Climb Against Crime

94.7 Highveld Stereo

admin — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:02:06 +0000

TRAINING HIKE TO CATHEDRAL PEAK

admin — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:15:05 +0000

Thanks for your comments Andre and Willem - keep commenting - keep talking -and with the assistance of people like you we will get the word out and get the job done. Much of the way we have tried to angle our view of crime has been, especially on my part, as a result of the movie, Tsotsi. Every South African should see it. Obviously it is a classic example of movie making at its absolute best. One of the most difficult things to achieve is to lead your audience to feel empathy with the antagonist. The crime committed is horrific, unforgiveable, inconceivable. I literally shudder with horror, as a mother, imagining my baby being driven away with by a cruel faced bastard and then on top of it, being shot and left paralized. But in the movie we are then taken into the life and heart of this young man and we see a pattern that evolves into what would logically seem, under the circumstances, the only route to follow - that of crime. First, crime to survive and then crime to live comfortably followed on by the inevitable - crime for the sake of greed. By then it would almost seem too late. The young boy’s mind has been cast in criminal stone and the only solution that society can offer is to catch him and kill him or catch him and lock him up. Our climb is very much a statement against the seeds of crime. We would like to believe that we are intersepting that young boy or girl at a stage where their minds can still change direction and move forward in a positive direction for the sake of themselves and the sake of humankind on the whole. We will shortly have all the details of the proposed Sports Centre for the Cosmos City High School posted on our website. We would like to appeal to anyone who is able to assist with contributions of either money and/or equipment, sports gear, time or expertise. Another angle we would like to look at is the possiblity of setting up adult education classes from the School/Sports Centre which would serve the greater Cosmos City community. If there is anyone that has any ideas or suggestions with regard to this please contact us.

As far as the training goes, we’ve bought our 70l K-Way back packs and today we start treading the treadmill with backpack on back! Brendan, our trainer at the Lonehill Sports Clinic, has instructed us to also wear our hiking boots, which should be fun. It will add a whole new dimension to leg lifts. We’ve taken a very firm decision that our training hike to Cathedral Peak on the 18th September will go ahead without the reservation at the gloriously comfortable hotel. We’re going to arrive on Wednesday afternoon and then hike up to Sheppards Cave, which is an approximate 2/3 hour hike, and spend the night there - just to get some practice sleeping on rock solid floors, cooking dinner on little gas cooker’s and generally just sampling the crisp Drakensberg night air. So forward we climb - onward and upward (who said that?) We’ll climb to the top of Cathedral Peak and get back in time to depart again for Johannesburg. Cathedral Peak will be our first climb on the 5 day climb so we’ll get a good feel for how DAY 1 will go - relieves a little of the Day 1 angst I would assume. From the summit of Cathedral we’ll be able to glance our eyes across at our day 2 to day 5 peaks, being Outer Horn, The Mitre, The Cockade and Cleft Peak. Oh yes, and we also have to try and fit in an abseil or two for the ladies who haven’t yet attempted the exercise - just so that they don’t suddenly get cold feet at the top of the Mitre when the only way down is one or two abseils down beautiful horizontal rock faces. Lorraine never realised that menopause would be such fun. But she’s game for everything and I’m sure she’ll cope perfectly well on the abseil with the assistance of a few therapeutic expletives that assist us all in times of extreme pressure and difficulty.

BOOT CAMP WELL UNDERWAY

admin — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:17:10 +0000

Welcome to our Climb Against Crime website. The purpose of our drive is a slight diversion on the conventional way that crime is viewed. The new and very successful Primedia initiative “Crimeline”has a byline which says “Putting criminals behind bars where they belong”, and quite rightly so, however, we have approached the Crime dilemma from a different angle; Crime breeds in a place where there is no opportunity, education or recreation. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of human needs, the very base level consists of breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis (Hey, I had to look this up! It means, quoted verbatim, ’The process by which the body reacts to changes in order to keep conditions inside the body, i.e. termperature, the same.’) and finally, excretion.) Needless to say, we have pitched our intention to fill a need at the next three levels of SAFETY, ’security of employement’, BELONGING, ‘being part of a team, sport, community’and ESTEEM, ‘Confidence and achievement in gaining education and higher learning’. All these factors contribute immensely over time to eliminating the notoriously easy option of CRIME.

As far as our personal Boot Camp is going, well, it certainly is cooking ahead. We’ve been at it now for 4 weeks and although, personally, I’ve not lost much of the 12kg I was instructed to lose, I’ve lost 2kg and hopefully put on about 2kg in muscle tone. If my maths is right and muscle weighs twice as much as fat then my total weight loss excluding the weight of the muscle I’ve built should add up to 6 kg. I’d like to believe this anyway. The other girls have all lost a couple of kgs and are certainly punching the punch bag with a lot more gusto, lunging a lot deeper, running a lot longer and generally looking a lot fitter and firmer. Nice hey? As we count down the final 4.5 weeks to our climb we realise that we have taken on an extraordinary challenge and the nerves are a little frazzled. It’s one thing to walk 43kms in 5 days, which on the road or beach is an average 8.5kms per day but in the mountains you can double that distance because you’re climbing upward most of the time over rocks, boulders and along precarious paths WITH a 10+kg backpack on your back. Well, what the hell, lets CLIMB THE TALK! Keep those bodies pumping and keep those sponsors coming in. Viva a safe South Africa!!