Oww...

Hello!!! My presence on our lovely blog has been lacking of late and I'm feeling guilty. The truth is it's hard to keep motivated and keep the momentum going, especially when the other members of the team are all in Bristol :-( And with general end of term busy-ness my training slipped which isn't good. I fear the same thing may happen again what with lots of big exams coming up but I can't really let it. Training must continue. So encourage me. I need it. Like Jenni said in her post below - if you see me, tell me I should be running. I may shout at you. But when I go to sleep on July 20th having completed Trailwalker I'll be thankful :-)

Now, on to the main point of this post. Last Friday saw me driving from Coventry and Diana driving from Bristol to meet Jenni for our first training walk along the South Downs Way on Saturday. Andy unfortunately couldn't make it - he was meant to be revising for accountancy exams. Sounds exciting, hehe, hope they go well! Jenni planned a route that finished in Southease and started somewhere that I can't remember the name of, near Steyning. We're not sure of the exact distance (yet), at least 20 miles though.

We had a bit of a reality check the night before about what pace we needed to be walking at. So we set out at a fairly quick pace, even running down some of the downhills. Weirdly, running was a break from walking. Which sounds odd I know, but strangely true. The weather wasn't too bad for most of the walk. Sunny to start with but really really windy along the tops of the hills. And it rained quite a bit near the end too. On the plus side, the South Downs Way is a nice walk. It was quite busy on Saturday too. A lot of (insane) people running along it, some horseriders, some cyclists and other walkers. We wondered how many other Trailwalker people there were. Definitely one group who greeted us with "Are you Gurkha walkers?". And although I took my camera, I was concentrating more on the walking than on the photo taking, so I only got 3 photos and two of them were at the start! But I'll share them here anyway...

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We set ourselves a target time of 5 hours, which gradually got lengthened as our walk continued. It ended up taking us 8 hours altogether, of pretty much non-stop walking. We didn't even stop to eat, we had to eat and walk at the same time (not easy when you have a coronation chicken sandwich and hair blowing in your face!).

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It's weird the different emotions you go through too. At the start it's all good, feeling positive and enthusiastic. But it can really start to drag. You start to wonder if you're ever going to get there and at the end the only thing that kept me going was the fact that I had no choice, I had to get back to the car. I had never been so pleased to see Diana's car either that's for sure! I think a lot of it is to do with preparing mentally for it. Having the stamina to keep going and the will-power. I would quite gladly have stopped at about 10 miles! But hopefully that will improve with more training. It better, since Trailwalker involves us doing three times what we did on Saturday.

As for the 'Oww' title, walking 20 miles non-stop hurts. We moaned. We talked about what didn't hurt instead of what did because there were fewer things to list. I moaned some more. I realised I need new walking boots since my current ones attacked my feet, again. And today everything still hurts. More training is definitely needed, although a few days to recover is definitely needed first.