20.0.09
Summer Stagger
25 miles from Crafton Green car park, Stansted Mountfitchet. All the loveliness of the winter Stagger - tea loaf, fields of horses, laughs, sprinting muntjac deer, date balls - with extra sunlight. And anyway:
1. long distance walking is instant liposuction
2. these are nice people
3. War, murder, violence, all the hideous futilities and senseless pain of life - none of it impinges on this perfect world. And this is the reason why I am doing the Hundred all over again.
Saturday, 26 September 2009
Wednesday, 16 September 2009
22 hours to Fowlmead
12/13.09.09
The White Cliffs Challenge
54.7 miles within 22 hours
Described as a 'bracing clifftop walk', this was a circular route based on Fowlmead Country Park, built on the site of a former Kent pit near Deal. 22 hours to get out alive. It began mildly, flatly, sunnily - Deal Castle, Walmer Castle, Hawkshill Common, Kingsdown seafront - then carried on with hazardous, heart-pulverising up-and-down zig-zags via Shakespeare Cliff and Round Down to Capel Le Ferne, while the September sun boiled the backs of our necks. We headed inland into the Elham Valley and Bishopsbourne, eastwards over bits of the North Downs Way and finished up lumbering to and fro, lost, across what seemed like the longest ploughed field in Europe, on a wrongly-taken compass bearing. The food was brilliant - hot dogs, green grapes, custard creams, macaroni cheese. I've never seen such an unpolluted night sky, full of stars. Finished in 20.35, so have got qualifier for the Heart of Scotland.
And remember:
1. long distance walking is instant liposuction
2. these are nice people
3. War, murder, violence, all the hideous futilities and senseless pain of life - none of it impinges on this perfect world. And this is the reason why I am doing the Hundred all over again.
The White Cliffs Challenge
54.7 miles within 22 hours
Described as a 'bracing clifftop walk', this was a circular route based on Fowlmead Country Park, built on the site of a former Kent pit near Deal. 22 hours to get out alive. It began mildly, flatly, sunnily - Deal Castle, Walmer Castle, Hawkshill Common, Kingsdown seafront - then carried on with hazardous, heart-pulverising up-and-down zig-zags via Shakespeare Cliff and Round Down to Capel Le Ferne, while the September sun boiled the backs of our necks. We headed inland into the Elham Valley and Bishopsbourne, eastwards over bits of the North Downs Way and finished up lumbering to and fro, lost, across what seemed like the longest ploughed field in Europe, on a wrongly-taken compass bearing. The food was brilliant - hot dogs, green grapes, custard creams, macaroni cheese. I've never seen such an unpolluted night sky, full of stars. Finished in 20.35, so have got qualifier for the Heart of Scotland.
And remember:
1. long distance walking is instant liposuction
2. these are nice people
3. War, murder, violence, all the hideous futilities and senseless pain of life - none of it impinges on this perfect world. And this is the reason why I am doing the Hundred all over again.
Friday, 4 September 2009
28 go mad in Essex
29.08.09.
This wasn't meant to happen. What wasn't? Oh, all the stuff I thought I'd done with. This kind of stuff. Spending August Bank Holiday Saturday trying to find my way out of a field of 7ft-high maize in Essex with people behind me shouting for help and using their emergency whistles. Having been walking since half past four in the morning, with thirty-eight miles done and still another seven to go. Like I said, I thought I'd finished with this stuff. I'd done my Hundred.
So how did I end up here, Week One of training for the 2010 Heart of Scotland? The inevitable story. The 2008 Yoredale was meant to be my first and last Hundred. Then it was going to be ta-ta to the black toenails, the hallucinations of elephants in trees and men's faces in the sky, the blood coming out of my socks, the staggering along filled with more painkillers than Michael Jackson, the slithering up mud gullies in the Surrey hills after midnight. Hallo to road-running, the gym, aerobics, bit of pilates - everything safe, comfortable, controllable. The madness was over. A hundred miles non stop - never again. A bit like Sir Steve Redgrave said when he won the last but one of his Olympic golds, If you ever caught me entering for another Hundred you were invited to take me outside and shoot me.
