The Big Day

After torrential rain and hail on the way back from the registration on the Friday night we lined up with 350 other lunatics at the top of Neptune’s Staircase in Fort William under a cloudy but rain free sky very early on the Saturday morning. Needless to say both the GPS phone and Colum’s watch were relegated from the kit list due to poor performance in training.

A brilliant cycle along road, towpath and muddy forest track brought us to Fort Augustus at a quarter to eleven. Covered in mud but happy to have completed the bike part of the Bike and Hike we changed and headed off on the walk. Murray’s greater stride and ‘get this over as quickly as possible’ approach took him off into the distance. Meanwhile Colum and I passed the time playing Movie That Fish, coming up with dubious classics like Prawn of the Dead, Scampi (for Bambi), City of Cod, Goldfishfinger and so on. Attempts to explain this game to fellow Bike&Hikers tended to be met with confusion and a tendency to increase the walking pace.

We reached Invermoriston, the bronze stop, and indulged in the soup, sandwiches and cake that the wonderful people there supply. We later found out that one of the helpers had kindly filled not only Murray’s Platypus with water but also his rucksack. He didn’t realise himself until emptying his rucksack in the kitchen after the event and finding that he had carried enough water to sustain a couple of healthy sized carp for 35 miles but it didn’t do much to slow his pace and he completed the whole course in just under fifteen hours. Finishing just about in the daylight (ed: difficult to say for certain given prior confusion between the sun and the moon). Fortunately for all concerned there was no repeat of the infamous Whyte chaffing incident of 2006.

Colum and I took a more stately pace into Drumnadrochit and completed the last section well after dark. Sustained through the last 6 miles by playing guess how many paces to the next glow-stick. We finished just before 1 in the morning and Murray and Steph (our indispensable and expert support) saw us over the line.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s donated money, our total is likely to be well North of £2500 which is entirely due to your generosity! This makes such a huge difference to Maggie’s Centres and they, and us, really appreciate it. See you next year….. maybe!

Murray Whyte:
Minus 4 toenails
1 mega blister
1 blister on the hand! (may have been present before the event)
1 groin pull

Colum McCarthy:
1 blood blister
6 mini blisters
1 pincushion toe (kind of weird)

Mike O’Connell:
1 mega blister (still too scared to take the Compeed off)
3 mini blisters
1 dodgy knee

All 3:
Aches and pains

Who would have thought that the opposite of a car is a snail-drawn chariot.

Recycling

Well sports fans. You’ve come this far, so why not come a little further. This is it, the last week; the toenails are clipped, the bikes are oiled, the Vaseline has been purchased and we are ready to go.

We had decided on nothing too strenuous for the final weekend so met in Dalwhinnie, which has become the spiritual home of our training lately, and set out to repeat the journey to Culra bothy but this time on bike rather than foot.

Murray’s opening gambit was that he hadn’t been on a bike since the Bike & Hike three years ago, his logic being that he only has two 30 mile cycles in him and he doesn’t want to use them up in training. This said he rocketed off into the distance and left Colum and I to follow the trail of his dust. It wasn’t until we approached the final three miles before Culra, where the Landrover track becomes a rough path, that we finally caught up with him.

Then he was off blazing the trail again and kindly pointing out to Colum and I where the ground was particularly rough by flying over his handlebars and conducting a ditch depth test with his head. ‘Are you alright?’ called I, when he had remounted his bike. ‘What?’ he shouted, turning to hear me more clearly and immediately bouncing the bike off a rock and kissing the ground for the second time. ‘Nothing.’ I called, helpfully.

Colum, meanwhile was able to safely negotiate the whole route. Partly due to the fact that the disc brakes on Neil’s bike, which had kindly been donated for the day, enjoy braking so much that they pay only passing attention to whether or not you are trying to apply them. Still, makes for good training.







On reaching Culra Murray initiated a systematic inspection of the seats of the many bikes that were leant up against the bothy. Enquiry elicited the response that his bike seat bore many of the characteristics of a razor blade. Although closer inspection revealed that it had somehow worked loose and was at almost 45o to the traditional angle favoured by cyclists the world over. Thus, rather than presenting the flat surface that provides at least a passably comfortable accommodation for the buttocks he was perched upon something that resembled the profile presented by an intercontinental ballistic missile poised for take-off. Fortunately it was nothing Neil’s handy Allen keys couldn’t sort and so an embarrassing trip to casualty was averted.

Our pause for a photo provided me with the chance to show off the little used stationary power slide; very cool. General consensus of opinion however was that purple was a bad choice of helmet colour.







Massive thanks to all who have donated and provided encouragement, it means a massive amount to us and more importantly to Maggie’s Centres. Check in next week to see how we get on.

When the moon hits your eye like... well the sun actually

As the final stages of training approach we decided that a night walk would be just the ticket and so I headed South and Colum and Murray headed North to rendezvous in Drumochter on Friday evening. Having suffered five days of unbroken clouds I was pleasantly surprised to find sunshine at Aviemore and therefore determined to complete the walk in short sleeves despite it being "feckin' freezing".

