Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Fitness

With 2.5 months to go before the start of the End to End, I'm finding myself starting to think seriously about the fitness level it requires. As I'm just recovering from a marathon I'm pretty fit in general - I can, after all, run 42km in one go and take under four hours to do it. My legs are pretty muscly and I've got a lot less excess body fat than I did a year ago. In general, therefore, I'm in good shape both from the cardiovascular and the endurance point of view.

Walking 35-40km a day, on the other hand, is a different thing to running a long distance in a few hours, especially given that it's going to involve carrying about 20kg of rucksack and that it's going to be happening day in, day out for a couple of months. The good news is that I can walk until my feet fall off. The bad news is that doing this for more than a couple of days at a time is uncharted territory as far as I'm concerned.

The conventional wisdom from End-to-Enders who've gone before me is that after the first couple of weeks your body gets used to pounding along incessantly, but the trick is to be able to get through those first couple of weeks. If you're still feeling sore every day after a month, you're much less likely to finish than if you started in good shape. So what I'm finding myself wondering is how I'm going to be sure to get through those first couple of weeks relatively unscathed. An added complication is that I want to keep running in at least some form. So how to balance this? I've also got a fairly busy schedule between now and 14th August, so I can't just block a week out in my diary and go and walk the South Downs Way.

I think the answer lies in a combination of the sort of long-distance running training which I've been doing for the last nine months and long walks carrying heavy loads. It might even include a bit of running while carrying a lighter load for good measure. Mixing some hills into my regular runs should help prepare for the first couple of weeks along the famously undulating South West Coast Path, and a couple of two and three-day walks towards the end of July should make sure I'm in good nick for when the real thing starts. At least, I hope that it'll make sure.

In the meantime, if you're in the vague vicinity of London and fancy a long day walk (or even a two-dayer over a weekend) sometime, drop me a line. "Long" in this context means 30-40km (20-25 miles in old money).

Posted by mpk at May 30, 2005 10:57 PM