🗂🗓Ok, so I must have been giddy the day after the last day of work, as when this morning, hubby said he’ll get up for a walk, I spontaneously asked if he wanted to walk my new route with me!
📏📐I fear I hadn’t said the length, or we didn’t consider it really. Walking a route that I’m training to run should be easy doable, right?
🏃🏻♀️This was my 11.6k route that I have yet to fully run, as I’m following the magic plan and am at 8k, so never have run the whole route and wanted to walk the other way around to see how muddy the canal passages would be.
🙄🥴🙂Well.......
🏡Ok, so first thing is to say we made it. Yes, safe and sound back at home. But the first thing I did after a 3 glasses of water and a shower was head to bed to snooze for the next hour or so! 😴😴😴
🚶🏼🚶🏿♂️🚶🏿♀️It took us 3.5 hours, so not quite the quick morning walk I envisaged. And muddy does not convey the extend of muddiness. Our walking boots barely were able to stay above the mudline! And that squelch-walk for at least 3k was actually the most tiring part of the journey ! ( and no picture of the mud, as we were seriously sinking!)
🛤But we ended the route on the gorgeous former rail line stretch (salt line) that I already know from my 8k runs.
🦿🦵That was good, as by then I was seriously flagging! My knees were acting up and then my calf muscles were telling me to be very cautious with my speed.
🐌 So after slowing even more down (and after realising that that famous 10% rule should be kept even while walking), we finally made it home!
🥾🏞I’m ultra-proud of myself. I probably haven’t hiked more than 5k for ca 7-8 years, and spent years on 3-5k walks using the lovely series of Pathfinder Short Walks (those with Ordnance Survey mapping, later renamed to Crimson books totalwalking.co.uk ) , and then with my back getting more achy 🤕 over the years, even those walks stopped.
📚So it feels all my walking books have now a hope to getting used a bit more, because ...
😊💪👍🏽... because even if I was seriously flagging by the end with tired legs and calf muscles, my back held up all the way and I WALKED 11.6km!!
That’s also what running has given me!
Happy walking, running and joggling everyone!
Written by
CBDB
Graduate10
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Maybe not in the winter 🤣🤣 so the circular route might not be the one for celebrating my future 10k.
But I can double back on my former railway line and that gives me 9.4K so I just have to find a 0.6 loop of the main route.
I should perhaps recommend you take a look at the strength and flex forum CBDi 🤫 but maybe you're fast asleep after your quite brilliant "little stroll" 🤣
That is quite some morning stroll there CBDB, no wonder you needed a snooze afterwards 😳😴😴 It is wonderful how many doors this running lark seems to unlock to us, isn't it? I, like you, am discovering so much more of the area I live because of it, I am also walking more too, and enjoying yoga and the occasional squat or lunge (did I just say enjoying a squat and a lunge?!). I'm so glad you got to visit your long run route, and with your hubby too, what a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning 👍😊🚶♂️🚶♀️
Brilliant walk CBDB I know the muddy walks on that route so well. Your exercises and running have really supported you in improving your health. Just wonderful for you and hubby 👍👏🏃🏻♀️🎉
Absolutely! And it was a great (squelchy)walk to do with hubby. He’s also taller, so any dangerous deep mud patches .... 🤣🤣🤣🤣
We’re just glad we didn’t make our teenage son come with us, although we were tempted in the morning. But we would have never heard the end of it! 😂😂😂😂
I’ve got a different problem...Wales has gone into full lockdown, so although you can go out and exercise for as often and as long as you want, it should be from your front door.
I hadn’t started C25k during the first lockdown, so it wasn’t too bad walking along the main roads. During the Welsh Firebreak, I was on Consolidation Runs and just starting to dip my toes into JuJu’s Plan. I did find that jogging the walking routes was a whole different ball game though! 😫
So I’ve got the short run of W7, then head into the final week. So the 20 and 30 minutes can be run along the main road without too much difficulty, but I’ve got to find another 30 minutes from somewhere...unfortunately horrible inclines will be involved 😫
I’ll be out walking on my recovery days trying to find a bearable solution 😂
Oh I know this conundrum well. My starting points also have to be from my doorstep, and when moving up from C25k to B210k I did some consolidation runs by looping twice my old C25k route, but that felt actually quite demoralising. 😓
So I found a new route, thought it could be circular, but once I got to beyond 5k, it involved unpaved rural bendy b-roads with loads of blind corners and speeding cars. So back to pedestrian-only out-and-back routes.🙁
Similar to the Squelchy circular route: now that I know the extent of squelch on that route 😆 I’ll be accepting it rather as a reduced out-and-back route (avoiding all squelchiness) and that gets me to ca 9.3k.
So in these routes I think I need to add an annoying little loop somewhere to get to the 10k. For me, some of the routes have little loops coming of the main route, but I can tell that I feel resistant to doing them that way.
My ideal was finding a circular route of that length from my doorstep. But i have to accept that I will pragmatically have to choose to either
1) accept running 9.3km or 4.6km for my 10k/5k runs respectively and learn to be confident in saying that’s ok (in some ways the lengths are arbitrary anyway)😐🤥🤗🤫
or
2) I have to find or add little loops 😕
But driving somewhere to run a perfect distance is not an option for me, although driving to a Parkrun in the future is a different thing, and I will want to try that.
And summer will open up the Squelchy route (<— name is beginning to muddy-ly stick as well 😅).
But so you can see a similar quandary. 🧐 But my experience is that exactly that search for the right routes is also a process that is exciting and enjoyable. The anticipation to get to know the route that I walked yesterday with hubby is an example of that. It wasn’t perfect but boy did I want to get to know that whole new route and I’m so glad I did! ☺️😁
We don’t have big inclines in my vicinity, but that might be another option you can play around with, when solving that puzzle of the next perfect route. 🧩
Good luck with your search and let us know when you have found it!
Yes...My 5k /30 minute route is a there and back along 2 main roads with a couple of little evil inclines. At the furthest point I can turn left *up* towards the mountain ...or right and *down* to the canal. 🤔
Both will make some kind of circuit...but...the ‘down’ will involve some ‘up’ at some stage...and the ‘up’ has a *lot* of ‘up’, before a steep ‘down’...
I’ve just been looking through Strava...I did the ‘up’ for a walk back in April...it was a hard continuous up hill slog...maximum elevation around 300’ (90ish metres) 😫
That sounds perfect, Ima bit jealous because even if we wanted to I doubt we could find the time But a fabulous long walk for you and i’m so glad your back held up
Yes! I’ve suddenly gained more confidence again, and have this evening taken out my maps again to see which walks we could plan! Perfect for the holidays!
You will have fun planning and walking, I have 5 days off over Christmas and hoping to run or walk 5k every day to get ready for new year, work gets in the way this time of year
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week3run1 ✅. 3 x 17 mins with 1 min walks. 
How did your parkrun or (not)parkrun go?
week 2 begins! 
