Over the weekend, my hiking buddy and I registered for the Phoenix Summit Challenge we’ve been training for! The Seven Summit Challenge sold out in half an hour this year, so I was pretty stoked that we got in. But then I got really nervous. Like, bubble guts and everything. We are actually IN this now. Yikes.
The nerves will probably stay with me until I feel more comfortable with every summit we hike. We still haven’t tried the two South Mountain hikes yet. And on Sunday when we hiked Piestewa Peak again, it still kicked our butts. We agreed that we hate that mountain. It’s definitely made for tall people. Some of the boulders we had to get over felt like they were almost to our waists. At least we are both short and suffer equally… that’s what makes us good partners, right?
This little guy was a reminder that we DO have it in us to do such a big thing. There really isn’t much information on training for this kind of Summit Challenge. We can only go by what past participants write about and hope we are kicking our own butts enough to survive the big day. Our plan is to slowly add more hikes to our training, but the heat is too much to do that just yet. We’ll do both South Mountain hikes individually, and then probably get in a few more single mountain hikes through September. Hopefully by then it’ll start cooling off and we can add more summits into the mix. Here are our training days one, two and four. If you remember, training day three was a horrible experience that I’d like to forget, but you can read about it briefly here. If you have any advice, please share! We can use all the help we can get at this point… Happy trails!
