The Art of Walking

Most runners have a motto of "must go faster". Speed is king. Every time I take part in a race the first question asked of me afterwards is "what was your time" and whilst I'm not an elite or even competitive runner, there is a part of me that always wants to beat my last race time. I even had a dream last night that I shaved 20 minutes off my half marathon pb.

However, due to a niggling injury I decided to be sensible and walk the latest in a long line of races. The Druid challenge is an 84 mile, three day event which starts at Ivinghoe Beacon, along the Ridgeway and finishes at Overton Hill and I have to say, a pretty spectacular route. Rolling hills, autumn leaves and mud, lots and lots of mud.

I thought (maybe stupidly) that walking would be easier than running. But it turns out that walking that sort of distance presents a whole new set of issues. For example, I would normally spend around six hours completing each day, but walking being a much slower form of locomotion, meant I was on my feet for up to nine hours each day and those extra few hours felt like an eternity for my poor feet. This also had the knock on effect of less rest as I started earlier and finished later than everone else.

On the first day we were still walking when darkness fell, a great time to discover my head torch only had one working bulb out of three. After a quick toilet stop behind a bush I couldn't see the others up ahead and I started convincing myself there was an army of axe murders lurking behind every tree. My poor torch barely illuminated the ground in front of me, it certainly didn't have the power to pick out the faces of potentially scary people. Scared silly, I ran to catch up with the others, only managing to scare them as well. Sorry guys.

The other major difference when walking is the extra food I seemed to need. When running, an hour might pass between check points. When walking this might be up to three hours and I was starving by the time I reached each stop. I'd stuff myself with sausage rolls, chocolate, jelly sweets and mars bars. Towards the end of the race I'd even leave each checkpoint with a cup filled with sweets to keep me going along the way. Unfortunately this method of carrying food wasn't fool proof as I found out to my peril. A little after the checkpoint I was faced with a huge muddy puddle and instead of walking around it, I decided in my wisdom to jump over it. Clutching tightly onto my sweet cup I leapt gracefully (cough) into the air and as I came down on the other side my precious fuel went flying, landing in the puddle and sinking into the mud, never to be seen again. Gutted.

Also, for the first time ever, due to the extra time I spent walking and the fact I was pretty wet and muddy for three days solid my poor little tootsies were a bit worse for wear by the time I crossed the finish line. They were so swollen and battered I had to wear my slippers to travel home in as no other shoes would fit. Imagine a limping, slow moving woman making her way through the busy Victoria train station, wearing slippers, carrying a huge 50 litre ruck sack and proudly wearing a medal round her neck and you can imagine the bemused looks I received from wary londoners and endless tourists. Walking through Brighton train station however, no one even glanced my way. I love Brighton.

One of the definite up sides to walking is it's a lot easier to stay in a group and chat along the way. I ended up spending the weekend with some amazing people, Rob, Swampy, Ian and Mark, oh and the bog pigs (I'll leave you to use your imagination but a diet of high carbs resulted in some windy times). This sociable aspect of walking definitely trumps (excuse the pun) all the down sides and I definitely plan to do a lot more walking as part of my training for the toughest footrace on Earth.


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I'm running the MdS to support the British Heart Foundation. Please take a moment to visit my sponsorship page and donate whatever you can afford. Many, many thanks
www.justgiving.com/lauranicholls2013

Sand, Sand and More Sand?

Firstly, apologies for the lack of blogs during December.  Due to an injury my mileage was down to zero, along with my motivation.  So to get me back into the right frame of mind I thought I'd search the internet for pictures of previous races and here's the result.

These two photo's represent for me and I guess many others, what the desert is like.  Rolling dunes going on for miles and miles, orange sands, blue skies and not a tree or bush in sight. In fact, take away the thousand or so nut-case runners and it looks like you'd struggle to find a single living creature.  However....

Camel spiders are not actually spiders but apparently more closely related to the scorpion family.  When the sun comes up in the morning, these lovely creatures scuttle for shade which you can imagine is relatively scarce, unless of course it's MdS week and all of a sudden there are lots of lovely shady tents, if you're prepared to share with 8 smelly runners.

From a bit more research I also found that the more likely terrain is going to be a rocky, uneven surface which is going to make it very difficult to run without twisting an ankle, tripping or stubbing a toe. In fact smooth rolling dunes only make up about 20% of the race surface, which in some ways is good, as running in sand goes a bit like this, two steps up, one slide down, two steps up, one slide down, one step up, one slide down, one lie down, repeat.

Just to make this extreme endurance race a little more difficult the race organisers quite often add a little extra something to make sure competitors sample all the delights of the desert.  Mountains (jebels) often feature along the course.  It has been reported that in 2013 we will climb three jebels in one day.  This makes me tired just thinking about it, I guess I better start working off all that Christmas excess.

Obviously, the result of all this running on such uneven ground is some very sore feet.  The heat alone makes most peoples feet swell up by two sizes.  There's not much I can say about these pictures except, ouch!

Three months to go until the start of the race and I've never felt so excited, nervous, hopeful, doubtful, enthusiastic, apprehensive, fired up and terrified, all at the same time.


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I'm running the MdS to support the British Heart Foundation. Please take a moment to visit my sponsorship page and donate whatever you can afford. Many, many thanks
www.justgiving.com/lauranicholls2013