In December I started a long rambling blog about my first Parish Walk in 2009. Thought I better carry on with the story as can't believ it is over 3 months since I started it.
As I mentioned Colin Garvey and I entered the walk for charity and we agreed to walk together too. We were warned against this and I guess it has some downsides but we both finished on the first effort to do the walk so it definitely worked for us.
We didn't do any races before hand but had done some training together beforehand and also some individual training too.
We only had time for 2 long walks of 10miles plus during training for the Parish. The first was a 14 mile walk which I think we finished in about 31/4 hours. We were pretty excited that we had done our first longer walk and finished relatively unscathed - a couple of minor blisters but everything else intact! This spurred us on to trying to walk to peel on the parish route to give us a feel for whether we could really do the whole thing.
The main mistake however was to leave it too late to do the trial run. I think we tried it about 4 weeks before the main event.This was probably a bad idea in itself but was made much worse by the fact that Colin got pretty bad blisters and when we arrived in Peel we both realised we were pretty tired and the thought of doing that again and still having nearly a marathon distance to go did make us feel pretty daunted! matters went from bad to worse when he decided to slice his blisters a couple of days later which then got infected and he eventually only just recovered the week before the big day...
Anyway undaunted we set off on the big day with the plan to walk to peel at around 4.3 mph - try to get there in under 8 hours. We walked together until the sloc and then eventually got split up as we went up. I then had a few texts telling me about the beer at the round table which was very refreshing. We joined up again into Dalby and felt pretty good through Peel. From then on we stayed within about 400yds of each other although it is difficult to walk side by side all the way we stayed around each other and definitely spurred each other on. Perhaps the highlight being our trip through Andreas. Colin was catching me back up so we could walk together again, when I heard a terrific roar from the patio of the pub which was full of drinkers /spectators/supporters one of whom lifted colins spirits enormously and probably got
us both over the line! By then we were not eating much but when he was offered a tumbler of Baileys by an excited spectator, Colin went for it in one amidst the cheering crowd of drinkers and then roared off at blistering pace all the way to Ramsey, now leaving me in his wake!
Maughold was a struggle for us both and was dark cold and wet!Hot salty soup rescued us and some words of encouragement saw us back to the coast road and then it is all downhill from then on!
6am on the prom and we were all smiles with one of the most rewarding feelings ever, a first finish (and Colin swears his first and last...).
Happy days :)
Anyway we proved to ourselves we could do it and I came back for a second effort last year so I must have enjoyed it?!?
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