As a self-confessed geek, I’m not much of an outdoors or exercise person. I do take short walks around the neighborhood with my wife everyday so that Spidey can exercise and staying in general good shape is never a bad thing, but that’s as much exercise as I’m willing to put time and effort towards. Recently, however, we’ve been kicking around the idea of actually attempting to climb Mount Kinabalu, which as all Malaysians know is the tallest peak in Southeast Asia. We don’t have a set date yet, but it looks like it’s going to be a family affair with lots of people and generally planned for early next year.

I have no illusions about it being easy. Sure, it’s not mountaineering with rope and pitons, but even fit and sportive people generally claim that getting to the peak is an exhausting and arduous ordeal. This means we’re going to have to put in some regular training and that in turn means going to the Bukit Padang recreational area to climb the hills there. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but even less than 20 minutes of effort is pretty hard on you given how steep it is and how many steps you need to climb.

We originally planned on going twice a week, once on Sunday and again on Wednesday, but we’ve found that the traffic in Kota Kinabalu gets too bad around rush hours to make that feasible. So we’ve decided to go only on Sundays for leg muscle training and jog around in our neighborhood as endurance training. We still have quite some time to prepare so I’m not unduly worried, but given how punishing even 20 minutes at Bukit Padang can be, I have a newfound respect for the people who manage to complete the two-day climb up to th peak of Mount Kinabalu!