Milos Nykodym

First time in Uganda | I have for a long period been looking forward to be going on a training camp again. This time in Kapchorwa, Uganda. Cold and windy weather at home in Denmark, so it's great to be able to escape the winter for a bit. Early morning on the 4th of January I left for Uganda, where I will be for 4 weeks together with Ralph Street, Milos Nykodym and Tomas Krivda. They come from the UK and the Czech Republic. I know them from my time in orienteering and have run against them many times before. This is where we will be staying for the next 4 weeks.Long travelThe journey from door to door took us about 30 hours. First by train to Copenhagen and from here with Turkish Airlines to Entebbe/Kampala. En route with stopovers in Istanbul and Kigali. From Entebbe, a 400km drive awaited us. We could thus see a bit of Uganda on the way, but in reality quite tiring after almost a day on the road already, where we really most of all just wanted to get there and find a bed. During our stay we will stay at Home of Friends Guesthouse. Quite a nice place, where the 4 of us will live in a 5-man family hut. The place has a restaurant where we get breakfast and can buy dinner with a reasonably good standard (compared to what you can buy on the street in Kapchorwa). We have a small veranda facing the garden and a nice view of the countryside. Here we also have a gas stove for cooking.First impressions of the placeAfter arrival, we were able to go for a run in daylight. First impression of the area is that it is hilly around Kapchorwa! You can run many different loops, all of them are really cool. If you hate hills, Kapchorwa is not the place for you to go. If you want to run a 10km loop, it's hard to do with less than 250m of climbing. Which I'm quite fine with as my main goal this summer is the World Orienteering Championships in the Swiss Alps. Kapchorwa is located on Mt. Elgon which is 4321m high. Big extinct volcano. At the foot of the mountain there is a gigantic plateau at an altitude of approx. 1100m. We can see this plateau from our camp - not bad. Easy run with the group.Easy training to start the training campThe place is situated 1950m above sea level. So there is not much oxygen in the air for us. Which is also the reason why we have come here - to get some altitude effect. But also some heat. We have about 25-28 degrees a day here and no rain, as January is usually the dry season. The first few days we have taken it relatively easy and only being running at an easy effort to acclimatise to the altitude.I have travelled here with a small injury in one of my glutes. Most likely something muscular. One of the things that provokes the injury the most is high speed. So I found out quite early on in the altitude stay that dropping the faster training helps with the injury. So I will go for a lot of longer and hilly runs. Not something that makes me really fast, but luckily it's only January, and there is a long time until my season really starts. However, I do not think it is such a completely stupid way of training when I wanna gain some basic fitness, and this training helps me to able to tolerate the faster training to come. Watch this to get some impressions of the area around Kapchorwa.

4 days hike in 6 hours | We live on Mt. Elgon, so we got the idea that we should go all the way up to the top! It is Uganda's second highest mountain at 4321m above sea level. The shortest route is 43km with 2600m of ascent - the one we planned to take. Which may not sound that bad, but since we want to do it in a single push without wearing ourselves down too much in our general training program, it's a bit of a challenge. If we were to do the hike from HATC (nearest point from the Kapchorwa side) it would be a 70km run.Mt. Elgon is an extinct volcano from 24 million years ago. Elgon is the largest land-based caldera in the world. The hike up and down the volcano is usually a 4-day hike.Wakagai Peak - highest summit of Mt. Elgon, 4321m above sea level.Long trip to the trail headThe alarm was set for 5:00am. Milos, Tomas and I had a long day ahead of us. The day before we had found a local we could rent a boda boda/motorcycle from. Tomas has a little experience driving these from a trip earlier in Kenya. We managed to drive about 80m before it turned out that the tank was empty. It was still completely dark out, starry sky and Sunday. A bit of a problem that it was a Sunday, because this day people take the day off and go to church. So there were absolutely no people in the street. Some pushing of the boda boda and then the places it went a little downhill we could roll it. We were so lucky that we found someone we could wake up at a gas station in Kapchorwa, who could help us further.Ready for departure - while we could still ride it.Just when we thought everything was running smoothly, we got a flat tire. We had covered about 15km of the total 60km ride. Milos and I jumped off the bike, while Tomas tried to continue with a flat rear tire. After walking for 45min we finally got to Tomas, who had found a person on the roadside near Sipi who could help us change the rear tire. We were incredibly lucky with that, we were convinced that the trip stopped there. And it only cost us only 25k Ugandan shillings. Now we could finally continue. The last third of the trip was not on tarmac. Dirt roads that just got worse and worse! In the end it was almost impossible to get back and forth with the boda boda. It was now 8.45am and we could finally start the ascent - after more than 3 hours on the road.Towards the top via the Sasa TrailThe "run" started from 1720m above sea level, so we were expecting a climb of over 2600m. We all had a small backpack with us, consisting of; some extra clothes, chapatis, bananas, a soda and some water. This was hopefully enough to keep us going all day. We had just over 21km ahead of us towards the summit. For every meter we moved forward there was less oxygen in the air - at sea level there is 20.9% oxygen in the air, while at the top there was 12% oxygen in the air.The first part of the climb was really steep until we reached the jungle. From here it was actually a fairly easy climb and we were able to run part of the way. We had two short breaks along the way to eat something, otherwise we kept going pretty well. After almost 4 hours we reached the top. Pretty wild views from here over a large part of Kenya and Uganda.Pretty nice lake at about 4000 masl.A couple of places we could find some spring from where we could refill our water bottles.The trip homeMt. Elgon is located in a large national park, where you need a permit. And it is mandatory to hire a guide (with a rifle) to accompany the group. A guide will not really be able to run. I only say maybe, that we had a permit and a guide.Spetacular landscape. This is not far from the summit.Not everyone on the mountain was equally impressed with our achievement, so it ended up being a long trip home. But that's another story. The trip in totals: 43.2k 2670m ascent 6h20m (without breaks) 1720m to 4321m elevation Route: Sasa TrailsSee the route on Strava here.