Apologies for not writing earlier but I have been quite busy with work and also have family visiting.

Another question I have gotten asked a lot recently is what I am doing in order to be fit and ready for the trek up the mountain.  My wife’s bestfriend went through a list of potential  nightmare scenarios of what could happen to me during the climb and this ensured that my wife has now become one of the best endurance trainers in the world!  Her support and my son’s have been great during all of this time. Mateo’s role in a part of the regime has really stood out! (please see below)


I have always considered myself to be fit for my age and a bit self conscious about not looking like a lot of men my age: fat!  The fact that my father was a professional football player and was always fitter than I am made sure that exercising was always part of my life. Even today when I am a bit stressed out my wife kindly suggests that I go for a run or a swim in order to  let off some steam. Sorry I digress, back to the training.

I made the decision to do the trek on April 1st basically 9 weeks before the start. Given that I am close to 35 and have not lived in high altitude for almost ten years I knew I needed to make sure I was more than fit enough. When I was younger there really was no need to look for a specific training regime. The fact that on weekends I would normally be playing three football matches put pay to that. But now that I have to schedule the time I am going to work out so things have changed!

So how do you train for trekking and climbing a mountain?  Google must surely have the answer, so off I went to search for : altitude training. Sure enough I very soon started realizing that I need to increase my endurance to long treks and also get my lungs ready to take in less oxygen and burn up to three times more fat than my body usually does.  In many ways it is very similar to training for a marathon. One thing that stood out was that all the training in the world would not work if I did not have the right approach to nutrition. Kinda makes sense and in my engineering mind the perfect analogy came to me: “No use running a Ferrari engine on Diesel”.  So after a good two hours on the web and also talking to other trekkers and friends here is the training schedule I designed:

Day 1: Swim 1 kilometer. Swimming is great to increase your lung capacity
Day 2: 40 min Weights routine.  Perfect as I don’t like making funny faces in front of mirrors.
Day 3: Stairway to Heaven. For 40 minutes I go and down the stairs of the building I live in.  After the first weeks I knew I needed to carry some weight so Mateo kindly decided to help.

Day 4. Swim 1 Kilometer

Day 5. Cycle. I decide not to drive and cycle where I need to go.

Day 6. Stairway to Heaven

Day 7. Rest.  You always need to rest!

So there it was, the plan that was going to make climbing that mountain a piece of cake. With energy at full levels I decided to start with Stairway to Heaven, doing 30 minutes full out.  Good shape? Yeah right. I finished the 30 minutes almost crawling up the stairs and was not able to walk for the next three days!! The positive of all of this? I had had knee surgery a year ago and the only part of my legs that was not in sheer agony was my left knee!!!

After the fourth day, I was able to move properly again and started training much better and was progressively getting fitter. Almost a month into my training and I decided that my right big toe needed to meet a bollard on a station full on!! On April 28th I broke my toe!!


I was running late for a train I needed to catch and was upset after having a very heated discussion with a train station attendant. I was still fuming about it when I saw my train was due to leave. I started running only not to notice a bollard in front of my left foot which I hit straight on!  I limped to the train and started feeling my toe get bigger and bigger. The ice I got did not help and I very soon realized that something was not right with it. I was distraught.  I had started working on the campaign with the people of Conexion Colombia, had chosen also to work with the JFGE foundation and now I break my toe. Toes and anything to do with feet is quite important when you are going to be walking 6 to 8 hours a day for 11 days. I had sabotaged myself!

The next day I went to the hospital here in London and after waiting close to 3 hours I finally got it x-rayed and found out that although it was broken, it had not damaged the joint and that the bone had not displaced so if I was very careful I would be able to get back to walking normally in 2 to 3 weeks and would then continue to train.

So during the last three weeks I have not been able to do my Stairway to Heaven routine (thank God!) but I have been able to swim and do the weights. I am walking normally now and although I sometimes feel a bit of unease in the toe I now have the all clear to get back into proper training. I will be doing the STH routine over the weekend so will let you know how it goes!

Once again thanks for reading and for donating!!!

Andrés
 

Summit Day minus 32 days

So let me cut to the chase and answer the why question from the beginning. Why am I training and getting ready to spend 9 days in the Caucasus attempting to summit Europe’s highest peak: Mount Elbrus? Before I give you my reasons rest assured you are not the only one thinking about it.  A good friend of mine said that it was a great way to tackle mid life crisis early. “Better a mountain than an insane monthly payment on a Ferrari”. Another one said: “So you’re trying to prove that you are still young”, or the best one from yet another friend that said, speaking with a wild surfer accent: “Cause it’s there dude”.

Whilst there maybe a bit of truth in all of the above, the real reasons, there are three, are:

1. I miss the mountains. For that I can only blame Bogotá, the city of my birth and most of my life before I emigrated to Europe. Living at 2,600 mts of altitude in a mountainous plateau surrounded by yet more mountains to the east made me not only get accustomed to them but also enjoy exploring them.  I remember the Sunday challenge.  My father and I would wake up early and race up the mountains to watch the sunrise and if we were lucky and the sky was clear, see the snow capped peaks of The Ruiz Volcano as the whole city woke up. Sitting at the top with the San Rafael water reserve behind us and Bogotá in front of us we would wait for the first rays of sunlight that would hit our backs and then start shining over the city. The peace I felt in those moments is pretty indescribable. You see, mountains have that effect on me; they make me slow down, relax and concentrate my mind on just being in the moment, in the climb. After 10 years in mountain less London I feel it’s time to go back to the mountains and call back all those feelings.
2. I love a challenge. This might be the midlife crisis aspect of it all. I will be 35 in July, I have a wife I love very much and a 16 month old hurricane that is transforming our lives by the second and rather than feeling I should slow down I believe that I should be looking for new and exciting challenges. This year I am celebrating 5 years as an entrepreneur and I think that this is my way of giving something back to myself. I freely admit that this journey has been the hardest I’ve ever been on and whilst there have been moments when I have looked back in envy at my corporate friends and their lives, I would not trade all the experience and learnings I have accumulated so far. You see I deeply believe in the capacity of the human being to creating their own reality no matter the actual environment or past programming. I am an optimist and believe that if you want to change your reality, the world will conspire to help you.
3. Helping 157 teenage single moms in Cartagena, Colombia to change their realities by becoming entrepreneurs. This project encapsulates the essence of this challenge. By funding a foundation’s one year program to educate these mothers to be psychologically strong and overcome their present, we can contribute to the rewriting of these women’s’ future so they can build their own sustainable business. I believe this is a “mountain” worth summiting!
   The parallels are evident to me: Whilst I will be in freezing temperatures pushing my body and mind to fight the altitude, inclination and my inner chat telling me to stop, they will be in the sweltering heat of Cartagena fighting with their reality and understanding that unless they accept their inner power and its possibilities they won’t be able to overcome the current situation of being young, uneducated and with children to feed, let alone educate. In the end it is about believing that we can create a different world for ourselves.

Hopefully this will give you an idea of why I am doing this and that my twin goals are to summit Mount Elbrus and raise the US 8,500 required to get the program off the ground and running so that 156 teenage moms whom I have yet to meet also make it to the summit with me.

If you would like to make a donation, please click here

The team at Conexion are currently working on translating their site to English so if you have any queries about donating please click here to read more