Well there are now less than three weeks to go until the trek. I've had a fairly good past couple of week's preparation having now officially got to 90% of my fundraising target, raising £3,612! The last fundraising push was primarily done with a pub quiz up in London, which managed to raise £330 - far more than I had anticipated so I'm really pleased with the result! It was a fantastic night (if you like pub quizzes, of course), with six rounds of questions on various topics such as Arctic Geography and Sport. As pretty much everyone who organised the quiz was Welsh, I'm also both ashamed and proud to say we had managed to work a question involving 'Grandslam' into every round! The prize for winning the quiz was to have the teams drinks tab paid up to £150 as the prize, and the winners really helped massively towards raising such a great total as they put pretty much all of that back into my Red Cross bucket, which was pretty amazing of them. We also had a raffle to round off the night and to include everyone who hadn't done so well in the quiz, and that seemed to go down pretty well, with people winning prizes from vouchers to a meat hamper (my friend's dad is a butcher and donated that one, so a big thank you to him!). Anyway, hopefully everyone had a good time as I really did!

The training has also been going pretty well - which is a good thing considering there's really not long to go now! Talking to other people doing the trek, one thing which I hadn't previously thought of was trying to stay on our feet. This seems pretty simple, but having tried it its more challenging than you would think - oddly enough the place it seems to 'get' me is my ankles. As my day is usually spent sat in front of a computer trying to write essays for university, it generally doesn't involve much simple standing, but as we won't get a chance to rest much on the trek it's something I'm definitely going to start practising.

The rowing has also been playing a part, having achieved quite a nice 10,505m in the last three sessions. Annoyingly with the hot weather I did develop some sort of fluey hay-fever in the last couple of weeks, but having taken lots of Benadryl I soldiered on with the rower, and given that, am quite proud I managed that distance. The first session was a simple 20 minutes at around 2.55/500m in which I managed 3505m....think I went a bit faster than the recommended pace there but never mind!

Next up were 3 lots of 3 minutes at around 2.47 - a little quicker this time. The first set was fairly good with 605m, with the second set just topping it with 606m. The last set was, to be frank, pretty disappointing as I only managed 569m. This week though I have 3 lots of 8 minutes to tackle, and I will fight through that one to get some much better results!

The last set I did was simply rowing 2 sets of 15 minutes at around 2.55/500m, and I did manage to beat my predicted distance of 2500m on both tries. The first I managed 2593m, but it's the second that I was quite proud of with 2627m - a fair bit quicker which is always nice.

Having got over the strange hay-fever / flu that randomly attacked (and also handed in my dissertation, yay!) I'll be on the rower a ridiculous amount for the next week - the fact I'm off to cross the Arctic in under 3 weeks is providing a lot of motivation, so expect some great results in the next blog! I'm also off to walk a Husky soon, which will be really amazing. I've never really met one before, having only seen them briefly while walking my own two dogs, but am hoping to learn a little more about them on the walk, and generally get more accustomed to them. Fingers crossed that a great week of training follows!

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