Monthly update: October 2025

There have been no updates recently because I needed a month to get over my failure to complete the Long Walk on Sep 20. It was generally a horrible experience: it was hot (>30 degrees) which sounds amazing but it wasn’t, actually. I managed to walk about 43km and I threw in the towel. Hiking in this temperature is not enjoyable, my pulse was 150 (on average for the whole hike!) and after 13 hours I didn’t see much point in walking any farther, especially seeing as my stomach refused to cooperate.

I must say I was disappointed but, as usual, there’s a silver lining in every cloud. I think I learnt something from this experience:
First, do I really want to go hiking even in extreme weather conditions?
Second, did I really think I was prepared for a 70km hike if I’d only done a few 30km marches this year? The answer to both questions is sadly a „no”. Next year I will be better prepared BUT I’m not going to even start if the temperature is above 30 degrees. I hate such weather and there’s no changing this.

So, after this hiking debacle, I decided to make some further changes to my training. I bought another bar for my garage so that I can do some benchpressing, squats and deadlifting all in a single training. I keep my weekly schedule of 4 benchpress trainings but I’ve now added 2 trainings where I do a bit of everything. Round 1 looks like this:
10×52 DL
10×72 BP
10×25 SQ

Then I add 1-2kg for round 2, and so on until round 7. The goal is to eventually start all 3 activities with 70kg and add 2kg each round, but I need 2-3 months to get there.
Finally, I’m still doing my general stamina training whenever I have time with crunches and pullovers etc.
Overall I can see some improvement but the weight still refuses to drop below 147kg which means I need to add some cycling. I just have no idea where to find the time for all this.
The new goal would be to lose around 30kg and I have 47 weeks to do this because next year I’m (obviously 😀 ) also taking part in the Long Walk.