We were both walking for charities close to our hearts, me; Kitty in the City - a local cat rescue charity that my girlfriend does a lot of volunteering and fundraising for and where we got 2 of our 3 current little fluff balls, and my girlfriend walked for the Dr Hadwen Trust for animal free research, where she also volunteers her Saturdays.
We both hit our targets and raised a nice amount of money that will greatly help these charities continue their amazing selfless work - if you sponsored and happen to be reading this, thank you so much!
The walk itself, called Just Walk was an event by a company called Across the Divide (read about them and their events here: https://www.acrossthedivide.com/about-us/who-we-are/) and it was really well organised, and throughout the whole route everybody was looked after and given lots of encouragement.
For me, the whole thing was a nicer experience than the London to Brighton Ultra Challenge that I took part in back in May 2016, as there was much less pretence, it was possible to walk for whatever charity you wanted to (no matter how small) and the route was divided into much better segments, which made it much less hellish than the 100k London to Brighton event.
One of my best friends had attempted the 100k L2B walk in 2015 but didn't make it to the end. I thought it would be a fun thing to try and agreed with him we'd do it again in 2016. Unfortunately for me, the event was hijacked by another friend who took over the idea and decided the charity we were walking for, which for me, didn't make it feel like I was doing it for the right reasons any more - which is a big part of why anyone would put themselves through this kind of thing in the first place.
The 100k was pure hell, only made harder by that fact.
I didn't make it to the end either - I hit the 72k mark after 19 hours of walking, at which point my legs were popping and twanging, and I feared I was going to severely injure myself by carrying on.
Annoyingly, I was pretty close to the end too, having hit the final section, but I just couldn't carry on. I think it would've been a different story if I'd been putting myself through that for something I cared about, as the mental determination to finish would've kicked in at that point.
I think the most frustrating thing about the L2B walk was that the sections were broken up into different length sections that weren't thought out very well, and to add more hell on top of that, the rest stops were often further on (sometimes much much further on) than the route map stated... an extra 1k or 2k here and there isn't too much of an issue, but when you've just done an 18k stretch and are in desperate need of a rest to sort out your feet and recharge, adding 4k-5k on to a section that big was a bit of a piss take!
Anyway, here's a nice little meme created for me by my team mates which sums up the whole thing for me:
Wanna know the weirdest thing about it all though? Some time in January, I felt myself wanting to try it again! Nobody else would do the L2B with me though, but when my girlfriend spotted the Just Walk event we decided to do that instead - something manageable, yet still a challenge. Because what's the point of asking people to sponsor you to do something you can actually do?! I don't understand that at all.
Surely the point of asking somebody to give you money for doing something is that you're going to be taking on a challenge, that there's the risk you may not be able to pull it off, but you try your best to do it anyway, and you EARN that money.
Next year we're going to do the 40k for just that reason - there's no point doing another 30k, we did it already, and we go walking quite a lot anyway. I literally have no idea how I managed to do 72k of the 100k walk, but I will attempt it again in the future.
