Pete Thomas’s Blog

We started off walking round North Kent (not all of North Kent, just a bit of it). It was raining quite hard so it was good to test out not only our waterproofs (never without them since that disastrous time a few weeks ago), but our spirits as well. Luckily both held out so we blasted fearlessly and defiantly through the damp and dripping Hayes Common with typical British pluck - stiff if slightly wet upper lip. Then it stopped raining after 2 or 3 hours. (But still with scattered showers of course).

I had decided to try the new pair of boots, but thought it best to wear the old ones for the morning and break the new ones in during the afternoon, but just in case I carried the old ones in my backpack. As it turned out by lunchtime the old ones were still causing some pain, I put the new ones on and it seemed the one area that would probably need the most breaking in was right where the most pain was, however they were brilliant - my worst nightmare (ending up in the Andes with the wrong boots) is now laid to rest.

The afternoon went well, lots of hills (see picture. Please note that to get this picture I had to run ahead up the hill).

After the 8 hours we didn’t feel too bad at all, Laurie had a slight blister) however the next morning there are plenty of aches and pains, so we’re quite glad the traing schedule has a couple of single 8 hour walks before the double 8 hour (in two weeks’ time).

NB, looking the photo you might think it’s a flat field with a vertical field behind. That’s my bad photography. It’s actually an (almost) vertical field with a flat field behind (honest).

Got some new boots today. These are not as macho looking as my previous leather ones, but they are lighter and ventilate better. Most importantly there is room for the shock absorber insoles.

Saxophone players use an expression “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” or “GAS”. It’s very often associated with amateurs, but can quite easily spread up the food chain. Us hardened pros are usually happy with a beaten up old instrument and have no need to succumb to all the latest accessories (unless of course we are lucky enough to be sponsored), but I still occasionally feel the need to by the latest NASA designed waterproof neckstrap.

But when it comes to trekking gear, walking into the outdoor shop is almost on a par with waliking into a stationary shop. I become the ideal consumer and drool over all the lastest hitech equipment and accessories. Sometimes my inherent thriftyness wins out, and tells me that an £80 trekking pole is actually a stick so I end up walking with a stick I found by the river Itchen. Funny thing is when I was on a walk recently and left it somewhere, I actually went back (downhill) a mile or so to retrive it as if it was an £80 stick. I wonder if I’m going to need to bring my stick to Peru, how do you explain to customs why you are bringing a bit of a tree on a transatlantic flight and back?

The big one. Two six hour walks one day after another. We did it. Not easy.

Saturday was an easy morning as Jim and his grandma were with us so we just did a two and a half hour amble along the Itchen from somewhere to Ovington where there is probably the best pub in Hampshire.

But then the afternoon was long and hot and exhausting. Laurie’s new boots had been causing problems (she thought they were run in but no) so we went home for the old boots and decided to walk round Southampton. Not sure if it was the mundanacity of walking up and down hills in Bitterne or the annoyingness of Itchen Valley Country Park only letting you have UHT milk with your tea (”Sorry you can’t have real milk with your tea, we need that for milkshakes” - and so I paid an extra 45p for a “glass of milk” to put in the tea), but this was a hard afternoon.

Next day we thought we would take it easy so six hours round the reasonably flat New Forest seemed a good option. The first half hour was a bit scary as I was aching from the previous day anfd thought I’d never make it, but that soon wore off and the beautiful surroundings soon took over. (The New Forest is a pleasing combination of treeishness and open savannah).

However things got a bit tricky when we got lost in the woods, I won’t go into detail as it would involve blaming Laurie’s map reading skills, but it was very very scary when we thought we wouldn’t make it to the pub in time for lunch. Vultures were soaring overhead and wolves were getting closer, but finally we got to a place we’d been to before (yes we’d done a complete circle) so we got our bearings and made it to the pub just in time. Lunch was not as good as the pub in Ovington, but memorable for our exit. We accidentally let a very enthusiastic New Forest Pony into the pub garden as we left. A big pub garden full of chavs.

So onward and unexpectedly upward as we discovered a very nice bit of the New Forest (up north) that is very hilly and probably previously unexplored. A long long long long but nice end to the dual 6-hour marathon.

Except I realised that I really needed shock absorbers in my boots as I had some quite considerable pain in the balls (of my feet) - see 2nd Weekend. This means buying not only shock absorbers (i.e. another type of expensive odour eaters), but also new boots as there is not enough room in the old nicely run in boots for the shock absorbers.

(Or is it Podometer - I can never remember). Laurie bought me this for Christmas and its great. Here is an example of what it tells you:

Pedometer mp3 audio file

It’s great to get to the pub at lunchtime and know that you can replace all those calories. As long as you make a creative guess about the number of calories that need to go back in it’s no problem.

However, the lady in the podometer sometimes lies. You can walk for hours sometimes, hit the button and be told that you have walked 0.32 miles.

