Walking the Walk

Today we did our first training walk along part of the actual Trailwalker route, from the start at Queen Elizabeth Country Park (henceforth known as QECP) nearly to Checkpoint 2 and back again... 10 miles out and 10 miles back.

For the first time since starting our training we encountered properly hilly terrain! Actually there were two hills in quick succession... very tough on the calf muscles!

The pictures (one from the bottom and one from the top) show the first of them, the steepest and longest of the two... although they definitely don't show just how steep it was, balance-losingly steep in places! All good training!

In general though it was a lovely walk: clear blue sky, beautiful countryside with signs of Spring everywhere, church bells ringing in the nearby village... just perfect.

As we approached the turnaround point we wondered where we would stop and eat, and just at that moment a selection of large tree trunks hove into view off to the side of the track... we really couldn't have planned it better! We stopped for 10 minutes to eat our sarnies and take the weight off our feet then headed back the way we'd come, a small part of my mind thinking about the fact we had to go back over those two hills!

With 5 miles still to go to get back to the car we passed an older gentleman who asked where we were headed. We explained that we'd done 15 miles and were now headed back to QECP. He said "Gosh, what it is to be young!"... which gave us a little extra spring in our step and a chuckle.

So we did 20 miles (route below as usual) in 5 hours and 52 minutes which is an average speed of 3.4 miles per hour... pretty good considering this was our longest training walk and incorporated 4 (2 in each direction) big hills. Very pleased with that. Best of all... NO BLISTERS!!

We learn something new every time we train... today we learned that we need to take even more food and drink... we were both hungry and thirsty by the end.

Today's route.