We're going now....

....and unlike Scott, Oates and the gang we hope we make it back.

Follow our schedule here and we'll try and post a blog article as soon as we are back in Moshi, after our summit attempt on 1st March. It should be challenging, as an eye witness doing the climb this week (thanks for the insights, Bob) says there is more snow at the iconic summit than for the last 10 years. Bring it on.

The thermals, platypuses, poles, 4 season sleeping bags, and more drugs than you'll find on an average Friday night in Guildford High Street, are all packed. Too late to do any more training. Ethopian Airlines are calling. Tanzania and the majestic Mount Kilimanjaro...the waiting is over.

Thanks to everyone for their good luck wishes and cards. Your encouragement will put a spring in our steps, if not much needed oxygen in our blood. And many many thanks to all who have helped us raise more than £10,000 to start World Vision's life-changing water project in the Kisiriri community in Tanzania. Read more about what you've helped to do here...and if you stumble on this and haven't donated, the total needed is much more than £10,000 so please feel free to help out here.

Wow...we're really doing this.

The Kili 6

The Suffocating Machine

Eszter & I were very interested in the hypoxic testing and training that Andrew's been doing. However, as don't live in London, using The Third Space's hypoxic chamber wasn't really an option. We did explore the possibility of using the chamber at TeamBath - a £30 million sports facility at Bath University, including a Sports Training Village used as a training base by Olympic and world-level athletes. Whilst they were very helpful, it just wasn't practical, partly because of their opening hours, and also because of the travelling time.

So, we bit the bullet and hired a hypoxicator - a machine that sucks oxygen out of the air and feeds it to you via a mask - from The Altitiude Centre (run by the very helpful Richard Pullen, who knows a thing or three about endurance events). Eszter's mum, who's a doctor, took to referring to it - somewhat disturbingly - as The Suffocating Machine, and the label stuck. It wasn't a cheap option (we've had entire holidays for less), but if it means we could enjoy climbing Kilimanjaro a bit more, and minimize the risk of Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) then - in the context of the overall cost of the trip - it doesn't seem quite so bad.



The hypoxicator is used to perform Intermittent Hypoxic Training (IHT). So what's that all about then? To quote from the website of GO2Altitude (manufacturers of the machine we hired) -

IHT exposes the recipient to "hypoxic air" containing 16 - 9% oxygen (equating to an altitude exposure of 2,000 to 6,500 metres above sea level) intermittently at 4-6 minute intervals alternated with breathing normal (sea-level). The 45-90 minute session is conducted once or twice a day while the participant sits comfortably, perhaps while reading or watching television. A course of acclimatisation requires 15 – 20 sessions.

Exposure to altitude in the aforementioned manner stimulates the various biochemical and physiological adaptations necessary to ensure an increased oxygen carrying capacity within the body, ensuring the user is adapted to the altitude of the proposed destination before even leaving sea-level.

Watching TV whilst doing it is more of a challenge than it sounds. For one thing you're having to clamp a large face mask to your head, and support an air reservoir the size of a rugby ball. For another the machine is loud, so the TV has to be at an anti-socially high volume. And you're having to keep an eye on the display, so you know how your pulse and oxygen saturation levels are doing, and can see when to start or stop using the mask.

We started off at 13% oxygen - equivalent to being at about 3,900m, which is already into the region where AMS can start to strike. You could definitely feel the lack of oxygen, and you could see the effect on little graphical read-out on the machine, as the oxygen saturation of your blood fell from its usual ~100%, to around 85%. Every few days the oxygen was reduced by 1%, until it was down to a mere 9% - as if we were at 6,500, or about 600 metres higher than Kilimanjaro. The first few times at 9% were decidedly soporific - rather like when you're trying to read before going to sleep, but you just can't keep your eyes open. But as the days passed, it got easier, presumably as our bodies adjusted to the rarified air.

Anyway, personal experience of breathing air with 9% oxygen for just 5 minutes at a time makes me very glad that we're only going up to a mere 5895m, where there's a whopping 10.1% oxygen. (That's 12.2% more actual oxygen, so is more significant than it might seem.) But it does make me marvel people who have climbed Himalayan peaks without oxygen - at the top of Everest there's less than 7% oxygen! Nuff respect to Reinhold Messner.

Will it work? We hope so. However, we obviously won't know how we'd have performed if we hadn't done IHT. But if we can get to the top without feeling too dreadful, we think it will have been worth it.

And in just over a week we'll be able to let you know...

Gym and tonic

I think most people would agree that gratuitous non-competitive exercise is a necessary evil rather than one of life's great pleasures. For most of my own very nearly 50 years it's always been fairly near the bottom of the to do list...and when the day is disappearing the gym trip would conveniently find its way to the next day's agenda. And the next.

Until now.

