Day two: 10'44" per km. Day three: 8'48" per km. It looks like a spectacular adaptation and it is nothing of the sort. Here are both files side by side, the four things that actually explain the gap, and the one number that did genuinely improve.

A baseline taken after you have already adapted is worthless. So on my third morning in Leh, before altitude has had time to change anything, I walked into a lab and had my blood drawn. Haemoglobin 14.25 g/dL, PCV 43.50%, red cell count 5.07. Here is the full starting line, published ahead of the September retest.

I drove from Rishikesh to Leh over two days, then ran for an hour at 3,302 metre the next morning. My blood oxygen read 97%, a sea-level number. My pace was three and a half minutes per kilometre slower than easy. Here is the full file, and why a good oxygen reading is not permission to train.

This is the actual list we send our guests, built from five years of watching what people bring and what they wish they had. Almost everything on it is here because somebody once turned up without it and had a worse month for it.

Most people arrive braced for hunger, and the first surprise of the month is how much food turns up. Cooked vegetarian meals planned around what you trained, why restriction backfires, and where the real difficulty in Indian vegetarian eating actually sits.

The most surprising thing about a good residential day is how unremarkable it looks. No punishing dawn session, no shouting, and most of the day is not training at all. Here is the shape of a day, and more usefully, why each block sits where it does.

Residential fitness programmes in India run from roughly a lakh to well over ten, and almost nobody publishes what the number includes. How the pricing works, where the extra costs hide, and the one question that produces a real total.

Every weight loss camp in India looks identical from the outside. Mountains, a group photo, a promise, a price. Seven questions that sort a serious programme from a nice hotel with a treadmill, in about ten minutes on a phone call. Including our own answers.

Knowing which doctor to see is a skill, and almost nobody is taught it. A plain map of 22 common conditions: who to see first, which specialist handles it, when to escalate, and the signs that mean going to hospital now.