Getting fit for HMI

My love for mountains made me sign up for the basic mountaineering course at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling. I signed up for it in May 2015 and course start date was in Oct 2015. Why HMI? Two reasons - one I didn't qualify for NIM's age limit criterion and second lots of blogs suggested to do Basic course from HMI and Advanced course from NIM.

I got accepted by June and was pretty excited about the course but all the blogs that I had read talked about the tough trek that one has to undertake to reach the HMI base camp in Sikkim. So I knew that I had to get strong to lift 12 kilos on my back and build endurance to climb 8000 plus ft in just 4 days. The challenge though was that in May itself I had a serious flare up of fibromyalgia and my fitness levels had actually dropped as I wasn't able to work out as hard as before. On top of that all the vacations and work travel had increased my weight by 8 kilos...double whammy!!! 

So here I was, in pain and not at my fittest and thinking of joining a basic mountaineering course at HMI...I was nuts! But as luck would have it, I heard about this fitness place near my residence that used sports conditioning, boxing, Muay Thai and CrossFit for building fitness. I was hooked after the trial class and I signed up with them. I liked the variety they offered and slowly my endurance started to build up again. On their suggestion, I would run 3 to 5 km before the class as warm up and added 20-30 minutes strength training on a regular basis. 

In addition I also started climbing 14 floors of my building (280 stairs) with 9 kilo backpack (10 times each instance) twice a week. I also did the loaded backpack hike at Nandi hills just before I left for the course and that told me that I have a shot at it. And that's how I finally landed at Bagdogra Airport on a hot afternoon of 18 Oct 2015. 

I paid for prepaid taxi and got ready for the 3 hour long ride to Darjeeling. Since it was Sunday, the traffic wasn't too bad and as we got closer to Darjeeling the weather cooled down and it felt as if we were driving through the clouds. The steam engine on the narrow gauge train took me back to my childhood...the start felt very promising - quite misleading I must say!

The taxi dropped me at the main gate as outside vehicles are not allowed inside and now I was stuck with a 15 kg unwieldy duffel that needed to be carried up a long steep slope to reach the institute building. Couple of advanced course guys saw me struggling with it and one of them decided to give me a hand with the bag. It was quite a hike to the main building and I was sweating by the time I got there - partly because I had gained 6000 ft in matter of hours and my lungs were still getting adjusted to thinner air. 

Little did I know all that for the next 8 days I would be doing much more at this altitude of 7000 ft than walk up this slope with a duffel bag!