Keeping the Ball Rolling

I know: the title is dated and cliched, but I couldn't think of anything more appropriate to describe recent events.

As you're aware, and due to injury, Anita has withdrawn from the Last Two Degrees trip. I wish her well and sincerely hope she recovers soon and starts planning and training for future events.

In the meantime, my training pushes on. Yesterday, 17th January 2016, the weather turned and some long awaited snow finally arrived. Like Scott, Shackleton, Fiennes, etc, I squealed like a girl and dashed out into the garden. Imagine my surprise when I found only a couple of inches of snow and not a knee deep coating extending out to the horizon.

Looking to the hills, I caught sight of the snow-capped domes beckoning me. Again, the covering was simply not of a sufficient depth to support skis and pulk.

No worries, I loaded up my trusty tyres and hit the trails, hard!

Snow, snow and more snow. Oh, and a couple of guys wrapped in mountaineering gear and commenting how unusual it was to see someone pulling tyres through the woods. Yeah, that was one of the few moments when I've been left speechless. One of them even took a photo of me, no doubt to entertain, or terrify, his friends and family!

Anyway, here's a few shots from the training session.

Enjoy.

Hardest thing I've had to do

This is the hardest thing I have had to do.  But I'm going to have to withdraw from the North Pole trek.  Unfortunately my knees have decided that they weren't up for the job, and to be truthful I have been carrying an injury hoping that they would hold up. But they gave up the ghost on the last tyre drag I did in Jebel Ali and have been getting worse and worse.

I finally went to the doc yesterday in the UK, as I'm on leave, and he has said that I have to go and see a specialist up in London as there is some major tendon damage going on there that would need a specialist in sports injury to rectify, and that the initial injury should have recovered by now anyway.

I am so gutted. I had to do a lot of thinking about this - as just take some painkillers and man up but, the doc put it in perspective that I could do the North Pole this year, and work through the pain, but I probably wouldn't be able to do anything after that, as I would have permanently damaged my knees. So I'm sorry guys I'm bowing out and handing this blog over to James.

Anita x