Training in the Lake District

Perhaps the least favourite part of mountaineering for me is the actual climbing - vertigo being a longstanding friend of mine! Quite fortunately there is not that much actual climbing on most of the expeditions apart from the Carstenz Pyramid. So this week is spent in the Lake District under the expert guidance of Paddy Cave - one of the UK's leading climbers.

We started out doing some normal climbing however this was complicated by the fact that it was raining and that we were wearing winter mountaineering boots rather than rock climbing shoes. We started on a routes that were graded as 'difficult' and then moved onto 'v. diff' routes.

We also practised techniques for upcoming expeditions:

 jumarring; climbing using an ascender

Tyrolean traverse (using a length of rope across a large drop between two high points);and

abseiling.

A lot of fun and we did make some good progress - just hope I can avoid a relapse before the expedition in August.