The imminent challenge of climbing Kilimanjaro has finally focused my mind, and for probably the first time exercise has been right at the top of my priority list over the last few months. We'll soon see if this completely out of character steely eyed focus has paid off. And if it has it will largely be due to the third space gym in London.

If you really have to get fit - whatever your personal agenda - this is the place to do it. I'm not on commission, honest...but this place is motivating, stimulating, professional and - damn, I never thought I'd hear myself say this - sometimes even FUN.

I've concentrated mainly on using the hypoxic chamber as a way of preparing as much as possible for trekking at altitude. We know we're attempting the climb with minimal acclimitisation time, and then ascending faster than the optimal pace, so exercising at a simulated 8,500 feet with reduced oxygen is at least a start. Not the 20,000 feet we'll need to conquer, but hopefully a small edge.

But the whole gym is so open, an atmospheric architectural mix of glass and steel, that you feel like you're taking part in a spinning class, or Thai boxing, or in the swimming pool through the glass floor below you, whatever your own activity might be. And the in-house DJ spinning the decks projects a funky image that just puts an extra skip in your treadmill pace. Fancy a game of ping-pong or foos? No problem. And a range of classes that make you sweat just reading the schedule. I haven't tried the Persian cerebral Pilates session yet, but I'm sure it's rewarding.

There are some great personal trainers who will design a programme to suit your own objectives. And not like other gyms...they really listen to you and think about the programme, it's not just By The Numbers. Thanks to JD and Chris, both Kili conquerors, for their motivation and wise words!

And if you're unlucky enough to need the services of the medical centre, everyone there is equally professional and attentive. My ageing body has needed the manipulations of Clare, Belinda and Barry over the last few months...special thanks to Barry for his expert physio work on my dodgy back this week. I'm raring to go now...especially as Mrs M has offered to carry my rucksack all the way up Kili.

So huge thanks to everyone at the third space. Keeping fit can really be fun after all...wow, that's a revelation. Shame it took me 50 years to find out.

Teetering on the brink....

Do you want the good news or the bad news?

Well, actually it's fantastic news. As of now, late on Sunday night and one week before our first night's camp on Kilimanjaro, our fundraising target of £10,000 for World Vision in Tanzania is so close I can smell it. Unless it's the Ralgex (see below for the bad news).

We're standing on a cumulative £9,809 thanks to some very generous donations from a lot of friends, family and colleagues in the last couple of weeks, and because of a substantial pledge today from my brother Paul and sister-in-law Carol. And if their pledge becomes a reality in the next couple of weeks - conditional upon some personal financial shenanigans, Paul assures me, rather than any of us summiting* - the tax relief on the pledge would push us over the edge. Symbolically, of course.

So conveniently ignoring the original wildly ambitious target of £25,000, we're there. Well, if Gordon Brown can reforecast the budget deficit so creatively, then so can we...

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has contributed so far. This really will make a huge difference to the community of Kisiriri in Tanzania, as you can read here. We'll continue to track progress of the water project through this blog, and there's even the possibility that we could go back to Tanzania in 2008 to see the completed work and meet the community, thanks to World Vision.

With the fundraising tape breasted - well, almost - it's time to focus 100% on the challenge at hand. And from my personal perspective the timing is a real bummer, as our friends across the Atlantic would say. After months of training and feeling really confident about fitness and the whole psychology thing - BANG, a week before D-Day I've been hit by a double whammy. Flu AND the Return of The Dodgy Back. Fantastic. I've spent 3 days already cramming Nurofen and Lemsips down my throat, and Mrs M has been Ralgexing my ageing lower back.....resulting in a slight easing of the back pain, so that I can at least begin to contemplate hauling a heavy rucksack up 3 vertical miles to almost 6,000 metres above the African plains. But still feverish. I can feel the energy draining away by the minute...

Oh well, I didn't want to do any final training this week. I'll just hope that nature, drugs and the skilled hands of a physio from the third space can weave their magic by Friday. And that I haven't passed any dodgy germs on to Mrs M, in which case I'm in serious trouble.

I hope the rest of the Kili 6 are in good mountain climbing fettle. Neph # 1 Steve had his 22nd birthday today and looks well up for the challenge. Mrs M is in peak condition as long as that sore throat doesn't develop.....Neil's knee is under control. Last time I saw Jon he looked like a fit whippet, and Eszter is hopefully eager to escape the pressures of the legal profession and take it out on Kili.

See you all on Friday. Lemsips and Nurofen appreciated.

*summiting. What a ridiculous word...and another from our North American cousins, I suspect. Like the winningest football team in a season. Or getting acclimated. Two nations divided by a common language indeed. In any event I hope I make it to the top of Kilimanjaro by sunrise on Thursday 1st March, bad back, flu 'n' all.