As mentioned previously, I’ve entered La Marmotte and have engaged a coach to train me for the event. While I’m confident that he knows what he’s talking about and will be well capable of designing a programme to prepare me for the event, there are two other obstacles to success.

The first is my inherent laziness. Family and swimmers who trained with me will remember my lack of discipline when it came to training. Sure, I trained, but rarely as much as I should have, and if it wasn’t for the fact that my sister was more dedicated than I, I’d have remained in bed a lot more often when the 4:45am alarm went off. Still, that’s my cross to bear and I can only resolve to force myself out of bed in the morning as required.

The second problem is my weight, or more specifically the surplus of it. The advantage gained by extra weight travelling downhill is more than wiped out by the disadvantage of carrying said extra weight uphill, so in an event with 5000m of climbing, being 89.5kg is a distinct handicap. In September I was weighing in at 93.4kg and the commencement of cycling training, combined with a mini-diet, got me down to 88.3kg by November as which point I stopped the mini diet. The idea was to see if I could maintain the new lower weight for a while before making another step down. Christmas was the big hurdle, but I think I did OK to limit the weight gain to about a kilo.

Anyway, the scales tell me I consist of 20.5% body fat, leaving my non-fat body weighing 71.2kg. If I could get to 10% BF I’d then be down to 78.3kg or a 13% weight loss. That should help my climbing be something less than glacial! The plan at this stage is to do nothing until I’ve completed the MAP test, as the results are useless if I’m tired or lacking energy for the test, then to reactivate the mini-diet in stages to get to my goal weight. However, if I’m losing weight anyway as a result of following the training program, there’ll be no need for the mini-diet. Time will tell.