, you're doing great!". I met him and his wife again when I was running the third time and he said "congratulations" again :) By that time that was the only thing that kept me going (that and the fact that I had told M&m that I will be running three times).

Saturday was a bad day for climbing. Do remind me never to climb when I'm tired. I could only trust myself to hold the really really big hand holds (think the size of my head) and to step on really big things. Truly horrible performance. For the easy peasy routes that I could do without a sweat last time, this time I was drenched and shaking like a leaf. Bugger. Sandra's climbing has improved a lot, she's inspiring me :)

Finally ...

After one year, I have managed to get to the Bukit Timah nature reserve and run! Yay!! Even though it was raining and we only ran uphill on the very first slope that we could see from the parking lot, it was great!! The slope is about 45-50 degrees steep, for the first 500 meteres and then maybe it reduces to 20 degrees for the next maybe 800 meters. To my shame, I did not run the 500 m steep one in the first go. This is because I didn't expect it to be soo long, so I nearly died when after the first corner I was greeted with the same steepness ... On the second try and after careful consideration and application of my strategy, I succeeded in running the whole 500 m. For Sunday, I plan to run the whole thing (till the hill top) three times. Can't wait!

The back of my thigh feels a bit stiff. This is because on Wednesday Mihai, Maria and I decided to go for a run. Only 1 km mind you (they are pretty out of shape), but then Mihai said we should do some sprints. And sprints we did. Imagine me trying to run fast ... It's like watching a beer barrel trying to roll itself on a flat surface ... Mihai and Maria have been so kind as to take care of me now that Marian is in San Francisco. This only means that I'm making the poor souls do much more sports than they would normally do. This together will late night watching of football matches has turned my brain to M.U.S.H. So today I am slacking in school, woo hoo!! Will catch up on Sunday, I swear.

A lot of sports these days

Yup. Summing it up:

• Monday - Sleep sleep sleep. Tennis in the evening (1hr).


• Tuesday - Run about 10-11 km (don't know for sure, my iPod is iLost).


• Wednesday - Climb for 2 hrs (bad idea, finger pain again). Run about 10-11 km. Good thing Shumei wanted to run (as in she did not give in when I said "run now or don't run at all" when we were trying this very nice route), cause otherwise I would not have dun it. All i regret is that I definitely ran too slow.


• Thursday - Trek in MountHill Faber for 1 hr and a half. Did the hill three times. Ran two times on the final slope. Played tennis for twenty minutes. Maria is definitely improving, yay!


• Today - Play badminton for one hour.


• Tomorrow - Compete in Rockmaster. My aim is a) not to finish last (second last is good). b) be able to start. I have just realized that this Rockmaster will only be my fourth competishun. Evar! Woohooo! Scared.


• Sunday - Tennis two hours in the morning (if it doesn't rain). Then trek between MacRitchie and Bukit Timah parks. These are two adjoining parks but not very close, mind you. The trek should last about three hours. As you can see, I've already made plans for Sunday, so this will be the reason why I will not qualify for the Rockmaster finals. Rrrright.

Inspirational

Wha, I was just reading about the Boston marathon. Apparently you need to qualify for it, by getting a running time of 3:40 hrs (women) for a registered marathon in the same year. OMG!

But that is not the best part. This is fucking inspirational:

"One of the most recognized duos each year at the Boston Marathon is Dick and Rick Hoyt. Dick is the father of Rick, who has cerebral palsy. While doctors originally said he would never have a shot at a normal life and thought that institutionalizing Rick was the best option, Dick and his wife disagreed and raised him like an ordinary child. Eventually a computer device was developed that helped Rick communicate with his family and the family learned of one of his biggest passions: sports. Eventually Dick and Rick started competing in charity runs, with Dick pushing Rick in a wheelchair. The father and son began to enjoy racing so much that they started entering marathons and even triathlons, with Dick towing Rick in a little boat during the swim and carrying him on the front of his bike during the cycling portion. Dick and Rick have competed in 64 marathons and over 200 triathlons and finish with competitive times, often faster than 90% of the pack. Their top marathon finish was an astonishing 2:45, a time unattainable for most average marathoners."

They also ran

"224 Triathlons (6 of which were Ironman competitions), 20 Duathlons, and 65 Marathons, including 25 Boston Marathons".

So yeah. Stop whining, stop finding excuses, get off your fat ass and train!
[this is addressed to me, however, if you feel it addresses to you too, then by all means ... ]

Training and such

Hey Fen & Nita, this is for you! I wanted to post a comment on each of your blogs to tell you how I trained, but realized that it would be too much of a hassle, so here goes.

