Epic walking vol. 1
Home » Blog » Epic walking vol. 1Good guest bloggers and Oxfam Trailwalker 2012 team, The Ministry of Silly Walks, share lessons from their first epic 50km team walk. By team member Ines Gessler.
Current team fundraising total: $3,221.
Good guest bloggers and Oxfam Trailwalker 2012 team, The Ministry of Silly Walks are back after a 50km training walk, linking up some great tracks from Porirua to Wellington. Catch their first blog here, and tips on fundraising blog here. Each fortnight the team shares their experiences as they prepare for their first Oxfam Trailwalker challenge to raise funds for Oxfam. The team is quietly confident they’ve got what it takes but there are sure to be life-lessons learned along the way!
New team registrations are now closed, but you can still support the event by donating to your favourite team at www.oxfamtrailwalker.co.nz.
Last Saturday was the day of our epic. We had decided some time ago that doing a 50km training walk would help us get a better understanding of the sorts of niggly issues that might come up after several hours of walking. Having made that decision the drizzle and low clouds we saw when we woke up were not even enough to put us off. Plus the forecast had been good and we were fairly confident the clouds would disappear within a few hours. So we took the train to Porirua and set off to walk back to Wellington... and then some.
We started the day by getting lost between the train station and the car park at the beginning of the Colonial Knob walkway. Once we found the car park it was smooth sailing all the way up the hundreds of steps to Colonial Knob. From there we headed toward Mt Kaukau along that part of the Te Araroa walkway. Some parts of this track are somewhat less defined than others, which can make you feel like you’re just casually ambling through a forest or across a field. The low clouds we were walking through made those parts of the track especially mystical. We eventually made it to down to the valley without a wrong turn and wandered along the road and past a crossroad until we got to the Old Coach Road track. From there it was about an hour and a half before lunch on Mt Kaukau.
We huddled around a picnic table in the clouds/fog, wind and rain at about 1pm, after having walked for five hours, and questioned our sanity. After walking along the skyline track for a couple of kilometres, we realised we had to change our plans. The ridge was right up in the clouds and it was probably the windiest spot in Wellington. So we came down on Bell's track and did the Northern Walkway until we got to the Botanic Gardens. At this point we had another break and came close to calling it a (very wet) day. After a few minutes the energy from the food kicked in though, and we decided to soldier on – plus we had told quite a number of people that we would be walking 50km and we didn’t want to do less. Never underestimate the power of peer pressure! We ended our day by doing the City to Sea walkway.
The sense of achievement is still lingering with me now, five days on. I highly recommend other teams do a long walk before the actual event.
Lessons learned
- Knee braces can not be praised enough – the brace I wore turned my weak knee into a super bionic knee—though doing strengthening exercises is still the way to go for a long term solution.
- Wet feet = prune feet = walking on wrinkles. Surprisingly this is much more painful than walking on blisters. So the lesson learnt is to make sure you always have dry socks and shoes to change into – preferably before your feet start resembling prunes.
- It’s not the muscles that give out. After walking 50km my feet and joints hurt, but my muscles were still in quite good condition. Make sure you focus on strengthening joints and toughening feet as well as other training.
- ‘Grazing’ continuously is important, especially at the beginning of a walk. As the day wore on I became less and less interested in food—which is a very strange thing for me.
- Everyone has highs and lows but as long as someone on the team is at a high point when others are at a low point, the team as a whole will keep going.
The Ministry of Silly Walks team. L-R Ines Gessler, Elizabeth Holland, Lynne White, Paul Gilbert. Photo: Ministry of Silly Walks.
Top photo credit: The view from Mt Kaukau. Aidan Wojtas via Flickr. CC BY 2.0
Thumbnail photo credit: Michael McCauslin via Flickr. CC BY 2.0
Sun February 12, 2012 @ 09:25 PM