Unfortunately it didn't work out that way. In May this year I agreed to help out on the 40-mile checkpoint on the 2009 Wessex Hundred. After we'd doled out 482 platefuls of tagliatelli, carted a semi-comatose runner into the body bus, washed up, swept up and packed up, I went back to Alton HQ, slept in the car for the second night in a row and stuck around to watch the last finishers. Pangs set in. Withdrawal symptoms. I wanted it again - the tears, the heartache, the glory, the triumph. And then someone stuck a flyer in my hand. Heart of Scotland Hundred, 2010.
So this is why I’m bashing my way through a field of maize 7ft high following a leader who is nothing more than a fast disappearing white hat, somewhere deep in rural Essex. Basically, entries for next year's Hundred open in October and to qualify for it I need to complete a 50-mile event. There's one on 11 September, The White Cliffs in Kent, and to survive that I need to get in some practice.
The walk I'm on is St Peter’s Way In A Day. 45 miles to be completed before nightfall. It's the flat lands of the Dengie Peninsula, the world beyond Colchester, the bit that starts where the A12 leaves off. It's mostly field paths and tracks and you get little village churches with dumpy spires, windmills, wild plums and sloes in the hedgerows, cattle the colour of dirty vests, horses, pylons joined like skeletal steel paper chains, sea walls, mud flats. We walk through an Essex vineyard - yes, really - and past a field of alpacas, and a field of petrified trees, twisted like wire coat hangers, the relics of a long ago sea flood. There's a slightly spooky, mournful element to some of it. The estuaries of the Blackwater and Crouch are never far away. The sea walls are bleak. You remember history. The Canvey Island floods of 1953, when the North Sea turned lethal one night.
It's not a challenge event but a so-called Group Social Walk. Maps - Landranger 167 (Chelmsford, Harlow & surrounding area) and 168 (Colchester): not strictly necessary because today’s walk has a leader, someone who knows the way, but it’s nice to look at where you’ve come from and where you’re going to. Where we’re going to is St Peter’s, Bradwell on Sea. The route, St Peter's Way, was created nearly a quarter of a century ago by an Essex walker called Freddy Matthews, who was also responsible for the Three Forests Way. They're serious long distance paths, waymarked and named on both the maps. There are 28 of us here today. It’s such a good walk that someone’s come all the way from Bury, Lancs to do it.
15 miles in, at 9 o’clock, we’re in Stock, where we have breakfast beside the cricket pitch. Bacon rolls, fruit cake, tea and coffee. 28 miles done, we stop for lunch on a green outside the Purleigh Bell. I'm suffering by the time we get to 'afternoon tea and snacks' in a layby on the B1021 just outside Steeple but cured by Anadin and Eccles cake. Another 8 miles and we're done. Tea and fruitcake at the finish, outside St Peter's chapel.
The walk is put on every August Bank Holiday by Essex and Herts LDWA. The first St Peter’s Way In A Day was walked 21 years ago. Two of the guys here today were on that one too. And so you get a nice sense of continuity and history.
Besides which:
1. long distance walking is instant liposuction
2. these are nice people
3. War, murder, violence, all the hideous futilities and senseless pain of life - none of it impinges on this perfect world. And this is the reason why I am doing the Hundred all over again.
This wasn't meant to happen. What wasn't? Oh, all the stuff I thought I'd done with. This kind of stuff. Spending August Bank Holiday Saturday trying to find my way out of a field of 7ft-high maize in Essex with people behind me shouting for help and using their emergency whistles. Having been walking since half past four in the morning, with thirty-eight miles done and still another seven to go. Like I said, I thought I'd finished with this stuff. I'd done my Hundred.
