Weekend #8: Water

In a way, this was something of a rest weekend. My weight vest, building weight steadily these past few weeks, was barely worn at all.

Saturday morning came around and the vest went on as usual. Some driving, a bit of standing around, some more driving, some jumping up and down... Then I sneakily swapped the lead-weighted vest for a different bulky vest designed to have very little weight. I may do some stupid things, but white water rafting while wearing lead weights isn't one of them.

It's been a while since I've been rafting and I'd almost forgotten just how pleasant it is to spend a day mingling long periods of exercise, beautiful scenery, shenanigans and patches of adrenalin-pumping excitement together. We were rafting the Esperence. It's not a challenging river by any means and has barely a whiff of adrenalin to be had throughout the day, but it's a fun and pretty river.

There were the usual shenanigans, a few unusual ones, some solid paddling along the stretches of flat water, a couple of fun rapids, some rafters of... limited experience and a few minor injuries. Irritatingly (for me at least), one of those was mine. Dragging rafts out of the water, one struck the side of my knee at not inconsiderable speed. Generally, I'd be knocked over in that situation, but alas this time I was wearing shoes with excellent grip which refused to slide out from beneath me and I was against a rock with nowhere to be thrown to. That left my knee as the only place to absorb the impact. It did, quite admirably in fact. By the feel of it, the joint was momentarily popped open, significantly over stretching the innocent soft tissue on the far side of the knee. In summary, it was rather painful, agonising even.

The initial blast of pain faded after a while, subsiding to a dull throb. I can still walk on it without any dramas, but some movements are somewhat uncomfortable. A doctor determined that he could make it more painful by prodding parts of it. I assume this knowledge was useful to him, and was hopefully necessary for providing the advice not to apply too much lateral tension to the joint. If it wasn't, I subjected myself to a fresh round of pain for nothing...

Unsure of whether it would be a good idea, I didn't wear the weight vest on Sunday. I was later told that this wouldn't be a problem, so no more slacking off. Sunday remained a rest day though, with the only prep being some gear research and locating more maps for my GPS. This had it's first extensive test (ignoring all the short walks and rides) on the rafting trip, logging the trip downriver. It successfully tracked us down the river (while overshadowed by rocks and trees) accurately enough to show the maneuvers performed through each rapid and when I was pacing on the bank while doing safety.

Week #7: Capoiera

It was a week that lacked excitement, but kept me busy nonetheless. Mostly, I was kept busy with three evenings of Capoiera. There have been three sessions running every week for a while now, but clashing activities have prevented me from making all of them in a single week. At last, this goal was achieved! In celebration of this momentous occasion, I met up with my housemate one lunchtime to practice some Capoiera down at Salamanca.

Until now, I've been sensible enough to remove the weight vest before all of the different Capoiera classes and have made sure that I'm driving to and from the sessions. They're utterly exhausting at the best of times, I wouldn't be able to finish a class if it was much harder and there'd be a decent chance of not completing the walk home. This week the format changed slightly, bringing near an hour's walk to and then again back from each class. On Friday, I also included the weight vest. The fully laden vest would still have wiped me out halfway through, so I removed a lot of the weights before the start and brought it down to around 2.5kg. Now before anyone tells me that's nothing, a pathetic addition, I want to see you complete the 2.5 hour Friday Capoiera session and manage the walk back up to my house with just 1kg extra weight. It's not much, no, but it's enough. The result was a somewhat leaden walk (now with all weights restored) back up the hill after class. It was satisfying though, to finally do that; if I can get to 10% of my body weight in a vest while doing Capoiera, I'll be pretty pleased with that.

I dried some more rice and tried to find a way to keep cameras, torches and GPS charged for 30 days as well. It took a while, but I've finally found a combination of solar cells and a charger light enough to do the job and be worth carrying. The problem has been that I'm trying to find a lightweight solution to power all the different types of devices of various brands. I think that has been achieved at last, though I'll have to test the somewhat makeshift setup for myself to be certain.

Weekend #7: Shoes are important...

