Katy Willings' Mongol Derby blog: a life in numbers

Former international pony dressage rider Katy Willings’ latest update on her progress training for the Mongol Derby

Training sessions with Bruno: 2. He has been a bit kinder this week; it has got to the stage where, as I pick up my kit bag and tramp across Trafalgar Square to the gym, I start getting phantom pains in my back and limbs as my body realizes what it’s in for. I told him this. He did a little laugh, and made me do my favourite exercise – standing on upturned Bosu ball dragging heavy cable-weight across my body from ankle height to shoulder height. The fun part of this one is that you end up kissing your own bicep as you move the weight through its arc past your face. Simple things… It is getting to the stage now where what I cannot do on a Swiss ball isn’t worth doing. We have also established that I ought to consider riding days as contributing towards my training diary – in which case I had not had a day off for about twelve days as of Monday. I dutifully took Tuesday off…

Items of essential kit begged, borrowed, stolen: 4. It’s been a very productive week on the kit front actually. My bleatings of financial ruin have yielded some excellent freebies from friends who are also in the habit of doing silly adventures and therefore have accumulated some of the high tech kit I will be needing. I now have a tent, courtesy of Nik Cook – journalistic guru, massive hard nut and one-time slave driver round the Helly Hansen Adventure Race, in the bleak midwinter, all for a double page spread in 220 Triathlon Magazine (because pain is temporary, glory is permanent).

I also have a ground mat called a Thermarest which will apparently inflate and insulate me from the ground. I think I’ll need to practice deflating it again, without scaring the horses, well in advance. In fact, Mum has proposed staging a “Time Katy erecting tent whilst holding horse on leading rein” competition at home, possibly while setting the whippet on me in an attempt to have authentic marauding dogs in the mix too. I may also be able to get my hands on a sleeping bag which has already survived the Marathon des Sables, wrapped around my attractive friend, Fit Duncan From Queens, or FDFQ. This is a cheering prospect. He’s now a Ted Baker model as well as a general fittie, and having not seen him since we left Oxford five years ago I bumped into him at the gym on Monday and inevitably got talking about the Derby. This was the upshot.

Assets sold: 1. I am selling my car, it’s official. I am slightly embarrassed to say that I produced an Excel model to help me make this decision, and realized that unless I placed an outlandish “convenience premium” of about £50 on each journey, the car is bleeding me dry. Especially given my penchant for attracting parking tickets and speeding fines (appeals to Lambeth Council Parking Unit this month: 2. Appeals won: 0).

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