Fortunately we had Murray's bushman skills to help us out, although his suggestion of fashioning a rudimentary space blanket from empty monster munch packets was not well received. In the end I had to get my coat out of my rucksack, defeat! Murray went on to further demonstrate the heightened skills of the outdoorsman by getting the sun confused with the moon and his foot confused with an animal lunging out of the darkness to attack him. Topping this off by falling down two holes. I, of course, turned around for a good laugh and slipped on the cowpat of karma and went face first into the mud. Colum managed to stay vertical for the whole trip, which was a great success.

The now obligatory failure of Murray's GPS phone and Colum's watch meant that we completed the 12 or 70 mile route in somewhere between 10 minutes and 4.5 days. So a good improvement.

Just because a horse is brown it doesn't mean it's wearing a coat

Press announcement: There's one born every minute! We have a new member of the Leaping Badgers team in the form of Murray Whyte. He joined us for a short stroll out towards Ben Alder this weekend.

After five days of blazing sunshine with the clouds as scarce as the president of a multinational bank at a G20 protest and the rocks about to split from the heat we set out for a twenty five mile walk into Ben Alder. Needless to say it started lashing down with rain as soon as we left the house with the kind of intensity that would have put a smile on Noah's face.

Being kitted out with the latest in waterproof clothing we stayed dry for nearly seven minutes. After that it was similar to being in the shower, except cold, and we were fully dressed and there was no shampoo. Colum and I calculated that twenty five miles is the equivalent to walking up and down an average length bath 13,000 times.

Murray was able to track our position with his GPS mobile phone, until the batteries gave up. Colum's watch wasn't faring much better and was reluctant to move past 9:15. We twigged that something was wrong when the combined calculation from GPS and watch put our average walking speed at 25 miles per hour - which is virtually unachievable driving down the A9 let alone walking along forest track.

By the time we stumbled back towards Dalwhinnie it was noted that every single person that passed us was on a bike, wussies!

The bothy at Culra is a great place to stop for lunch if you're passing. With several rooms and a couple of wood burning stoves, as well as a huge shovel to bury your leavings, you couldn't ask for more. The service wasn't brilliant though - still you can't have everything. It was a roof over our heads and respite from the inclement conditions. Train in the wet and hope for the dry, is my motto and I propounded it several times on the long walk out until threats of physical violence shut me up.

Horsepower to Pedal Power

An unfortunate ruling in the Maggie's handbook means that Colum's 650cc engine isn't permitted for the cycling stage and so more traditional methods have needed to be employed:

His top speed of 17 -18 mph (ed: yeah right!) is a little disappointing and refuelling is required every twenty-five minutes. Saving grace is that the tax and insurance is pretty low at the moment (thanks Gordon). Citizens of Glasgow be warned that the orange and blue menace is at large - keep off the footpaths, cycle paths, roads, parks and ground floors of the public buildings.

After two weeks of strenuous gallivanting around Canada, Colum returned to Glasgow and, while still not quite adjusted to GMT, travelled up to Inverness for a spot of training.

After getting the blisters warmed up on the Saturday with an eight mile, pre-rugby stroll we headed out for the hills of Glen Affric on the Sunday. Spring may have been prodding the crocuses (or crocii I suppose) into action down in the glen but it was all winter in the mountains. We refreshed the all important ice-axe braking on a likely patch of snow as we headed up An Tudair. Evidently I need a spot more practice because when I did slip on a small slope later in the day my combination of shrieking, performing an ice-resiliency test with my gonads and hurling my axe away into a drift of snow did nothing to convince Colum that I actually know what I'm doing in the winter hills!

Nevertheless we safely made our way off Mam Sodhail and began a weary decent through snow and bog to the car park that seemed to have slyly moved a couple of miles further East than where we left it that morning.

Running Man

I think it was Einstein who said something about the definition of madness being doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. He may well have been talking about jogging. I’ve been doing it for months now, with the expectation of some improvement but I’m still just as rubbish as when I started.

Admittedly my warm-down has progressed from thrashing around on the floor like a beached porpoise and trying not to vomit to propping myself up against a wall and cursing heavily. The run itself, however, still consists of limping along with the sort of graceless movement that you might associate with a man who has just taken a cricket ball in the sensitives, while being drenched by rain, hail or snow.

Still, it must be doing me some good; so in the words of a wiser man than I, ‘jog on!’

Abominable Snowmen

Not deterred by the tales of blisters the size of Ostrich eggs, chaffing that would make your eyes water and the prospect of moving oneself from the West Coast of Scotland to the East Coast in only one day Colum has bravely (ed: foolishly) joined me for this year's Bike & Hike.

Maggie's is a really great charity, you can check out what they do on their website http://www.maggiescentres.org/maggies/maggiescentres/home/about/newintroduction.html. Maggie's rely on donations and fundraising and you can sponsor us at http://www.justgiving.com/mikeandcolum-monster and any donation, big or small, is very welcome.

Training started in earnest last weekend as we struggled through waist deep snow in Glen Affric:



Great exercise for the legs but also a little bit like trying to stumble home when you're the wrong side of a couple of Guinness too many. Still Colum seemed happy:

Let's hope that there's a bit less snow for May 2nd!