Holding Page.

Hi! I owe both updates and emails but things have been rather busy. So this is just a short post to let you know that I'm still alive and still training.



Yesterday I went out and bought some new walking bits to try out before the big event. In my stack of synthetic goodies are four pairs of socks. I'm giving the black ones a go today as David and I are off out to walk the final three sections of the Capital Ring. Bar the Woolwich foot tunnel, which is still shut for renovations. So we should be able to finish the walk with a nice little boat ride across the Thames. Lovely.

Better, fuller update to come tomorrow.

Road block

If you are a friend of mine on Facebook or follow my Twitter then you will have seen an extraordinarily downbeat status update yesterday afternoon (even by my standards). It went like this:

Miserable walk. Rain, a bit of hail, hip pain for hours, and I saw a dead coot floating in the canal. Totally morale shattering.

It was honestly the most horrendous walk of my life, but I was so determined to finish it I just kept going. Even when I was starting to swear under my breath, even when the rain started beating down heavily on me, even when I was not certain my legs would keep me upright. I was going to finish those stupid 23.5 miles because I knew that if I didn't, I might as well give up this whole escapade.

So I finished it.

When I got home, my hips hurt like hell. About an hour after walking through the front door, I was certain that I would never get off the sofa again. All through the night, I was waking to shift from hip to hip. And when I got up this morning it felt as though my legs had been replaced by a pair of very wobbly stilts, painfully strapped directly into my hip joints. But it wasn't the hip that was troubling me. It was my left knee - sore and stiff and almost impossible to straighten.

My boss very kindly let me work from home today - I spent it with my leg in the air and an ice pack strapped to the back of my knee. It feels a good bit better now, easing with a little bit of wandering about the house and a couple of stretches in the front room. But I've still booked myself in to see a physiotherapist in a couple of weeks, just to see if there's something I could be doing better. In the meantime, I'll keep going. I'll note how my body feels and find a way to get through.

Last night I was ready to give up. Tonight, I'm ready to beat this challenge.

20 mile verdict.

First up I would just like to say that although I logically know that 20 miles is an awfully long way to walk, the comparative ease with which I completed the 18 miler back in July may have meant that I set off with a slightly cocky bounce in my step yesterday.

Like before I chose to use walkit.com to plan my route for me. A big circular route through and around London stretched out in front of me as I left the house just before 8.30 yesterday morning.

Leaving Lewisham, I walked familiar roads up to Southwark Park, then along the Thames' South Bank before crossing the Millenium Bridge to St Paul's, then... Well, then I got a bit lost. My walkit route tried to take me through a locked gate and I became rather flustered as I tried to find a replacement route. Even though I know the area well, it threw me. I got back on track eventually, walking through the edge of Angel before heading onto Regent's Canal.

Regent's Canal is fast becoming my nemesis. A mile or so along the towpath and I started to hurt. Unlike last time it was my left hip rather than my knees and, also unlike last time, it was a sharp stabbing pain rather than a dull ache. My bouncing stride soon slowed to a hobble as I limped along the canal. I was certain that I would have to stop. I made plans on how to get myself home. And then, right when I was at my lowest, I looked up and saw this:



The sight of the towers of Canary Wharf glistening in the distance almost brought that bounce back into my step. I felt a boost from knowing that I was on the home straight, albeit one that was going to last for at least another 6 miles.

At that point I decided that I must carry on. I knew that I had to beat this pain.

And I did. I arrived back home 20 miles and 6 hours 2 minutes after setting off. My hip was so painful that I could barely walk through the door, and had to crawl up the stairs to the cold bath that was waiting for me.

Today, I'm still uncomfortable. Should I have carried on with an injury? Possibly not. Am I proud to have beaten the 20 miler? Definitely. Am I ready for another week of training? Ask me when I come back from my 4 mile walk tomorrow.

Big training.

I can now tell you what 18 miles feels like. It mostly feels like a sort of dull ache, with a touch of sunburn, and a whole lot of sleepiness.

I set off this morning on this route - another big loop of London made up of sections of paths I've walked before. That really helps as, theoretically, I don't lose time or pace checking a map every five minutes.

It was quite warm out, but not as oppressively hot as it has been recently. I stuck to shade where I could, and set off at a good pace. It was at about mile 12 that my knees and thighs started to ache a bit and they carried on aching from there. My hands and wrists decided to swell quite heavily, which was funny but not particularly helpful, and yet somehow I've still escaped any kind of painful blister. I feel lucky.

The best moment of the day was towards the end of the long drag along Regent's Canal, which is very pretty, but even pretty views get boring after several miles. I was really tiring at this point, and wondering where Limehouse Basin had hidden itself, when I looked up and saw Canary Wharf looming over the buildings in front of me. It gave me such a grin on my face and a spring in my step that I bounced my way down that last mile to the Thames Path.

On arriving home, I sat on the sofa for long enough to eat a sandwich and drink a milkshake (thanks for the advice, Clairey) before retiring to the bedroom and promptly falling asleep for an hour and a half. It was quite possibly the best nap I've ever had.

I woke up with a slightly clicky right ankle and a nice lobster pink glow to my legs. No idea how I'm going to feel in the morning, but luckily it's a rest day.

Next walk is 4 miles on Monday. I don't think I'm going to dread that one anymore.

Battles with heat and temptation.

Cor blimey! London's a bit warm at the moment. And whilst that may be fine for sitting under parasols, drinking Pimm's and watching England being rubbish at sport it's not entirely fun to be out walking in it.

So it was with some reluctance that I marched myself out of the house late yesterday afternoon to walk 14 miles.

I picked up my circular route from walkit.com which took me from my home in Lewisham, up through Greenwich, under the Thames at the Greenwich foot tunnel, through the Isle of Dogs and onto the Thames path at Westferry. Then along the Thames path to Tower Bridge where I crossed the river once more and doubled back to go east on the southern Thames path to Rotherhithe. Then back towards home through Surrey Quays, New Cross and a tiny corner of Ladywell.

It was no where near as bad as I thought it would be. Yes, OK, so I was pretty pink and ridiculous looking and I could see my knee muscles twitching in the last couple of miles but it was fine. Utterly uneventful, really. I managed to complete it in 3 hours and 50 minutes, which isn't too shabby.

The only bad part of the walk was stepping off Tower Bridge to find a Pimm's stall and a tapas festival directly in front of me and knowing that I still had to walk to Lewisham. WOE!

First milestone.

I've now walked over 100 training miles since I announced this project. That seems to equate to somewhere around 29 hours of my life which, I guess, is rather a lot in two short months.
EDIT: Actually, it turns out that this was only from when I started specifically training for the marathon in September, so that's just since 17th May! Go me!

Last week my training took a bit of a kicker when my iPod went missing from work. I had been using music as a pace keeper and various podcasts as a way of giving my mind something to concentrate on when walking familiar paths.

But losing the music has opened my eyes to what's around me.

This last week I've taken the training slowly so that I can stop and look at my surroundings. Two of my regular short walks follow well-trodden tourist paths, passing some of the most famous views in London, so I've started off by photographing those. The few pictures below are from my walks from Covent Garden to Limehouse and Covent Garden to Canada Water.

(I've put the rest of my pictures from these walks in my Ward Walks London folder over at Flickr.)

I've started noticing smaller, less noticed things too. I think I'll take the time to stop and photograph them in future and add them to my building picture of London.

I guess I'm lucky to live in a city so many people travel across the world to see. I should remember that every time I'm tempted to tut as I pass a group of slow moving tourists. But I'm not promising that I will.