I left Spain in early December with a lot of happy memories and a lovely new scar, courtesy of my machete.

Held together with surgical tape

I am now in the French Alps for a winter of altitude training. That was the plan and all seemed to be going well, when my boss turns out to be the personal trainer of Celine Gros, one of the world’s top female downhill mountain bikers.

She invited me to train with them. However, I decided to give myself a break from fitness training until the New Year and to enjoy myself in the mountains for a bit. After two weeks of snow-boarding and skiing I wound up with stretched ligaments in my knee, a hernia, one shoulder dislocated and the muscle in the other torn. My left ankle which is prone to sprains remains remarkably unphased by all the mountain activity but is strapped up with zinc oxide tape as a precaution.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror the other day and realised that I have so much tape holding me together that I look like a parcel. Apparently I have to have key hole surgery before embarking on proper training or more snow-boarding. Apparently.

Apart from being held together with string the rest of the expedition planning is going quite badly. When I was briefly in the UK in December I found that I had not been paid for quite a lot of the work that I had done in 2007 and so was out of pocket to the tune of around �2000. That �2000 is, roughly, all the budget I have so far saved, so being without obviously puts the feasibility of the expedition into question. However, after much deliberation I have decided to crack on anyway and have booked a place on a three week jungle survival course / mini expedition with Bushmasters starting on September 20th in Guyana. I’m also pleased to mention that Bushmasters have become a sponsor of the expedition.

So here I am in the mountains, I have a personal trainer, someone to train with, mountains to run up, a rucksack to put weight in, a compass to learn how to use properly, buckets of enthusiasm, all the food I will need and an Internet connection to blog on. All I need now is to find a sponsor / get my money back.

Tags: off-the-grid, machete, jungle_survival_course, zinc_oxide_tape, key_hole_surgery, altitude_training, mountain_bikers, french_alps, downhill_mountain, fitness_training