Arrived in Camp: - Christ all frickin’ mighty. This place is so mind blowing and so gorgeous, it’s a trip to just sit outside with my Tenties and eat food and feel the heat and the wind and the altitude. 

Departing 12h30 tomorrow to get to T5 at Heathrow and then on to Santiago, Calama and finally San Pedro de Atacama. 

Taken the last two years to get here; the desktop countdown app can be deleted or archived; I can stop obsessively waiting for updates from the RTP site / team / youtube channel and can hopefully reduce my running tech-porn shopping down to a more sustainable level. 

I'm very lucky to have the kind of family and networks around me that support and motivate me to do this - so thank you to you all.

See you in Santiago Mrs S - xxx C

So, it's about 25 days to go until we depart for Santiago; it's 6 days until I shut down for two months as a 'sabbatical' to clear the decks to participate in Atacama 2023 and things that occur to me that I wasn't quite thinking of when I set this all in motion:

- LATAM do like to change flight times - a lot - and seldom with my best interests at heart;

- Training fatigue - bored of training now - want to just go give this thing a full go and get to experience the whole gamut of heat, altitude, sand, camp-life and so on;

- Packing - was never the best at that - so getting everything into the backpack is still a work in progress - bits can hang off and I'm sure that will be fine;

- Better to know less? Made the mistake of talking electrolytes to a couple of smart people who wanted to know what rate I deplete magnesium at - terminated that convo pretty quickly as if that's required information, then I'm going to have a wonderful time lurching from ignorance to understanding; and

- I think I'm as fit as I can be, given the work done to date - but will it be enough? Really don't want to blow up and join the DNF squad (although that's still entirely possible and maybe even likely) given the lack of any real experience in these things. 

I hope the first cold beer in San Pedro will be as sweet as I think it will be. Look forward to meeting the other 120-or so nutters doing this thing and coming out the other side. 

Wheeee!

C