I am beginning to think I’ve made a terrible mistake…
Next month some 25 of us BD’ers will be heading to the hills for charity, climbing up and down 40km of UK mountainside in 24 hours as part of the Three Peaks Challenge. ‘That’s 1/3 of Everest!’ the literature cheerfully exclaims. That right there is enough to completely freak me out.
Like Ollie writing before me I do not excel in the fitness game (not discounting a lapsed YMCA gym membership and the determination to one day perfect a Van Halen leap off the couch). So last Saturday I began training for Three Peaks in earnest (i.e. at all) with a big country walk in Surrey Hills.
I absolutely loved it: rolling slopes, dense forests, beautiful ponds, not another soul in sight… as far from my walk to work along Hackney Road as you can get. Carried away by the joy of it all, I was easily on track to complete the 17km circuit when fate cruelly interrupted at the 12km mark in the form an elderly, toothless gentleman at a bus stop who – without any encouragement at all – insisted on broadcasting the news that there was indeed a pub open in the next village just up the road with tables outside in the sunshine and not a bad lunch menu either.
Clearly a gentle country stroll was never going to be enough to get me up 40km of mountain. So last night I joined 5 other fitness-challenged BD’ers in Victoria Park for a session of Boot Camp. To be honest, I was not looking forward to Boot Camp at all. It sounded like the kind of heinous punishment that propelled Demi Moore to such terrifying heights of confusion in GI Jane she was driven to scream, “suck my dick!” to anyone who’d listen.
Our only consolation was that the pub was so close we could actually see it, so when we all seized up vomiting in agony half way through, a soothing pint was but a short limp away.
At 7pm, looking like a bunch of nuff nuffs in red bibs, we were ordered to fall into two columns. It didn’t come as any great surprise or bother to learn our line formation was not up to scratch - I’ve seen the army movies, I get the whole humiliation/motivation deal. However it soon became apparent that an ambivalence to authority would prove the least of my worries. Forced to endure a vicious cycle of press ups, crunches, lunges, sumo star jumps and more, interrupted only by painfully long sprints around a bandstand, there would be no stopping, no slowing, no let up and no escape. Split into two competitive groups, the low point came when we had to drag ourselves on elbows and knees under a dozen overhanging groins. Even water was rationed as some sort of sadistic reward for the fastest team. Argh. At the fifty minute mark I said I would rather take off all my clothes and climb the nearest tree than sprint again. Thankfully it never came to that, but I meant it.
How did we go? We all made it to the end, just. Swaino grunted A LOT, I almost hurled, Allenby went into deep shock, Elton reckons he was absolutely fine (yeah, right), Jess B was distracted by the instructor and Mr Meats felt like he’d been crippled for life. My post-Boot Camp inquiry as to whether there might be a more genteel beginner’s version was met with the withering suggestion that perhaps we might go for a wander around Waitrose together, pick cans off the shelves and call it exercise. Will we be back? Yes, but only because we are even more terrified of Three Peaks than we are of the masochistic military.
Visit our Just Giving page to find out more about the BD Three Peaks Challenge and how you can help get us up the mountain.