I’m less than a week away from departing, and now I’m in that last-minute scramble to get everything together: Camera battery and spare fully charged? Ample supply of band-aids and Ibuprofin stocked? All my hiking clothes laundered?

Fortunately, one thing I haven’t been leaving until the last minute is my physical condition. I’ve been training for this, to one degree or another, since January, when I started pushing myself to upgrade my workouts (more elliptical time! Higher difficulty level!) and downgrade my eating. The end results look promising.

I’m sixteen pounds lighter than I was at Christmas, and even the “interim pants” I bought in the early spring are really loose.

And in terms of walking fitness? Well, for the last five weeks, I have been doing serious gym workouts on weekdays and then long walks outside on the weekends. This weekend, I did 14 miles on Saturday and 15 miles on Sunday. Aside from cursing the Chicago Triathlon and the way it took over the downtown part of Chicago’s lakefront on Sunday (it was like an obstacle course getting from Navy Pier to the Field Museum), that’s been good restful exercise time. And it’s typical mileage for the weekends in August—about 30 miles total each weekend. I even walked through the torrential rain two Saturdays ago, confirming that even waterproof boots don’t matter in a serious, sustained downpour. But I know I can manage England’s usual light rains with ease.

My legs are strong and lean and pretty defined (not like a runner’s, but not bad…), and my feet have calluses in all the usual places I develop calluses when hiking—the bottoms of my little toes, my big toes, the inner edges of the balls of my feet. I’m hoping this will decrease blistering on the trail.

Now I’m just itching to finish this week and get on my way. The trails await.