This weekend we almost reached the extreme limits of human endurance - 6 hours walking the South Downs Way without a cup of tea. At one stage late in the afternoon we arrived at the top of a very steep hill where there was a lane. All we had to drink was two teaspoons of water in the water bottles (we’d frozen them but they hadn’t thawed out as it wasn’t as hot as expected so they were still mostly ice). “I could really kill for a cup of tea right now” I said. At that exact moment a car pulled up right next to us and 3 old ladies started pouring themselves cups of tea. I looked at the old ladies, then at my stout and sturdy trekking pole (aka stick). Then back at the old ladies slurping their tea without offering us any and back at the stick. Their lives were saved only by the arrival of a couple of miserable boy scouts. (Walkers in the country usually say “morning”, these ones just scowled and looked down at the ground).

This walk was basically the one we should have done last weekend if our boots hadn’t filled up with water. Except we did it backwards. (The route, not the walking). After a brisk 3 hour walk in the morning with lots of “up-hill-and-down-dale”, we stumbled across a very dead deer. Knowing that Jim (our 6 year old) would appreciate it, I packed its skull (complete with antlers) into my rucksack and headed on to the pub for a ploughman’s. (Hoping the deer’s head didn’t smell too badly). We’d actually seen a ploughman earlier so it seemed to be appropriate to eat a Ploughman’s. I just hope it wasn’t the last one as he might have been hungry.

We then set off for the afternoon. Laurie, feeling brave, thought we should also do a hilly walk in the afternoon so back up old Winchester Hill, but the steep route. It started to rain and of course this time we had our waterproof gear. Just as we almost got to the top of the hill we both realised how tricky this trekking malarky can be. Laurie’s feet swole and she realised that she should probably have bought some bigger boots, and my knees started to hurt. Blisters were there on the soles of my feet but a pain in the knees can be a real pain in the a***. Luckily Laurie had some anti inflammatories and I made it down the long long descent in one piece. I expected the worse and thought I’d wake up the next day needing crutches, but surprisingly I felt fine. Can’t wait for next weekend which is two 6 hour walks. That’ll be the real test.

This was supposed to be one long walk of six hours, but didn’t quite turn out like that. We drove to Exton in the Meon valley and planned a walk that would start off with some hilly bits, as close to the Andes as the South Downs gets. We managed quite nicely up Old Winchester Hill, thought about how much more out of breath we might be at 14,000 feet, admired the bronze age earthworks then down to the pub for a quick lunch. That came to nearly 6 miles, about half the walk.

As we ate our lunch in the pub garden it started to rain. Laurie didn’t have her waterproof jacket (I smugly had mine in the rucksack) but neither of us had waterproof trousers so (being a gentleman) I gave her my jacket and we decided on a 2 mile shortcut back to the car, nip home for more waterproofs and resume part two in the New Forest even if it was still raining. However it wasn’t just rain. It was a downpour with thunder, lightning, cats, dogs and probably frogs. It was raining so hard you couldn’t actually see and within 3 minutes I would have won a wet tee shirt competion. It took about 30 minutes to get back to the car, by which time our boots were full of water and squelching so we had to abandon the rest of that day as you can’t walk in wet boots and expect your feet to not disintegrate. We’ll need to do more during the week to make up.

Now we know that you really do need the expensive Goretex trousers or your boots could turn into paddling pools for the very rare Andean Poison Arrow and Panpipe Frog.

We went to the Outdoor shop in the morning and they fitted my boots with some special insoles to soften the bottoms and stop the blister, sort of deluxe £32 odour eaters. We left the car at Shawford, a station half way between Southampton and Winchester and planned to get a train back to eastleigh and walk up to Shawford. We miscalculated the mileage and got to Shawford in two hours, so quickly planned a further route up onto Twyford Down, through a golf course where we got lots of dirty looks (as if we weren’t on a public right of way), then across a footpath over the motorway, up St. Catherines Hill and back to Shawford along the Itchen Navigation canal. I had to remove the deluxe odour eaters as they made the boots too tight but at least they had me through the 9 miles of up-hill-and-down-dale without the blisters getting worse. I’ll try without them next time and see if my feet have toughened up. This was a good bit of training as there were plenty of hills and it was an incredibly hot day and we got through the weekend without too much pain.

This weekend we needed to do two 4 hour walks. It’s easy enough to do one, but the real test is to get up the next morning and trundle off on another. This wasn’t too bad, on Saturday we did a walk from the Hampshire Teashop Walks book which went from Stockbridge on a roundish route to somewhere for tea and then back along the River Test to Stockbridge. The Teashop was a disaster though, small teapot with one teabag for two people and 20 minutes for my rhubarb crumble to arrive so we just left without it. I had some blisters under my feet at the end so a bit worried about another 4 hours tomorrow.

This is the first weekend of serious training (ie longer than the paltry 5 mile walks we’ve been doing up to now). We needed to do a 4 hour walk this weekend so decided to walk along the Itchen Way from Southampton up towards Winchester and then turn back after a couple of hours. We had Jim (our 6 year old) so perhaps it was more of a nature ramble rather than full-on trekking. Anyway he was very proud to spot a deer, fungus on a tree that looked like poo, and went on to find at least twenty interesting wildlife features, including this bug (called “Bugwin”) which became his friend and hitched a ride on his face, ear, hair, neck and arms for a mile or two.