61 days to go. Don't we need to get fit?

I thought I should start to keep some record of our training programme.  We wanted to talk to experts about this, but couldn't find any who would give us advice for free, so have designed our own bespoke training programme based on three guiding principles:

1. Preparation is everything.

2. If you don't do stretches you'll be in agony the next morning.  

3. If you're not fit enough when the trip starts you'll soon get fit.

Last week we managed two spinning sessions.  Each one lasted for 75 minutes and seemed to produce a lot of leg pain and sweat which must be a good sign that our training programme is hitting all the right notes, albeit it with some irregularity.

I cycled to work for the first time as well last week.  Taking a substantial detour on the way home meant that I covered 22km on Friday, before cycling to Richmond along the canal on Saturday morning, which was another 30km because the canal is quite wiggly.

These bike-based elements of our training programme have been complemented by a variety of stretching exercises and things designed to stop various back niggles becoming more than niggles.

The difficult thing is going to be finding hills of the size required to allow us to adequately train for crossing the Andes.  If anyone knows of anything of a similar scale in close proximity to London we're all ears.  The good news is that the first stretch of our journey from Ushuaia heading north doesn't appear to be too too hilly.  The bad news is that it is just about the windiest place on Earth.  Given that getting blown off the road seems to be a fairly frequent occurance in Tierra del Fuego, the gentle breeze beside the Regent's Canal doesn't provide much by way of practice for the uninitiated.  The more we think about it, the more important our third training principle seems to be....

Tomorrow we're off to meet Andy, king of bicycles.  Hopefully he's going to make our bikes for us.  He's crossed the Andes by bikes several times so (to use a totally misleading analogy) it's a bit like buying a space rocket from Neil Armstrong.  Hopefully once we've got bikes sorted everything should start to fall into place, and with the flights booked too there is no turning back now.

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