Mountain climbing trainings

3 more weeks till my first mountain climbing trip.

Been doing some hikings, aside from the regular gym classes.  No trainings on treadmill, though I did spent 20 mins on a stepper machine some weeks ago.  It was extremely boring to say the least. 

Today, I followed 2 of my group members to Batu Cave early in the morning for our training.  The rest of the group couldn't join us. Some decided to go in the afternoon instead.  It was my first time to this area and I was excited yet fearful of the stairs.  They were pretty steep and the steps seemed kinda narrow to me (or prolly it was just my imagination).  

Batu Caves has 272 steps.

Round 1 of the climb started off slow.  As usual, I was huffing and puffing less than 15 mins into the climb.  The climb down was pretty scary (this really confirms I do have some fear of heights) and I was holding on to the handrail and walked down as carefully as I could, walked sideways in fact cos I was that scared.  There were quite a number of people there for their trainings too, I guess.  There was a group of runners jogging up the stairs.  I thought they were pretty crazy to be jogging up and down. Most of them ended up walking anyway, while their leaders kept shouting for them to keep jogging. If it was my leader, I would have said shut the duck up.   

By round 5, I thought I was gonna passd out.  I told myself that would be my last round but then Evon, one of my members said to go for 2 more rounds.  Alright...I told myself that I could do it.  By round 6, my legs were heavy and turned jelly.  At the last round (thank god), I had to motivate myself by not looking up at the stairs. Imagine my jubilant when I came to the end of the climb. I think I can pretty much say this will be the first and last time I will ever climb those stairs.

To continue on with our training, we headed off to Gasing Hill for hiking. With just a banana to refuel our body, we made our way to the hiking trail.  Again, I was almost breathless before I even started the journey. 

My previous 2 hikes up this hill were incompleted. First it drizzled halfway thru and on the 2nd trip, half of us got lost thus I never actually completed a full round of hiking.  The weather today looked group and my 2 group mates knew their way so everything was good.  The hike wasn't easy, considering that I was already pretty much beat from the earlier morning climb.  Towards the end of the hike, as I was coming down the hill, I could feel the soreness and tightness of my calves.  We finished nonetheless, yeah....  The entire morning training took us 3 hours. 

We ended our morning with Ipoh Chicken Rice for lunch.  Went home, soaked my poor feet in warm Epson salt bath and plenty of muscle creams.  My plan to join the second group for the afternoon hike was not to be.  I would be crazy to continue with that.  Furthermore, I was actually suffering from a slight injury to my left rotator cuff the nite before. Took an afternoon nap instead. 

But......I will be heading to Gasing Hill again tomorrow morning.  No idea how my calves would be by then but I hope they will be less sore.   Crazy to be doing this but I had to keep the training ongoing.  After all, the climb up to Mt. Kinabalu base camp will take 4-5 hours...and that is just the first half of the whole climb.