Preparation: Week 1

It feels so good to finally have a plan and date set for my walk to Merritt.

Week one of preparation went pretty well. Just shy of 194km. Sundays are my long walk training days. I’m aiming for 50km today. We can talk about that later.

I suppose there wasn’t a whole lot to the last week other than getting comfortable with longer distances. I got used to the weight of the backpack faster than I thought I would. I’ve got my backpack packed with almost everything I’ll be taking with me; I still have a few adjustments to make. The biggest surprise is how much better my back feels in general now. My posture without the bag feels better, my back feels better in bed, and in the morning too. I have about 4.5kg in the backpack when I start walking, but as I eat snacks and drink water and coffee, the bag gets lighter. I’ve been stopping for a short break every two hours or so because…

My biggest hurdles at the moment, are battery related. Keeping my devices charged for a 24-hour journey is going to be tough, especially listening to music, taking pictures, videos, and writing. It sucks my battery up pretty fast. Ideally, I want to do the walk in under 20 hours, but I need to make sure I put safety first. Walking in circles around the neighbourhood is significantly different than walking to another town, along a stretch of road with no mobile service.

I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff in preparation for the journey. I almost died laughing at a story of a person who tried a 100km walk in 24 hours and all they did to prepare was two 30km walks, and one 50km walk. It didn’t go well for them, they made it, but it was not as easy as they thought it would be. I’m pretty confident I'll be just fine. The temperature last week and this upcoming week is about what it will be like in September too, so that is nice,

All this walking has done wonders for my brain. I wonder how long I can handle bologna bun-wiches…

I want to work on some different play lists for walks. I want a list of songs about walking. And a playlist of songs about rainbows, but that is also a story for another time. Different songs, styles, and podcasts all have different effects on me while I’m walking. I hope to figure out a lot more about that for myself. Once I get it worked out, I will share the playlists on here.  

One week down, 13 to go…