Some of you may be old enough to remember the last "Good" Indiana Jones film, from way back in 1989. In the climactic scenes of that film, our hero Dr. Jones, had to pass three strange and deadly tests before he could nab the Holy Grail. The grail for the Spa2Summit boys is, strangely, the summit of Pen-y-Fan. But before we reach it, we must undergo three strange and deadly tests, or training walks as we also call them. If you're a regular reader of this blog you'll know that I had blister problems on our last walk which meant I was unable to finish the final stretch with the team, and had to sit in the pub nursing a whisky...
This has caused me a few problems (the blisters, not the whisky). Hurty blisters took a week to calm down. What footwear am I going to wear? Will my feet last the distance in June? Etc., etc... To put some of these worries to bed I thought it best if I undertake the 9 miles I missed, which is what I was intending to do today. Unfortunately, for various reasons, that wasn't what happened but I still went out and did 15k, out of Cheltenham towards Leckhampton Hill, across Daisybank and Sandy Lane to Seven Springs then out toward Kilkenny, turning off toward Wistley Hill and then down through Charlton Kings to home. And guess what? No blisters! No pain of any sort in fact. I feel a little bit more in tune with the whole S2S thing again, having had my confidence knocked a few weeks ago.
I also wanted to try a couple of things out on the walk today. Firstly, the GPS unit which has very kindly been loaned to us by Garmin through Nicki at Cotswold - Brecon. I have been using Mapmyrun.com to plot our route on. I thoroughly recommend it, it's a really good tool. You can plot your route on a Google Earth style map, with the roads overlaid, but also there is a terrain map option which is really handy for plotting your way around steep ups or downs. Another excellent feature is the option of exporting your route data as a Garmin friendly GPX file. I struggled at first to get this data on to the Etrex unit, but thanks to the magic of Google found easygps which is a free program which made it, you guessed, easy. Once the route is on the unit it was very easy to follow it, and get an accurate of time, distance, speed and so forth. Very nice!
Related to that is the other thing I wanted to try out and that is averaging 4kmh. As a team, we have maintained a pretty high average speed on our previous walks. By slowing down and averaging 4kmh, we can preserve our energies but still have time for refueling stops and have a few hours as a contingency. So using the gps I tried to monitor my speed and bring it down to 4kmh. How hard is that? I'd watch the Average Speed section on the display, it would hover round about 4-5kmh, I'd put the unit away and then... I averaged 5.7. It's hard to walk slowly, I think you get a destination in mind and you just put your head down and go for it. It's something I think we really need to get dialled for the big one, tortoise and hare springs to mind!
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