Our First Proper Training Walk

Our First Proper Training Walk by theshed

October 23, 2007, 11:20 am
Filed under: training

Michelle and I decided to start our training proper this last weekend and thought we’d ease ourselves in with a combined 20 mile walk, 12miles on the Saturday and 8 miles on the Sunday.  We also wanted to just get away a little bit and spend some time together.  It seems like we’ve hit that age when every weekend is filled with something, generally weddings or stag do’s or hen parties or birthdays.  Anyway, the point was we haven’t had much quality time together, just the two of us, so we thought what better to do than pick a random place to stay in and then go for some walks in the country.

So the random place we picked was a little village called Aldbourne, just on the Wiltshire-Berkshire border.  It’s near Hungerford which is a place I like because they serve nice cream teas in the Tutti Pole Tea Shop.  We stayed in The Crown pub which was very nice.  Nice accomodation, nice food and excellent service.  I’d recommend it to anyone thinking of walking in the area.  I’m not sure the locals would though.  It looks as though the pub has just undergone some refurbishment and has switched it’s focus to more of a foody family orientated pub rather than a beery pub.  I got the distinct impression that some of the locals weren’t too keen.  We loved it though.

It also turned out to be a great location since one of our walks started from there.  We tend to pick our walks from the Walking World Website.  It keeps it nice and easy and we haven’t got brave enough to plan our own yet.  On the Saturday we did a variation of the Aldbourne Circular which was 12 miles from Aldbourne up onto the Ridgeway and back down into Aldbourne and on the Sunday we walked a little circular route from Little Bedwyn.

On the Saturday morning we set off from Ramsgate quite early so that we could arive in Aldbourne in time to put down the 12mile walk.  Around this time of year Ramsgate always has some lovely sunsets and I finally managed to take a picture of one of them.  It’s not the best one I’ve ever seen but it’s the first one I’ve got a picture of.

Anyway, after a 3 hour drive we got to Aldbourne and cracked on with the walk.  Saw some tumuli and some other nice stuff but saw a really weird grass crop circle thing which was cool.

We managed to put those 12 miles away in around 4 hours which has made me worry less about covering the distances on the coast to coast in the time we have.

When we got back we checked into our room, watched TV for a bit, headed to Hungerford for a cream tea, came back for a drink in the pub, ate and watched England get beat in the Rugby World Cup Final.  Then it was bed time to get some rest for Day 2.

Woke up in the morning and had a nice hearty breakfast.  Eggs, bacon, sausages, beans and black pudding.  Washed down with copious amounts of tea and finished off with a few rounds of toast.  All very nice…until I started walking and then it all felt very heavy.  That was lesson number 2, don’t eat like a pig before a walk.

So off to little Bedwyn we toddled and the sun was blazing down as you can see from the photo…

This walk was only 8 miles and we we’re both feeling fine after the day before.  Very nice walk it was.  We got a little lost but we’re soon back on track after we had lesson 3 and 4.  Lesson 3 was that Michelle needs to calm down when we get lost.  She turns into a bit of an angry monster when she doesn’t know where we are.  Lesson 4 was that I shouldn’t be so confident when I say things that I’m not confident about, i.e. “it’s definitely down this way dear!”.  Anyway, we got back on track and stopped at the Plough in Shalbourne before heading back round to finish the walk off.

All in all a very good weekend walk.  My legs ached a little bit on Monday but nothing to worry about.  No blisters, no dramas or anything. 

So that’s our first proper training walk under our belt.  Next thing we’re going to do is walk the 16 or so miles from ramsgate to Canterbury.  We’ll have to plan our own route so it’ll be good practise sorting maps out and stuff and it’ll also be the longest walk we’ve done to date.

Wish us luck.

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