It's taken a while to get to posting this blog, but what with all the walks either at the start or end of the day, it gets a bit busy...
On the 12/13 June we all met up again as a team to do a long night walk and get another feel for what we've let ourselves in for.
The planned distance: 32 miles (i.e. over half the walk)
The planned time: 11pm Friday to 9am Saturday.
We had to sort logistics with the cars so that there was one at the end and one in the middle with extra provisions, dry clothes, safety, etc. We then headed to a start point at Checkpoint 4 and donned the headlamps. First observation - you become a focal point for flies and moths!
The temperature wasn't bad at all - not as cold as expected, especially with a hill or few to keep up the internal heat.
We had not done Checkpoint 4 to 5 before and so doing it in the dark was interesting...on the whole the directions from the map were fine (I think the team sort of trust me now...). We only had one point at which it was very hard to distinguish any track at all in a field, so the compass came out and did its job.
We made good progress and knocked some minutes off the suggested timing (though we were fresh and not several hours in), and we soon began to see some light - the first of dawn was at around 3.30am (if my memory serves well). A beautiful pale blue began to emerge at the skyline, although the sun did not actually rise for a considerable time later.
By this point we were walking over familiar ground - this helps because you know roughly what's coming, but at the same time you have to remember that there's usually more of it than you'd thought! This also applies if going over the same ground within a few minutes - Jules lost his hat after one of the checkpoint stops and had to walk back. Then he dropped his camera whilst Tweeting (I think) and so jogged back! Meanwhile we had a surprise when two dogs came our way at high speed, only to be equally surprised when their owner appeared and I saw that it was 5.45am!
By 8am (we'd been up for hours you lazy lot!?) we had made it back to the "mid-point" car - actually it was just over 20 miles. This had taken us longer than we'd estimated, but when compared to the 24 hour target times, it worked out fine. We had to leave Stevie at the car here as his knee and hamstring were playing up (doing better now). It reminded us of what we needed to look out for in order to stay as a team.
Jules, Cliff and I then moved on to cover two more stages, the first was familiar and the second not. This second stage from Checkpoint 8 - 9 was l-o-n-g. The acquired heat of the day was temporarily held off by a visit to the ice-cream van that was perfectly situated in a car park. The man didn't look or sound like an angel...but then how would I know?
"Just one more incline. No, really Jules. Look at the guide, it's just this one more..." - phrases that became a little waring as I repeatedly uttered them, putting perhaps too much faith in the guide map's contour histogram. To be honest, by this point the tiredness of limbs, growing soreness of feet and heat of the day made even the level parts seem uphill.
But we made it! We even found where we'd left the car some 12 or more hours earlier (meeting up on the outskirts of Lewes wasn't exactly easy the night before). So now it's more training: pushing it, stretching, vaseline(!), running, walking, stretching, cycling and more stretching, generally before anyone sensible is out of bed, or when the day is done and normal people watch telly or go to bed.
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