Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

More on the End to End

For starters, this is the 200th post on this site. Golly.

I've finally got moving again on planning for the End to End, after a few weeks in which I was too busy to sit down and devote too much time to it. I've now got a pile of 50 A4 sheets, each of which is a stage of the walk - they're based on the 1:50000 maps as printed from Tracklogs. The pile is pretty intimidating as each sheet represents at least 26 and at most 76 kilometres of walking. Still, I can't wait to get going and start working through the pile - and if the pile of 50 sheets of A4 is intimidating, heaven knows what the pile of 1:25000 maps will look like once I've acquired them all.

To add insult to injury, I've finally got around to creating a website for the project. geektrek.org is now up and running, which I guess means that the project has been officially launched. Link to it lots and make sure people give lots of money to the charities in gratitude for not having to do the walk themselves.

A rather cool development is that I've found that the Loch Ness Marathon is on more or less the exact day that I expect to arrive in Inverness, so naturally I had to enter it. Definitely no guarantee of a stonking PB, but it'll be a fun experience. My legs will have no end of endurance after walking about 1600km, but I don't expect them to have very much speed in them. As was pointed out to me earlier, though, I am unable to resist entering races if I'm in the vicinity of them. Besides, running in the countryside around Inverness should be pleasant.

After Copenhagen last weekend, once I've had a bit of a break I'll be concentrating for the next couple of months on endurance with a touch of speedwork - plenty of long runs, some nice hard hill runs and a good few long walks with a loaded rucksack in preparation for August. While I'm pretty fit already and the first couple of weeks of an End to End walk are pretty good endurance training in themselves, I figure that doing a spot of training in the months leading up to it will pay dividends in the first few weeks of the walk in the form of less sore feet. And if I'm really being sufficiently foolish to combine a walk like this with not one but two marathons, keeping myself in some sort of running shape is a very good idea.

Posted by mpk at May 28, 2005 9:45 PM