The meetings of the Hilltop Coven that week had consisted of little but walking marathon planning, and Sam and I eventually decided that we needed to wear running trainers and “layers”, and take sunscreen, rainwear, 2 litres of water, money, IPhones (with gps for the mileage & speed), a morning snack, lunch, an afternoon snack and a spare snack!
Sam had come up with the inspired idea of walking along the Leeds Liverpool canal tow path, which was brilliant because it would be pleasant, interesting, flat and we wouldn’t have to stop to cross roads or anything. She’d calculated that 26.2 miles would take us from Leeds to Skipton and we had cajoled poor Graham into sacrificing his Sunday lie in to drop us off, and part of his afternoon to retrieve us afterwards (bless him!). The forecast (stunningly enough) didn’t include rain, so we jumped in the van in high spirits!
8:00 on a Sunday morning on the canal bank was busier than anticipated, with herds of dog walkers and runners already out in force and we joined them at a fast pace. It was dull but dry and fairly cool; in fact the perfect day for outdoor exertion and I soon had my tattoos out! I had promised my friend Rob that I would take a picture and post our progress on Facebook every 2 miles, so I set the GPS to go beep every mile and announce our pace. I normally have this feature turned off because it’s a bit embarrassing when your arse announces in a loud robotic voice that sounds like the Queen doing a Stephen Hawking impression “pace 6; average pace 6.1, distance 2, time 30 minutes and 6 seconds”!
Just after the first hour, we’d uploaded two photos accompanied by witty captions, covered 4 miles (over a seventh of the way there!), the time had flown (never stopping talking helps!) and we both still felt really good. This was going to be easy!
At 8 miles, whilst it wasn’t exactly equatorial, I just couldn’t wait any longer to try out the “zip off leg” feature of the new walking trousers and successfully managed to remain vertical during the one leg balancing act and quickly transformed the outfit! To be fair, I wasn’t actually cold once we got going again.....
According to Queen Stephen, 3 Rise Locks at Bingley was exactly half way, which we celebrated with lunch (protein bar for me, bagel for Sam) and an extra photo and Facebook before continuing for the last half of the event. Wild Irises was the subject of the 14 mile photo journal, and during the upload I noticed that the battery on my phone had got alarmingly low, so had to make the sad decision to stop taking photos and messing about online to save the battery for the important task of Distance Meister! Sam was promoted to official photographer but without the ability to add commentary to the photos, we decided that in each we should hold up the number of fingers to correspond with the mileage so we knew where each picture was and I could retrospectively finish the updates accurately! We both now looked like retards in the photos, but at least the data would be right! Luckilly Sam's husband Alex is a "scientist" too, so she's used to all of the "essential" statistics and attention to detail!
The tarmac’d path had deteriorated after Bingley to a grassy / dry mud track which was a bit uneven, so after about 20 miles we were both complaining of sore ankles, but otherwise all was good. With just 2.2 miles to go, we came across a family of swans having a siesta on the canal bank, and decided that they needed capturing for posterity as the 24 mile marker. Unfortunately, Mrs Swan decided that she didn’t want her privacy abused in this way, so reared up and hissed loudly, frightening Papparazi Sam (Swans can break your arm you know!), which, of course, I found highly amusing. A fit of tired giggles overtook us for a while, after which, we both guiltily admitted to each other that our legs were pretty tired and we were glad to be near the end! We veered off of the canal when it ran parallel to the main road into Skipton, and the 26 mile photo was the blessed “Welcome to Skipton” sign. The last 0.2 miles was spent hallucinating about coffee, and by the time we saw Tescos we had completed the marathon in 7 hours 17 minutes. I’m afraid that all we were interested in at that point was whether Tescos had a cafe and a loo! Sadly, no cafe, so we had to walk EVEN FURTHER to Morrisons, who, happily, had both! We called International Rescue who said he’d be with us in about an hour, bought beautiful big cups of the brown stuff and gratefully sank down into chairs.
To say that we were pleased was an understatement, and as the coffee went down, our energy and enthusiasm came back up and we started excitedly reviewing our success! The story soon changed when we tried to get up.... neither of us could walk properly, and we just about managed to shuffle off to meet Graham, both looking like we’d had an embarassing accident.....
The Coven conclusion was that it was hard but good! I was happy because I’d now got my head around the distance and how long it would take me to walk a marathon, so could start mentally preparing to run one (which was the whole point of the excersise), but we both ached in lots of new places and Sam actually said that she was worse after my walking marathon than running the Edinburgh Marathon in 4 hours 12 mins and 18 seconds! http://samsedinburghmarathontrainingblog.blogspot.com/
It just goes to show that training for stuff works..........
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