As expected, January has flown by and it has to be said that the bike training hasn’t been that good! We were only a few days into the New Year when Amy disappeared to Vancouver for a week with her work and as predicted, no sooner had she arrived back, did I then depart for a trip with my work to Italy. We kept joking between ourselves that we’d try and find time to see each other in February!

We did have a major step forward in the trip preparations though, as the 18^th January marked the delivery of the BIKE! I could hardly contain my excitement when I first saw this huge anonymous looking brown box and the thought of what it contained almost had me salivating with anticipation! (I can only apologise, it’s a medical condition I’m dealing with!)

I actually got a bit more than I’d bargained for as, after I’d discovered that Greg from Sunday Bicycles had bubble-wrapped the steed as if it was his first-born (which I am very grateful for, as I’d have literally cried if it had been damaged in transit!), he had also thrown in some spare tyres for the bike as well as Sunday Bicycles shorts, jersey, and two pairs of gloves! You’ll see the photos of me fully kitted out starting to creep onto the website very soon, and even if I’m starting to look the part, please bear in mind that it’s still the same unfit moaner hidden underneath!

Sadly, even though the bike was raring to go, I then proceeded to leave it untouched for the remainder of January as we had a holiday in Lapland booked. I decided to avoid attempting any downhill skiing this time as any broken limbs obtained through my innate ability to spectacularly crash even on the nursery slopes would have severely hindered the challenge training.

With this in mind I opted to try my hand at cross-country skiing, thinking it would be a good cross-training activity to help improve my general fitness whilst taking in the snowy beauty of the frozen landscape. And both of these ideas would have proved entirely true if it hadn’t been near impossible to stay upright on the damn skis for more than five minutes. If you can imagine bambi on skis, you’re not far off the image I presented our fellow skiers with!

We were actually on holiday with our good friends Wendy and Neil, and after three days of lessons, myself and Neil were feeling pretty confident of our cross-country skiing ability. So much so that the thought of a 15km loop around and over a frozen lake seemed like a walk in the park. And after I’d crashed for the third time, I wished we had walked it! To make matters worse, Neil is one of those people who has no perception or sense of impending danger or pain, although he’d obviously forgotten all about this when he suggested that I should go first and he would follow in my tracks. I do think however, that he may have remembered these important facts about a split-second before I, without warning or reason, decided that skiing whilst standing was too easy and attempted to continue proceedings with my head and backside both planted firmly in the snow. Unfortunately, for both of us, this all happened on a reasonably speedy descent onto the frozen lake and with gravity being the cruel mistress she is, coupled with Neil’s lack of foresight for the obvious, I knew he wouldn’t be far behind. To be fair to him, he did an amazing job of only slightly grazing my nose with the tip of his ski as he piled into and over me. The ensuing scene where we emerged onto the lake surface as the original human snowball was quite a shock to the passing snow-mobile drivers. With our skis and limbs entangled, and the subsequent theatrics in trying to extricate ourselves, we must have looked like a couple of inept bank robbers (full face balaclavas are the order of the day in temperatures around -20°C) as we acted out a scene which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the film “Dumb and Dumber”.

So to sum up, January was a mixture of travelling and bruises. Hopefully February will be quieter and I can get the training and fundraising back on schedule.