Yes you can .......

Last Friday I set out at 7 o’clock from the Kellaway Building Supplies branch in Bath to walk the 84 miles along the Kennet and Avon canal and River Kennet to the outskirts of Reading. The plan was a simple one; walk and don’t stop until the 84 miles were done in under 48 hours. 84 in 48 had a certain asymmetry about it that was attractive. Like all personal challenges, there has to be an element of jeopardy at its core, the chance that it would fail, to both make it worthwhile personally, as well as being a meaningful fundraiser. I finished the 84 mile hike in 32 hours and 42 minutes. When I stopped in Reading my feet were a mess and I was shuffling along like an old man. Every muscle and joint in my lower body hurt, but I had finished.

This blog isn’t about the physical aspects of the hike, it is about the mental ones. The money that I was raising was designed to support my charity’s mental health programme. The overnight period is always bad on any endurance trial , for me the hours between 2 and 5am are the pits, and this one was made worse by a dense, cold fog that sapped my physical and mental energy in equal amounts. Walking alongside a canal when you can only see a few feet ahead of you and you are stumbling and falling regularly is tiring in so many ways. When daylight came around 0630 I was close to packing it in, but I didn’t. Why not?

Putting the physical pain aside for a while, the mental fatigue that I was experiencing was a chunky problem to overcome. The distance seems never ending, and as you are slowing down, it seems to take forever to cover each km. It wears you down. So, during the night I had taken every opportunity to sit for a moment on a bench and gather my thoughts, and each time I came back to a number of themes that kept me going. I had a back-up plan for leaving the path and could call on people to come and get me if I needed it, and I was walking alone and so I wouldn’t be leaving anyone else to carry on alone - that took away some pressure. Jumping ship would have been fairly straight-forward. But each time the thought of quitting came into my head, it was overtaken by other more powerful thoughts.

Firstly, I knew that the physical pain was time limited; it would be gone in a few days, so I could ‘dismiss’ that as a thought or reason for stopping. Secondly, many people had handed over their hard-earned cash to sponsor me and so I had a responsibility to them to give this everything I had. But the main strength I drew on was that I knew Evie was with me. I could almost ‘feel’ her hands in my back pushing me along. I talked to her constantly. I also knew that whatever discomfort I was feeling was nothing in comparison to the pain that she had endured in the early days of her brain tumour. Put simply I could not let her down.

When I met Sean (back up team) in Newbury for the much-needed bacon butties, I needed a plan. That plan was to break down the remaining 32 km into small manageable chunks and tackle them one at a time. As I said to Sean, I needed to manage my own expectations. I put plans in place to face down the fear of failure and make sure that I gave myself every chance of success. Sean agreed that I could take ‘all day’. Patsy had said to me on the phone that morning that ‘it’s only 20 miles to go, in the overall scheme of things that’s nothing’. She was right, so I reset my mental clock as if I was starting from scratch that day, setting out on a 20 mile hike. Something that I had done dozens of times before, except that this time I had 64 miles in my legs already, so I was going to be a lot slower!

I walked from station to station along the Westbury to London railway line that was paralleling the canal and I finally reached Theale, leaving me a piffling 10km to go. At that point it was a simple case of setting out again and keeping on going until I ate up the distance. That last 10km was tough going.

I know that a lot of people doubted that I could complete the hike. At many times over the last few months, and during the hike itself, I doubted it myself. When I reached the end, I could hardly climb into the van for the drive home. But I learned some valuable lessons. You can overcome doubts, and improve your self-belief. You can manage those doubts in a way such that they fade. Looking back now, the mental pressure that I have been under since Evie died has been immense. It has worn me down. In those early years, I was convinced that I had failed to keep her alive even though I knew there was absolutely nothing that I could have done to beat the cancer. But it has also proved to me that I cannot be broken. Where a mental challenge exists, it can be treated just like any other problem; broken down into its component parts and tackled piecemeal. But like all things, it can’t be beaten alone. This hike took the support of my wife, of Sean and his bacon butties and of a daughter’s love that is beyond measure.

What pleases me most about this hike is that I also managed it without the help of anti-depressants dampening things down. So when someone asks me now if I can manage what appears to be an impossible task, I can answer “yes I can”.