We're at the end of the second month of training…

As I said previously, Multi-Day hikes are essential for gear assessment and trimming. This month's multi-day hike was more about celebrations (wedding), and the beginning of Lent gave a completely different colour to the season (not just liturgically).

Our Classification of Training Walks

• Short ¼ Day walks: from ½ to 2 hours – often squeezed in at the end of the day.
• Medium ½ Day walks: ˜4 hours in length, either before or after lunch; mostly on a weekend.
• Full Day walk: Anything longer than 4 hours and requiring a lunch break; always on a weekend.
• Multi-Day walk: Overnight and requiring camping; we'll need to slot some of these in for testing our new gear.

Training Walks

This month was dominated by our Multi-day hike down to Jenolan Caves for our wedding anniversary. Having such a significant walk in the month seemed to reduce the regularity of the other smaller walks somewhat. We've also been dipping into the Fun Things to do on a Training Walk You've Done a Thousand Times file to make things interesting. Some days we just don't have the intestinal fortitude to bash out the kilometres and weight-bearing for a training walk…

Walk	Type	Count	Length (km)	Ascent (m)	Descent (m)	Duration (h:m)
Lawson Loop	¼ Day	9	4.035	100	101	0:44
Turtle Rock Loop	¼ Day	3	3.240	153	153	0:50
Furber Steps - Giants Stairs Loop	¼ Day	2	6.226	375	374	1:44
Turtle Rock Figure 8	¼ Day	1	7.287	347	347	1:55
Mt Hay - Butterbox Point Loop	½ Day	1	5.192	238	237	1:35
Overcliff-Undercliff Shortcut Loop	¼ Day	1	4.210	170	168	1:05
Fern Bower - Dardanelles Pass - Ruined Castle Return	Full Day	1	18.365	2,113	2,126	8:11
Empire Pass - Echo Bluff Loop	¼ Day	1	6.897	285	281	1:59
FredericaFalls-QueensRd-EmpirePass Loop	¼ Day	1	9.780	447	447	2:44
Tom Hunter Park - Lucinda Avenue Return	¼ Day	1	4.278	241	246	1:36
Echo Bluff Loop	¼ Day	1	5.410	224	239	2:11
Furber Steps - Return	¼ Day	2	3.144	1.97	200	0:40
Giant Stairs to Furber Steps	¼ Day	1	4.523	287	307	1:10
Six Foot Track	Multi-Day	1	45.389	1,653	1,912	14:14

Walks per Week

The aim is to eventually get to around the same weekly values as what we'll be actually doing on the walk, for comparison our first week's totals are (see Version 7 in weeks):

Hours	Length (km)	Max kg	Ascend (m)	Descend (m)
49	136	17.69	2,425	2,314

The first week of the Heysen is probably the most critical, as our track fitness will be kicking in after that (Sandi generally laughs when I say things like that…). Also, it will be near impossible to clock up that number of kilometres, as we don't have all that free time just for training. But it will be interesting to see how close we get. The most important targets, in my mind, is the weight and the ascent & descent: If we can get close to those averages I'll feel a little more comfortable.