Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Baby Steps @ Bt Timah

The long awaited (or rather long delayed) stairs training began today. Stairs would be a boring cop-out option. Decided to ease into the training at BT instead. Psychologically better. :)

Packed my backpack last night. Time to take things (pack, weights, boots, trekking poles, bottles etc) out of storage, pat off the dust and load up. Happily filled up empty 2L bottles with water and stuffed everything in. Squeezed in a small sleeping bag, my bag of harness & karabiners, and some newspaper (for stuffing deadweight space) for good measure. La-di-da... pack pack pack.

Picked up the pack to weigh. Horrors, nearly fell backwards, could barely lug it! Stood on the scale - more on measuring later - and *18kg*! That was excluding my 2L water bag to be filled during training. Wow, really?! But my mental calculation of the content was not so much. Re-weighed a few times, different machines, same reading. Ok... offloaded 4kg. Much more manageable.

*How to weigh - Don't bother putting the pack on scale. If it stood upright, it would block the scale reading. If it laid horizontal, it would not be balanced properly on the scale (& not fully weighed). Weigh yourself, then weigh again carrying pack, take the difference.

So back to BT with my 16kg pack & poles. Did S-R-J 3 sets.

Summit x3 - the warm-up steps
2:25 min (up)/ 1:57 (down)
2:29/ 1:44
2:31/ 6:40 (incl walk to Rengas)

Rengas x3 - the high steps
4:40 (up)/ 3.58 (down)
4:59/ 4:11
4:42/ 8:04 (incl walk to Jungle Fall)

JF x3 - the 183 steps
4:50 (up)/ 3:42
4:48/ 3:42
5:12/ bye-bye....

There, mission accomplished & got out of BTNR before dark. Lots of monkeys in the car park. Was almost afraid to open my car and pack up, lest they jumped in and snatched things away!

A good start. :) *self-pat*

2 comments:

-ben said...

Ah, so you are one of the people I said "Hi!" to that evening on the stairs. 'Didn't understand the need for long attire though...

PS said...

Hmm, can't be... I wasn't even in longs.