I’ve decided - for no particular reason, just because - to write about the weekend just passed in terms of footwear.  If you object to this… well I won’t actually change it back, so there’s probably no point complaining about it.

 Folk dancers use a range of different shoes, generally based on the style they do most or that first introduced them to dancing. Scottish and Irish soft dancing shoes are exceedingly common, swing dancing shoes as well, Irish hard shoes less so. I’m possibly unique and certainly rare, in that I dance wearing hiking sandals. Essentially the sole of a hiking boot held on with a few straps instead of leather and laces (straps, leather and lace… somewhere along the way this post took a turn for the strange). They’re heavy, the grip’s all wrong for dancing and they look bizarre, but they’re also extremely comfortable. I’ve learned to work around the rest. That said, I still dance barefoot half the time because it’s even more comfortable. That’s how I spent Friday night, dancing barefoot through a few hours of Irish and folk dancing.

Saturday morning brought a new challenge. Riding uses particular footwear as well, but I normally ride wearing work shoes because that’s where I’m going to or from. So when I go mountain biking, I don’t have any special riding shoes to wear. Though it makes people wince to see all the exposed skin, I often ride wearing my hiking sandals (look, they’re really comfortable!). I deviated from that this weekend by using some high-top volleys. The track was pretty narrow and I didn’t want my feet getting too shredded by passing shrubbery. As it was, I should have worried more about my hands and face, which both sustained injuries when falling in the line of duty.

I’ve done very little climbing over the years and have no fancy climbing shoes either. So I stuck with the volleys on Saturday arvo, figuring that the grip they gave would be good. Wrong, very wrong. The toe on a pair of volleys is a soft thing that bends easily, regardless of how your toes are positioned. Trying to maintain a grip on a precarious toehold proved nigh on impossible. I also wore half the remaining tread off the soles trying to use their grip on the weathered dolerite. If you’ve not spent much time in Tas, it’s entirely possible you haven’t studied this rock up close. Freshly cut, it’s a mottled grey and can be quite smooth. It weathers to an ochre hue with a texture like grit 1 sandpaper, if there is such a thing. Nice and grippy, but death for any soft-soled shoes.

Sunday morning was an easy choice. Making cheese requires no special footwear, so I could wear my hiking sandals! Alas, some exercises in the afternoon required some creative thought. The soles of my volleys were already worn thin by a couple of the exercises at Hell Night in Wellington, and the climbing had nearly finished them off. They wouldn’t give me any good grip. A discussion at Hell Night had me tempted to just go barefoot. The guy running it mentioned that cushioned modern shoes encourage really bad practices when running, which cause a lot of additional wear on the joints. He had us practice a running style that avoids those problems and mentioned that it was almost instinctive whenever running barefoot. I’ve tried and I think he’s right. Unfortunately I’m less inclined to run around in the dark barefoot, lest some unkind person leaves glass strewn amid the concealing grass. So I needed a thin but tough sole, with no padding… Something I had already considered for the next time I go rockclimbing is my old pair of rafting shoes. Turns out five fingers are pretty much ideal, with a tough grippy sole and absolutely no padding. I’ll give them a try next time I go climbing as well, though I’m told I will soon have to try climbing in walking boots.


(I actually have some photos, and not all of shoes! For the sake of not delaying this any longer, I'll post this now and upload the photos in an edit later.)

EDIT: See, one of them was of people who'd just donned their shoes!

Week #6: Capoeira and rice

Another week down and it wasn't completely wasted. A return to Capoeira on Monday set things off to a flying start. I took the weight vest off for my two hours of intensive exercise, hoping that perhaps that would spare me complete muscle failure at the end of a two hour session. It was a nice idea, but that extra weight would have just hastened the inevitable.

I'd missed that feeling of muscles collapsing beneath their own weight. It sounds unpleasant, but it's actually invigorating. Like the feeling of floating when I take the weight vest off, the end of a Capoeira class brings with it a feeling of ease. Walking, running, pushups... all seem that much easier compared with a few rounds of switching legs from Negativa. Think doing your normal exercises, all while remaining in a low push-up position.