First of all, I don't know if you are going to carry your stuff up there or if your trekking company will provide for all of that. I heard that on Kilimanjaro there are porters that would carry just about everything (including a toilet seat) for a given (affordable) price. Anyway, I think the basic training for any mountain (carry or no carry of load) should consist of hiking at a high speed uphill carrying loads. Yup. I'm not kidding. This will increase your lung capacity (critical at altitude, remember kili is almost 6000m) and also increase your endurance.

Not so many hills here in singapore, but MacRitchie is a good place to start. If not, bukit batok reservoir is also nice (i miss took bukit batok for macritchie at one point). For MR, there is a 10 km route that is just nice for the start.

I think at first you should have about 5 kg of load - what I did was to carry 1.5, 2 and 0.5 l bottles filled with water - to up to 12 when you're done. This way, if the going gets tough, you can dump some of the water in the jungle or even drink it if you're desperate (i think water becomes undrinkable after a couple of weeks of being kept in a container - i did not spill it cause it seemed like a waste). Since the water bottles didn't fill up the backpack and i didn't want them to wiggle around, i put some bed sheets for padding (i kid you not).

And you should walk as fast as you can. You should hike in the boots you plan to hike in during the trip itself, to ween them in and sort out any problems that might arise (blisters, etc) As for boots, I think any trekking boots should have a hard sole, from a good material (preferably vibram), should hold the ankle and have a hard tip (for when you hit rocks). Running uphill is also good training, but i did it only once a week. This load carrying trek should be done twice to three times a week - i think WE (yes i need it too) should start in early May or even next week, woohoo!! I volunteer Sunday evenings, yay!

If you plan to hike using trekking poles, which I seriously advise you to, you should adjust their length correctly: they should reach your shoulder or higher when you go downhill and they should be lower when you go uphill.

The same goes for your backpack: you should carry the backpack you plan to have with you. There's a whole theory about how you should pack you backpack, and how it should be adjusted. Basically your hips should carry most of the weight. I will show you if you don't know how.

For the rest of the gear, I suppose the trekking agency will give you a list of gear which I suppose you will need to buy. Lemme know!

Training, I has it

So. You know, in the past, I never really liked ice cream. In fact, I hateded it. But then, I got a taste of ice cream in this country. And realized that it's different from what I remembered ice cream tasted like back in communist Romania. So I've been giving myself a monthly treat. This month, it was Ben & Jerry's Turtle soup. And it gave me a food allergy!! Yay!!! Which left me scratching like crazy for half the night... So I didn't go to training this morning, seeing how I was supposed to leave for training when I was finally getting ready to sleep.

Instead, and also to punish myself for eating THE WHOLE ice-cream box I went and trained by myself. What I wanted to do was: 40 minutes ARC, 3 sets of

• 3 pull-ups with 7.5 kg


• 15 weighted cruches


• 30 tiger torso crunches


• body tension(45s front, 30, 30 sides)

, climb a bit then do one endurance route.

What I ended up with was: 30 minutes ARC (what?! I am injured, ok?!), 2 sets of

• 3 pull-ups with 7.5 kg


• 15 weighted cruches - 5 kg


• 30 tiger torso crunches 5 kg


• body tension (45s front, 30, 30 sides)

, plus one extra set of pull-ups with 10 kg. But when I looked at the 5 kg disc for crunches I just couldn't do it anymore. By then Shumei had come so I went downstairs and climbed for a bit, and that was that!!

When your backpack is too light

The alarm on my phone starts ringing at 06:30 with the melodious tune entitled "motorhighway.aac". I hit the snooze button with sniper precision and doze back again. I hit the snooze button five minutes later. And five minutes later. In the end I extract myself from bed fearing Marian's kicks and/or comments. I have a gut feeling though, and move the curtain a bit and try to peer outside. I will my right eye into opening and realize that the fog I am seeing is for real and not due to my shut eye-lashes. To be sure, I open the window and throw my hand outside. I mutter a satisfied "YES!" and perform a double somersault back to bed.

This is what happens when your backpack is too light and you think you can actually RUN uphill.

10th October Resolutions

I, Claudia, owner of subsiding cold, declining climbing and running abilities, do hereby pledge to follow through on these resolutions:

1. Climb more! As in, besides coming for training and giving my fullest, i will also put in at most an hour of climbing every other day.


2. Do at least two pull-ups (or more if my elbow allows) a day.


3. Train more! Go to the Bukit Timah nature reserve twice a week: on Tuesday night and on Saturday night, and give those hills a try!


4. Run on the rest of the days (Thursday, Friday and Sunday). Thursday is day off, so run to my lungs' content.


5. Repetir et practicar l'espanol, si no, yo estabo in lots of trouble.

I have spoken!