So how did I end up here, Week One of training for the 2010 Heart of Scotland? The inevitable story. The 2008 Yoredale was meant to be my first and last Hundred. Then it was going to be ta-ta to the black toenails, the hallucinations of elephants in trees and men's faces in the sky, the blood coming out of my socks, the staggering along filled with more painkillers than Michael Jackson, the slithering up mud gullies in the Surrey hills after midnight. Hallo to road-running, the gym, aerobics, bit of pilates - everything safe, comfortable, controllable. The madness was over. A hundred miles non stop - never again. A bit like Sir Steve Redgrave said when he won the last but one of his Olympic golds, If you ever caught me entering for another Hundred you were invited to take me outside and shoot me.
Unfortunately it didn't work out that way. In May this year I agreed to help out on the 40-mile checkpoint on the 2009 Wessex Hundred. After we'd doled out 482 platefuls of tagliatelli, carted a semi-comatose runner into the body bus, washed up, swept up and packed up, I went back to Alton HQ, slept in the car for the second night in a row and stuck around to watch the last finishers. Pangs set in. Withdrawal symptoms. I wanted it again - the tears, the heartache, the glory, the triumph. And then someone stuck a flyer in my hand. Heart of Scotland Hundred, 2010.
So this is why I’m bashing my way through a field of maize 7ft high following a leader who is nothing more than a fast disappearing white hat, somewhere deep in rural Essex. Basically, entries for next year's Hundred open in October and to qualify for it I need to complete a 50-mile event. There's one on 11 September, The White Cliffs in Kent, and to survive that I need to get in some practice.
The walk I'm on is St Peter’s Way In A Day. 45 miles to be completed before nightfall. It's the flat lands of the Dengie Peninsula, the world beyond Colchester, the bit that starts where the A12 leaves off. It's mostly field paths and tracks and you get little village churches with dumpy spires, windmills, wild plums and sloes in the hedgerows, cattle the colour of dirty vests, horses, pylons joined like skeletal steel paper chains, sea walls, mud flats. We walk through an Essex vineyard - yes, really - and past a field of alpacas, and a field of petrified trees, twisted like wire coat hangers, the relics of a long ago sea flood. There's a slightly spooky, mournful element to some of it. The estuaries of the Blackwater and Crouch are never far away. The sea walls are bleak. You remember history. The Canvey Island floods of 1953, when the North Sea turned lethal one night.
It's not a challenge event but a so-called Group Social Walk. Maps - Landranger 167 (Chelmsford, Harlow & surrounding area) and 168 (Colchester): not strictly necessary because today’s walk has a leader, someone who knows the way, but it’s nice to look at where you’ve come from and where you’re going to. Where we’re going to is St Peter’s, Bradwell on Sea. The route, St Peter's Way, was created nearly a quarter of a century ago by an Essex walker called Freddy Matthews, who was also responsible for the Three Forests Way. They're serious long distance paths, waymarked and named on both the maps. There are 28 of us here today. It’s such a good walk that someone’s come all the way from Bury, Lancs to do it.
15 miles in, at 9 o’clock, we’re in Stock, where we have breakfast beside the cricket pitch. Bacon rolls, fruit cake, tea and coffee. 28 miles done, we stop for lunch on a green outside the Purleigh Bell. I'm suffering by the time we get to 'afternoon tea and snacks' in a layby on the B1021 just outside Steeple but cured by Anadin and Eccles cake. Another 8 miles and we're done. Tea and fruitcake at the finish, outside St Peter's chapel.
The walk is put on every August Bank Holiday by Essex and Herts LDWA. The first St Peter’s Way In A Day was walked 21 years ago. Two of the guys here today were on that one too. And so you get a nice sense of continuity and history.
Besides which:
1. long distance walking is instant liposuction
2. these are nice people
3. War, murder, violence, all the hideous futilities and senseless pain of life - none of it impinges on this perfect world. And this is the reason why I am doing the Hundred all over again.
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