First things first… if someone asks you if you want to walk 26 miles, even if it is for charity; think long and hard about that decision. My advice is, when they say you should “train” before hand and do some stretches to warm up your muscles, please do not stand there shaking your head and exploding with a hard to contain guffaw. Do some training, or at least some stretches beforehand. You are not invincible, and yes you will feel like you’ve aged, just in your legs and feet by the end of it.
See now, me being the all knowing fountain of knowledge that I am didn’t think about any of this at all. My thoughts went something like this; 26 miles isn’t that far… not really I don’t think it will actually take all day HA! 10 hours after starting, complete with a few stops I collapse helplessly to the ground just past the finish line, still gripping my prize winning lindt chocolate with my medal around my neck. (I figure if I’m going to remain helpless to theft for at least a couple of minutes I want to ensure I still have some chocolate to get me through the pain after such an ordeal!)
After my rather melodramatic OMG! I compose myself to assess the damage this wonderful walk around Birmingham has done to my feet. As I claw off my purple vans it feels like my feet are expanding, much in the same way a bump onto a cartoon characters head does immediately after impact. As I assess the damage I notice that there are only a few blisters covering my feet, though I am quite impressed that blood has been drawn on a couple of my toes, now that is dedication! As I sit, rather elegantly with my bare feet on display, legs crossed, hair in my face and feeling like I am emitting green gas in the same way a sim does when it needs a shower, I think back over the past 10 hours and the walking that has taken up the best part of the day. Overall, it wasn’t all that difficult! There were a few moments where I found myself becoming irrationally angry at passersby beeping their horns in encouragement at our charitable act of walking around the outskirts of our colourful city. Mostly I had been in high spirits, maybe it was the sugar overload.
When we had set off around 9am in the morning, as the first wonderful supporter in their comfortable car and sunglasses beeped their horn there was an enthusiastic “WOO!” from myself and the people around me, but as the day drew on you could tell how much pain people were in and how much further they had to go by their reaction to such a beep. This scaled from the excitable woo at the start of the day to the “SHUT UP and get out your car and join us MORONS!” that was peacefully spoken back to passing cars towards the end of the day. This coupled with the varying emotions of all of those around me made the day quite amusing! Within a few hours of starting out the order of business had been set. My sister and friend Jack had flew on ahead at a pace I can only describe as inhumanly fast and enthusiastic. One of my sisters friends began to lag behind after we had reached our first “rest stop” where she had ingesting a burger and chips almost all in one mouthful, and the remainder of my sisters friends and myself were somewhere in the middle trying to solider on and catch up with the super humans. This was done whilst taking it in turns to whinge about our feet and have random spouts of irrational anger where bottles were “accidently” thrown at people and everything became hilariously funny, thus making walking that little bit more difficult.
I was informed that the organisers of this 26 mile jaunt; BRMB had said you would go through every emotion and I guess that that is true. I definitely visited anger, anger at passersby, anger at having so far to go, anger at my feet and irrational anger for people in general. Not to mention anger at the signs being put up incorrectly and therefore miscalculating the miles; this I took as a personal attack of people plotting against me to make the task harder. Yes, anger was definitely there! But there was also the delirium; this was most probably my personal favourite. Whilst experiencing this I remembered the hypnosis in Zoolander and almost found myself seeing Will Ferrell handing me lollies whilst telling me to be happy… happppppy. It set in at intervals just after the half way point. We had sat down around 1.30 for some lunch and having had to stand up in stages and walking around like we had broken backs for a couple of minutes we set off again. At first this was in good spirits, 10 miles to go we were told. We began to walk up a slight hill when it all went wrong. Suddenly I had the uncontrollable urge to laugh, I didn’t understand it! There was nothing funny around, no one had fallen over and no one had said anything to stimulate such a reaction but there I was, laughing uncontrollably at the sentence “come on, jog for a bit, it makes your legs feel better” I looked around at my friend and my sister and her friends and found that they were all laughing also, we had no idea why. This went on for several minutes when Jack decided that it wasn’t for him and disappeared like speedy Gonzales never to be seen again!
As we got closer to the end the pace slowed and I found my legs having an argument with the rest of my body. My brain was telling them to get a move on and my legs were rather stubbornly telling me to politely get lost! As my body was having this inner argument I received a phone call from Jack to say he had just crossed the finish line, that I probably had about an hour and a half left and oh yeah, the last hill before the end was a killer. Well thank you very much kind sir, I’ll just crawl into a corner and die now if that’s ok with you! I gave him my congratulations through gritted teeth, don’t get me wrong I was genuinely happy he had finished… and in record time but I wanted to remind him that now was not a good time to talk about his superhuman abilities to put one foot in front of the other at such a speed.
As I battled through the last 2 miles, up the aforementioned ridiculously steep hill I found myself happier than I had ever felt in my life. I never thought it would feel so good to see the word “finish” on a big white sign in a dishevelled park on the outskirts of Birmingham! As my sister, her friend and I stumbled somewhat elegantly toward the finish line there were half hearted cheers from some of the sponsors on the side lines. Yes we were some of the last people to cross the line but we didn’t care. It was done, we had made it and all was glorious! As I fumbled across the finish in a daydream I had a medal placed around my neck by a nice lady who just smiled at me when I told her it was cold, but cold was nice. I moved slowly down the table to find some lindt chocolate in big boxes, the lady telling me that I could take a handful if I liked. Not wanting to look like a true fattie I took just 3 and stumbled in the direction of my sister. By now my feet and my legs were shouting at the rest of my body, demanding to sit down and please, not to get up again for a while. Finally I gave in and sat down with a graceful thump and drowned myself in water. I had done it! I was still in one piece and I had only had to use my inhaler once. Ok, so perhaps walkathons weren’t a scratch on an actual marathon but I had completed it, all in one piece with somewhat minimal damage to myself… It was only when I crawled into a hot bath about an hour later that I realised the true pain that was to come. As I sat absorbing the amazing feeling of the hot water against my legs I had a moment of panic where I thought I may have to stay there till morning as I couldn’t lift myself out. After realising that this was a ridiculous notion I gingerly found my seat on the sofa and found myself smiling inanely at the screen. I had done it, when even I thought I couldn’t. Now, I don’t care what anyone else thinks, that’s something that I feel I can be proud of!
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