My legs are aching, but I’m totally pleased. =) Yihui and I (together with Kyo) ran 30km yesterday evening! Damn shiok. We hadn’t done such a long distance in a while and our wheels and cogs were a mite rusty, but it was gratifying to know that our endurance base was still sufficiently in place to allow for an impromptu 30km run without too much agony.
During the run, Yihui and I did the usual reminiscing about past climbs and we were musing about how much we missed Cho Oyu, being on the climb, the regular grind of acclimatization climbs, the base camp atmosphere, staying at our tents, driving across tibet on 4WDs and enjoying naan and lassi in Kathmandu. After having gone through that entire experience, it seemed so surreal as if it belonged to some other past life and there we were, running at east coast (again, as we have over the past few years) talking about it. One thing we totally agreed upon, was that after having survived Cho Oyu, most notably our amazing 19 hour summit day (during which NONE of us went to pee, to the amazement of our sherpas), nothing can be impossible, much less a 30km run.
It’s a comforting source of confidence to have, that having been pushed to the brink and back on Cho Oyu (almost to the point of crawling in the process, very unglam), we’ll always have something as a yardstick of exhaustion to compare the rest of our training to. But only until Everest that is. =) So yes, being superultramegashack at some point does have its eventual benefits.
xxx
On another note, I went for a recce at Pulau Ubin with my colleagues David and Seung and I never expected the following view:
That’s David pointing out the edge for the quarry jump. I didn’t realise that Ubin has such a big scenic quarry. Although it did require us to remove a section of the surrounding fence to crawl into the area to find out… Not that I recommend it, but it’s all in the name of a fruitful recce! Thanks to the Ubin “lao-chiaos”, I got to visit mountain biking trails that were off the beaten track! And there aren’t many of these left anymore. Yeah, so visit Ubin, before it gets any more “prettied up” than it already is and becomes another Sentosa.
Ms Jane Lee was the leader, and a founding member of the Singapore Women’s Everest Team. Jane was the first woman from Southeast Asia, and the 37th woman in history, to have scaled the Seven Summits. She also completed a 560km ski crossing of Greenland in June 2013.