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Don't Panic - Just Pack!

David Campbell / 07.04.2005

So here we are, midnight on the night before we fly out to Morocco. I tried to get to sleep earlier, but lay there sure I was keeping my girlfriend awake. We have spent the last 3 days assembling the "last bits and bobs" and refining out kit, food and packing. Last bits and bobs?!? I have been waking up at 5:30 every morning (trust me this is very unusual) out of panic about the sheer volume of things that we still have to do!! Then finishing typically late. I think I'm already exhausted!

Monday was figuring out exactly what we had managed to accumulate and trying to get some semblance of order into what we were doing. Fortunately I have an unhealthy fascination with spreadsheets, so a few hours later I had a mammoth sheet that detailed every proposed calorie, gram of protein, carb and fat, quantities and total weight of everything that we might need to take.

Tuesday was spent shopping, including raiding every chemist in London for their Mefix, a tape that is great at preventing and dealing with blisters .... in our packing today, it turns out that 90 linear meters would have had us both looking like mummies for the week and going very hungry! In Muji we were quizzed by the bemused shop assistant about why we were sat on the floor surrounded by a number of their small bottles and containers with our laptop open as we tried to figure out what would hold everything for the week.

Food to Go

Today we sat around deliberating every gram, the merit of everything v’s everything else and have managed to get our packs down to a respectable 12.5kg - still an awful lot to try to run with! The area that we may still be heavy on is food ... we currently have about 3-3,500 calories a day, an amount that a lot of competitors would probably laugh at.

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