Setting off tomorrow!!

Last day at work today, packing in the morning and ought to try and cat nap tomorrow afternoon because I'm picking up Sally & Jon about 2.30am to drive to Heathrow. Reckon I'll be too excited to sleep though...

I've not done as much training as I planned (ain't that a surprise?) and only partly because I had a nasty cold which floored me last week. However, here's a snap of me joining in with Rachel Clark's run a mile a day - being pushed along by Piper as you can see:

And we did have a brilliant "Mojo Move-a-thon" where Rare Species' unique Cheryl Sprinkler lead a solid three hours of silly dancing without stopping for even a minute. We served gin and raised a tidy £505 towards our total. The three of us have raised over £11,000 between us now - so proud.

Fake Snow

My mate Sally Hooper has signed up to join me on the Arctic adventure - yaaayyyy!
Here's a photo of the three of us Fromies in Victoria Park with our dogs - all looking very unlike they will haul us anywhere soon - and with fake snow on what was a really quite mild day. Hilariously, about 6 inches of snow fell just the week after so maybe we had summoned it down with our photo opportunity!

Training is going....OK-ish. I cricked my back doing one too many exercise classes and adding in Pilates that I've never done before. But it takes more than that to stop Knaggr. Lovely Ashley Gregory has donated me a month's free pass to her Pilates studio so I just concentrated harder on doing the exercises properly the next time and also went for a session with back wizard, Peter Scruby. So many  talented Fromies to fix you when you're broken.

Better crack on - we'll be there six weeks today. Yikes.

My lovely WHY colleague, Lucy, made this groovy graphic for me. She perhaps should have put some googly eyes on me too since I'm currently feeling very unprepared!

I put my back out at the beginning of last week and was walking like an elderly lady so have done no exercise classes, just the usual dog walks with my less-than-husky-like two pooches. That has eased a lot now but have decided I had better sign up to a monthly subscription to Innov8 gym after Christmas to get fitter.

In other news, I bought some half price merino long johns - woo hoo! And, much more excitingly, I think I'm on the brink of having a fellow Fromie dog-sledder signed up to come and share my tent. More on that later!!

Yesterday (Sunday) saw another Fromie dog-sledder, Jon, and I heading up to Cannock Chase in Staffordshire for a briefing day about our Arctic adventure. Some things were great:-

→we got to meet an Alaskan husky like the ones we will be learning to mush with - sounds like there might be five of them for my sled!

→ we had an exhaustive run through of all the kit we will need and what bits we get to borrow once we're in Norway

→ some of the other people there who are doing the challenge didn't even look as fit as me!!!

Things which weren't so great:

- we were talked at for three hours

- we didn't get to see the lovely Alaskan husky going for a run which I had hoped we might 

However, I feel an awful lot more like I know what to expect of camping out in the Arctic and of their contingency plans for the route if the weather comes in bad and we're in a white-out. Now I'm not feeling so daunted by that bit - instead I've shifted my worrying to controlling a pack of REALLY strong dogs on my own (I thought there were two of us to each sled, don't know why....)

On Saturday, Gitte took this photo of me (amongst hundreds of others!) for her blog about Kate Bush songs & fans, my choice being 'King of the Mountain'. What a great lofty notion that sounds like at the moment! After a tough exercise class at Innov8 on thursday evening followed by a hilarious work-out with Cheryl at Mojo Moves the following morning (her disco playlist this time unusually including the Ace of Spades :)) I cannot make it up the stairs without wincing, never mind a mountain...

16 weeks to go....
blimey, it's a year since I signed up to this challenge and thought "oh, simply ages to get fit and get all that dosh raised"... and now, look, I'm still barely getting to an exercise class once a week (and I come out of it looking like a prize beetroot) and am not even halfway to my fundraising target of £4,000. Better knuckle down.

Am off to a briefing day next week and we get to have a go with the dogs - hilarious photographic evidence to come I expect....