There was another session on Wednesday night as well, followed by a nice relaxing forty minute uphill walk back home. Once more, I removed the weight vest as the lesson started and donned it again when we slowed afterwards. I think next week I'll try keeping the vest on with most of the weights removed. It may be an insanely stupid idea but, if I can manage that, a mere bushwalk should present scant little problem.

I also returned to my previous habit of balancing on bollards at lunch. Again, I seem to have a knack for only doing this when it's extremely windy. This time it wasn't my legs that gave out each time. Instead, I would remain balanced until a gust arrived that was powerful enough to shove me straight off. Only one of the bollards was reasonably sheltered, so I took to swapping legs on that one rather than working my way along the line.

Next week, I'll have three nights of Capoeira. Maybe wearing the weight vest for them isn't such a good idea if I'm doing that many. It would be sensible to take it easier... Sensible? Me? Not going to happen!

I've got no further with planning what meals to start preparing. We have to sort out for sure who's going and meet up to work out that and myriad other details soon. In the meantime, I've started preparing some complete basics. Since longer cooking times mean more fuel and weight, just carrying bags of rice is a terribly bad idea. Quick-cook rice tastes really odd, some product of its commercial production. But it's very easy to make your own tasty quick-cooking rice. Take rice, cook it (steam, boil, simmer, soak or even use a rice cooker. The choice is yours), spread it on baking trays and put it in an oven with the door jammed slightly open. I find that 75 degrees fan forced works pretty well for my oven, though its dubious thermostat means that probably translates to anything from 65-90 degrees on a normal oven.Turn it and break up the lumps that form after an hour or so, then again after another hour. I can completely dehydrate white rice in a little over two hours. Brown rice is up around 4 hours. The result is rice taking up the same volume and weight as raw rice, but which cooks by pouring in some boiling water and sitting for a couple of minutes while you prepare to dish up. Since we're sure to need some, I've started drying rice en masse. Whatever isn't needed for the walk can go into the pantry for when I'm feeling hungry and don't feel like waiting for our stove to potter its way through cooking the rice.

Week #5 and Weekend #6

Alas, the delayed posting wasn't caused by a trip into the wilderness, a bridge being taken out by the recent gales and a forced week-long detour. So why the delay? I've a plethora of excuses at the ready but far less reasons. Came down with a cold last week and was floored for half the week. The extent of the physical training was some riding, continuing to add weights to the vest and an Irish dancing session. Started working out what food has to be prepared (since that much food will take a long time to dehydrate) and it looks like there'll be a crew of 5 or 6 for the Arthurs, then 3 or 4 after that.

What of the weekend then, did it bring a sudden increase in planning and activity? The cold loitered still, but faded enough to do a spot of manual labour, shifting and laying sandstone blocks. Started making some new weights as well, since I'm almost wearing all of those which came with the vest. Up around 6 kg now. Still noticing it, but that 1/2 lb a day seems a like a rate I can maintain fairly easily.

As for gear, I've been looking at what I have and I'm pretty much alright now. One potential problem is my sleeping mat. I have one of the early Exped inflatable down-filled mats, which is lightweight, packs down small, is the most comfortable comping bed I've ever used and I've never had a problem with it. Sounds perfect; what am I worried about? It was purchased in a batch of four. Of those four, all the others suffered catastrophic failure (when an exped goes flat it has absolutely no padding left, so any failure is catastrophic), only reaching around 20 nights of usage at best. At last count, mine's managed around 70. Now I'm hoping that's because I got the lucky mat and it'll make it clear through 100. The odds are against it though, and with 30 days of rough ground, I'm considering whether I can take the gamble. I haven't replaced it yet, but am looking at some options for doing so.

Well that's about it. No pretty pictures to accompany this time. So you'll have to cope with boring text.

Weekend #5: Wellington Wanderings

Belatedly posting about the weekend, because I've been somewhat short of time these last couple of days.

