On Wednesday, just three days after Sunday's 20 miler (itself after Saturday's 10 miler), I decided to go for a hard 31 mile walk. I told myself no running was allowed at all.
In brief, this was a miserable 8 hours and 40 minutes.
The ground was awful and made walking up or down grassy and muddy inclines tough. This was the day after serious gales made the news headlines, and strong gales continued today. I'd decided before setting out not to bring my iPod for this long, long walk which I've rarely done anyway for the longer training sessions, instead building the mental stamina of dealing purely with what I can see and hear around me: with trees being felled all over the place I figured it was best to have my ears unobstructed.
Although there were light showers for the first couple of hours thereafter it was a drenching, driving rainstorm. I had to stop and battle to put on waterproof trousers over the top of a pair of running longs and running shorts, but the waterproofing didn't last long. My upper body (with 3 thick layers of clothing) was also drenched after a couple of hours and I had to keep my work rate up to maintain some body heat. As I tired this became progressively more difficult and so the cold gradually set in.
I also had 10.6kg in the rucksack, the heaviest weight to date.
After about 4 hours I became aware of a real stinging pain in my nether regions. My soaked waterproof trousers, tight running longs and running shorts had conspired together to start causing the friction that was giving me some serious chaffing. This was a real disappointment because I thought I'd found the answer to these problems in my Nike Dri-Fit shorts. By the time I'd recognised this, having been zoned out for the last several hours, it was too late to do much about it. Not quite having reached my half way point (15.5 miles) I plugged on, grimacing. No amount of adjusting my gait was making any difference to the sawing action my shorts were now making on raw skin.
By now very cold I reached my half way point and turned for home . . . only then realising that my route outwards had been wind-assisted. I then faced just over 4 hours of walking into the gales and driving rain. I took on some food, finished off my 2 x 750ml water bottles and exchanged them for my reserve 2 x 500ml water bottles.
Head down and plugging on . . .
About an hour from home it was dark, so on with the head torch to cross the fields which weren't far off from being flooded.
Having the knowledge of being almost at the end of your destination after a long session does odd things: suddenly the last couple of miles became almost unbearable; questions like Why am I doing this? popped into my head; I became aware of muscle and tendon pains that weren't there before.
It's a bit of a mental battle to swap those thoughts for the reminder that, as soon as you stop, everything feels so much better and it's all over: that feeling of a deep relaxation on stopping, of a sleep-inducing hot bath and good, hot food.
Dr. Mike Stroud's excellent book Survival of the Fittest makes the point that it can't be because of an accident that human evolution has meant our body's longer term memory of these post-exercise "feel good" feelings successfully drown out the shorter-term memories of pain and discomfort from strenuous exercise. Without this survival mechanism our ancestors' first efforts at chasing a woolly mammoth for several days for the cooking pot wouldn't have been repeated. You can imagine our ancestral cave dwellers:
"Fancy coming out woolly-mammoth-chasing for a few days? I'm starving!"
"Nah! Can't be faffed. Last time we did that I got some serious crotch rot from this Nike Dri-Fit loin cloth and those wretched bison waterproofs, I was freezing cold, couldn't move for days and felt half-starved. I'll just sit here and wait for Tesco Direct to be invented."
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| Note the absence of rucksack, water bottles, trainers, GPS watch, heart rate monitor, energy gels . . . |
With woolly mammoths now found just a couple of miles away in the local Co-Op or whatever we don't really need to satisfy the body's evolutionary desire to go hunting and gathering for days on end, hence (apparently) we have a theoretical evolutionary reason for why we desire to do daft things like train for 10k races or marathons etc.
I finished my own day's woolly-mammoth hunting of grimness and crawled up the stairs with a satisfying degree of pain in my hamstrings and various tendons from having worked my walking muscles very hard. Slipping into a hot bath was utter agony though, with hot water and Radox stinging some quite serious chaffed raw skin.
Of course, I'd forgotten about the pain a couple of days later when I went out for my shorter sessions to finish the week!
I've now finished a 4 week build-up (with weekly mileages of 31.2, 35.1, 41.8 and 46), rather than the 3 week build-up I was supposed to stick to, so I'm taking a week off if only to allow my chaffing to heal properly.
