Living in central London its pretty difficult to get time on anything resembling a hill. This is a bit of a problem given that in under 3 months time we will be walking up a very big hill for about 8 days.

Alongside all of the running and trim trails, I am trying to fit in as much time as possible walking on hills. This inevitably involves heading outside London, which means an early start.

So at 6.45 on Sunday morning my alarm went off and I dragged myself out of bed and got ready to head to the South Downs for a day of walking. Glen and I jumped on the train at Clapham Junction and headed down towards Hassocks, a few kilometers outside Brighton. Armed with the compass and map book I bought him for Christmas, and an OS map and guide book provided by Kiwi, Glen and I set about planning our route.

We had initially planned to walk from one train station to another but were not sure about how much ground we would cover, and given that it gets dark about 4pm, we didn't want to get caught out. In the end we decided to do an out and back from Hassocks. We planned to walk for about 6 hours in total so just decided to see how far we got in 3 hours, then turn back.

The morning was pretty cold, but as with our other training walks, we were lucky to have pretty clear weather. Its amazing how easy it can be when you can see where you are going and you have a map and guide book with you and for once we had no trouble following the path. After a 15Km run on Friday night and a trim trail session on Saturday morning, my legs were fairly weary but soon started to warm up.



Our first climb was up New Timber hill and from here we could see our target destination Truleigh Hill far in the distance. After a couple of hours walking and a couple of decent hills, we stopped for our first chicken, cheese and chutney bagel. We had made pretty good pace and were averaging about 8.5 minutes\Km.

Fuelled by our first lunch we made good progress as we walked up the icy sides of the Devils Dyke. This was a fairly long and slow climb up the ridge of a small valley and really made me realise how hard 8 days of up and down was going to be.


At the top of the Dyke we were rewarded great views over the South Downs escarpment and a good look at our last hill..


From here we headed down along the escarpment before the final climb up Truleigh Hill.
We had now been walking for a bit over 3 hours so decided to turn around and head back towards Hassocks. the return trip was relatively uneventful, apart from the second bagel which was probably the highlight of the afternoon.

We made it back to Hassocks at about 3.30pm after 5 hours 45 walking time in which we covered about 36Km.

It was great to get out and spend some more time in my boots which were for the most part pretty comfortable, but still gave me a bit of grief on the up slopes. After a couple of days, my legs are recovering and I think I may even be able to get out for a gentle run tonight.

The GPS track of our walk can be found at www.chrisbeale.com. Select the workout on 11/01/09. This will probably take a while to load as it is quite large...

Failing to Plan may be Planning to Fail...

..but planning training is a pain in the arse.

January has arrived and now that the excesses of Christmas and New Years are out of the way its time to get serious about training. I've been training quite a bit up until the end of last year averaging about 3-4 sessions a week over the last few months. Now though its time to step it up a gear.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been spending quite a bit of time trying to work out a suitable training plan. This is actually a lot more difficult than I imagined it would be. My plan is to fit in 7-8 sessions a week including 2 swims, 3 runs of varying length/intensity, 1-2 Trim Trail sessions and a few hours walking with a weighted pack on whatever I can find that somewhat resmebles a hill.

Due to other training commitments it sounds like there is only going to be one official Trim Trail session now on Thursday nights so that is my one fixed point. The hillwalking I really need to do in daylight so that is confined to saturday or Sunday. The challenge is trying to balance the rest of the running throughout the week so as to give my legs a bit of a rest. I plan to do one long run a week which will be 15km - 30km so I really need a couple of days off after that to rest.

Anyway I'm on to about my ninth iteration of my plan and still can't make things work which is frustrating. I guess I will just have to give it a crack and see how it goes and adjust my plan if I find I am struggling with it.

Along with my new training plan is a new eating plan. Since I started training properly for this thing I have lost about 5Kg. This is particularly painful because I worked hard at the gym for months to put on a few Kg before last summer and now its all gone. I am now tucking in to a fairly high protien high diet, along with plenty of carbs to keep me going on those long runs. I'm back to eating a proper breakfast and trying to eat 6 small meals a day instead of cramming and snacking as I am used to. I'm only on the second day of this so i will have to see how it goes.

My days of drinking are also firmly stuck in 2008 and I plan to make it through to April without a drop passing my lips. Seriously. I actually mean that.

For anybody that is interested I have set up a webpage to log my running training. I use the Nokia SportsTracker application on my phone to record a GPS track of my runs which I upload to my website. Check out www.chrisbeale.com

You can select a workout form the box on the right hand side and it is displayed on the map along with information on duration and pace. Currently its a little bit slow to load the workouts, but when I get round to it I will be making some improvements. This
page only displays my road-runs. Aside form this my training to date has included Kiwis run club, Trim Trails, swimming, hill running and hiking.

Chris