Saturday came around and my legs were in no mood to be up and walking. After so much quadrupedal work up and down flights of stairs on Friday night, they wanted a rest. I forced them outside to the bus terminal and they got to rest while I caught the bus out to Eastbourne. I was curious about the eastern side of Wellington Harbour. From the arbitrary point where I decided to disembark, I set out along the shoreline. It was yet another beautiful day, bereft of the wind and rain I had been promised. Suffice to say, I was disappointed at Wellington's efforts!

There's a gravel road that follows the coast another 11km beyond the end of the public streets and looks like it'd be a great bike ride, but on foot I decided against doing the whole walk out and back (though I was tempted). Around a 6km walk out until I found a suitable rock to scramble onto for a view, and then back to track down a bus into the city.

As much as checking out the University, I was in Wellington to check out the other activities on offer. One thing that's a regular part of my life in Hobart is dancing, and I fully intended to test out the local groups. One of the numerous Scottish Country Dance groups in the Wellington area is the Lower Hutt group, who were quite conveniently running their Annual Dance on Saturday night. Kilted up and laden with weights, it took a while wandering the suburb of Lower Hutt to find the event. It was definitely worthwhile.

The first dance had 72 dancers on the floor in nine sets. A few more arrived late and some left early, but there were still nine sets for the last dance, four hours later. We rarely have more than six sets on the floor at our large dances. When I eventually found my way back to Wellington (some 4 hours after the dance finished; I may have taken detours), it was another hour before I sought out my hostel. Too many unexplored streets to wander while having rambling phone conversations back to Australia.

Sunday was a relaxed day. Nothing to mar its calm but a few more hours wandering the streets of the city, a quick run up Mt Victoria and over the back to scope out the best way out to the airport and running up and down the hostel stairs because I could.

Technically into the following week, but so early that it was still the weekend in parts of Australia, I checked out and set off for the airport. A sensible person would have caught a shuttle bus, rather than walking through the night with a bag full of wine bottles and a weighted vest. Having established that I'm not a sensible person early on, I had no interest in acting like it now.

It was tempting to head over the top of Mt Victoria, getting a last view of the city by night, but I had already gone that way a few times and I wanted to try something different. Besides, I was in New Zealand. "If we cannot go over the mountain, I say let us go under it!" Wellington is riddled with tunnels, for trains, buses, cars and people. One of them is the Mt Victoria Tunnel. Another is a pedestrian tunnel conveniently going under the airport. Between the two of them, an hour's mixed jogging and walking had me at the airport.

After that, it was the new week throughout Australia so we'll say the weekend had ended.

Week 4: It is a good pain!

Well, the end of another week has arrived and it's time to write about what happened. Mostly, what happened is that I've done foolish and tiring things, which were nevertheless fun. This week was never going to be about planning; from the start, I intended it to be about purely physical preparation. It started innocently enough, walking down the street as dawn’s light broke with a shovel in hand. From there, it took a turn for the painfully fun…

I had my usual fortnightly visit to the local vampire clinic, where they’ve decided they don’t want most of my blood and just take the plasma. They replace it with saline so that I barely notice the change, but having a gargantuan needle hanging out of my arm for nearly an hour tends to leave the limb a bit useless for a while afterwards. By now, you’ve probably gathered that resting injured/tired limbs isn’t my specialty. There was just enough time to ride home, change and head down to the Monday Capoeira class. Half an hour holding a percussion instrument was a nice gentle lead in to the hour of intensive exercise. Normally I would have struggled with the movements we were doing but, with a weakened left arm and my right thumb still in a splint from a skiing injury back in July, it was especially difficult. Totally worth it.

What of Tuesday? Would this be a day for some Rest, Recovery and Relaxation? Not really…


Tuesday morning came around and I seemed to have gained weight overnight, quite a bit of it. Indeed, I was coming in a full 4kg heavier than the previous night. Something was definitely strange; perhaps I was wearing heavier clothes, but 4kg heavier? Surely the lead weights didn’t weigh that much.

