A Lady in Training

Hiking boots give everyone cankles.

Day 3: first lunch outside of the house! I’m not sure if it counts as a Ladies’ Lunch, since the person I am meeting is a Lady who Consults, but I’ll take it. And since I’m ‘training’ for Kilimanjaro which I will start climbing in 12 days (and also my car is in the shop), I will walk there. 

I know several people who have summited Kili and one who didn’t make it (snow blindness!), and their levels of physical fitness vary widely - the overall consensus seems to be slow and steady beats the altitude sickness. As my hiking companion - my younger brother who is in the National Guard and runs daily ‘for work’ - trains by taking hikes in the North Carolina woods with a weighed backpack (I did tell them they carry our stuff for us…), I’m being the more responsible one by maintaining my dubious shape so that he won’t go up too fast. Plus, ordering good sunglasses.

The only exercise I’ve done in the past few years is taking the stairs to my office - which to be fair is on the 12th floor - and an occasional swim in the ocean when it happens to be high tide. My main concern is breaking in my new hiking boots, which I bought over Christmas in the US at a ridiculously expensive outing to REI - the most money I have ever spent at one store that wasn’t electronics, to buy exciting things like long underwear that no one will even see. 

Breaking in new boots is hard when you live in a place where as soon as the sun is up it is 100 degrees outside and as soon as the sun goes down you are at risk of malaria or mugging. Then someone pointed out to me over the weekend that I actually live right above our compound’s gym! With a treadmill! And AC! I had never been in there. 

Of course one of the treadmills is broken, but I only need one on the full incline at a slow and steady pace and I’m in business. So far so good, I’ve done 40 minutes two days in a row without passing out from heat exhaustion. Now we will see if I can make it to the restaurant down the street...