So today’s Wednesday. And it’s June already. Gosh. Time, flies, fun and that sort of thing. On Friday, I fly up to Scotland and on Saturday, it’s LAMMin’ time. It hasn’t, however, all been plain sailing.

The ups and downs of the weather (which is the only reason I can find) have played hell with my immune system. After a week of extremely bad sinusitis and a weeks recovery, I managed to pick up a slight cold and chesty cough. My lungs, fortunately, seem clear although I am still expectorating occasionally. I did manage a run of about 12-15 miles (I daren’t measure it in case it’s considerably less!) on Saturday but it took me quite a while and was comparitively flat compared to this coming weekends terrain.

On Sunday, however, I got a call from Blue (as he shall now be called - he tends to wear blue when we run and I, unsurprisingly, wear black. From henceforth, we shall be known as “Black ‘N Blue”!) who was in the far north of Scotland doing his munro-bagging thing. Apparently, he had pulled a muscle in his groin. Last time he did this he was out of action for 6 weeks and suddenly it was looking like I’d have to find another partner at last minute. Then he dropped himself in it by saying that even so, he’d still manage to do the last days hard walking up a particularly steep munro. Anyway, we agreed to speak later in the week.

It now being later in the week, I’ve just got off the phone with him (I say just, it was actually a couple of hours ago) and we’ve decided to go ahead with it anyway. But we’ve also made a sensible decision (in so much as any decision regarding racing up and down mountains carrying full packs can be considered sensible) and are dropping the next class down which is marginally shorter by about 5k but averages about 500m less in terms of ascents/descents. It also has a slower completion time and is the only course to give an estimated walking time (which is 11 hours which is a lot of walking!) The advantages of this are that we can take it easy if Blue’s strain is playing up or I’m being crap but alternatively, if we feel fine then we could do quite well on the course. As I pointed out, I’d rather take it steady and finish comfortably than push it hard, not enjoy it and get depressed because we can’t finish it. It would be different if we’d completed the OMM back in October but failing two in a row would be disheartening and discouraging.

So, we’re all in and ready to go. More or less. One more kit check and packing tonight and then tomorrow we will finally find out where it’s all going to happen. (Blue concurs with Endie’s guess that it could well be around the Pitlochry area. He’s quite excited by this as there are munros there that he hasn’t been up.)