Weight resistance training commenced today, using a weighted vest. I came up with the idea of making one of these years ago, but was stumped when it came to making it comfortable enough to wear constantly. Recently it occurred to me that this was probably something that already existed. Sure enough, there’s a plethora of the things. Most are just a vest with large pockets front and back for lead weights. They’re bulky and there’s no question of wearing one discretely beneath work clothes. I decided to use something more refined. The vest of choice is from a company called Ironwear, because they make a low-profile vest out of a breathable mesh rather than neoprene (aptly named a Cool-Vest). I’ve started pretty light at around 4kg. It’s just enough to notice but mostly I’m trying to get used to the feel of wearing the vest under my clothes while doing day-to-day activities. The aim at the moment is to add an extra ½ lb weight every day until it’s at 20kg, so that a 25kg pack won’t be such a shock come day one of the walk.

I tested it out by going back to the cenotaph during my lunchbreak to balance on bollards. The extra weight’s evenly distributed so it didn’t throw me off-balance, but did put a bit more strain on the leg. I didn’t time myself before to compare, but it was seven bollards in 22 minutes this time. I should set a fixed time (say 30 minutes) and just track how many I do in that time. Unusually, achieving less is doing better.

Tuesday night brought no reprieve, with a few hours of Scottish country dancing (still wearing the vest; from now on assume that I was wearing it unless I say otherwise). I hadn’t been up to Oatlands for the weekly session before, though a few friends from the Hobartian dancers always drive up. Scottish country dancing is far from the most vigorous of the dance styles I do, so it wasn't really a challenge to dance with the weights on. The real dancing difficulty begins when I try dancing Contra at the end of September, by then with around 11kg weighing me down.

A bit of walking around on Wednesday morning, before I settled in to sit for the day. First on a bus. Then (after having an extensive security check when they realised I was wearing a strange body-armour style vest) on to an airport chair, a cramped seat on a plane, a few more airport chairs, another plane and a bus to finish it off. It wasn't tiring, just boring. I was glad to dump my bag and set off for a wander around the unknown streets of an unknown city when I finally arrived at 1am. First impression of Wellington: they love their films
here. I counted half a dozen cinemas in my wandering, while only exploring a few blocks of the CBD...

Dawn brought new impressions, of course. Wellingtonites/Wellingtonians (anyone know the group term for the residents here) really like their films. I found more cinemas, large and small, and countless posters advertising film festivals. Then I venture out to the Uni campus I actually came here to visit. To think I used to believe UTAS was built on a hill. The stairs inside Vic Uni  are no steeper than the hills outside. There's an old cable car up to it. I was really left wondering at the wisdom of walking around the campus wearing a weighted vest.

I now dread the sight of stairs

Wisdom would have suggested I then learn from that, and not run up Mt Victoria on the other side of the city later in the day. Perhaps it was a glimmer of wisdom shining through, but I took the weight vest off for a while, not while running up the mountain, but while doing a two and a half hour capoeira session. Different format here, not so exhausting but no less enjoyable. At the end of it though, the pinky finger of my left hand had received the greatest workout, balancing a berraboi through a music session and a roda.


Friday brought a fresh round of walking up and down countless flights of stairs and steep hills at the Uni campus, before hell began. I checked out the local Parkour group before heading over, to see what events they'd be running. There's one that isn't really part of the training but is just general physical conditioning. They call it Hell Night. For anyone in Wellington of a Friday evening who thinks they're pretty fit, I recommend giving this a try. Frank Kitts Park beneath the yellow mast, 6-7pm. There's a range of exercises that use the features of the park for gym equipment. Fun, intense exercise. I realised it would be absolutely stupid to do it wearing the weight vest, so transferred the vest into my bag at the start. This demonstrated a certain lack of foresight; we were carrying our bags for half of the evening anyway, doing exercises as we moved from location to location, and the bag straps are a whole lot less comfortable than the vest.

Another week complete. No photos, because I left the cable for my camera at home in another country. I'll add them later.

Edit: A few photos now included