Last long walk before Château-Thierry

March 14, 2015TrainingChâteau-Thierry 24 hour race, Generation UCan, parkrun, Reigate Priory parkrunadmin

In two weeks time I will be walking laps around a 2,400 meter road circuit at Château-Thierry in France for 24 hours.

So today was my last long training day before I start to taper towards the race.

It also happened to be parkrunday – the one day a week that I go for a run. As with last week I decided to walk approximately three hours to a parkrun that I hadn’t done before – Reigate Priory parkrun, and then run 5km before walking another 4 hours back home.

Last weekend I set the alarm for 4:30am on both Saturday and Sunday and both times the alarm woke my wife. Whilst she is extremely supportive of the ridiculous amount of time I spend walking (over 100 hours already this year), she wasn’t too happy about being woken up at 4:30am two days in a row. In fact she wasn’t too happy about being woken at 4:30am just once.

So this week I tried the ‘natural alarm’ – drink two large glasses of water before going to bed and the call of nature will wake me in about 6 hours. And it worked perfectly – I was awake at 4:25am. The only problem was that the ‘alarm’ also went off at midnight and again at 2am!

IMGN0594_thm Anyway, I had decided to run Reigate Priory parkrun which was about a 3 ½ hour (or slightly more) walk from home. So I decided to drive a few miles and parked the car in Thames Ditton, starting my walk at exactly 6am. My planned route was 14 miles meaning I should arrive at parkrun with about 10 minutes to spare before a 9am start, but I didn’t count on taking a ‘shortcut’ which went in the wrong direction and added almost 2 miles to my planned walk!

At 8am I realised that I was going to be late and I increased the pace by 45 to 60 seconds per mile. Good training, but when it came to running my hamstrings were tight and my 5km parkrun was a minute slower than last week.

I actually didn’t arrive at parkrun until 9:05am but fortunately they were running late and hadn’t started yet.

As soon as I had completed my run – in a slow (for me) 24:50 – I purchased a bottle of water from the local cafe and mixed in a sachet of Generation Ucan to give me some energy for the return trip, and then headed off towards Dorking. After walking 3 hours to get to parkrun, my plan was to walk west for an hour or so before heading back towards Thames Ditton via Leatherhead. This would give me a bit of variety rather than returning via the same route I had already walked, and would also enable me to avoid going back up the steep hill out of Reigate. As a race-walker I prefer to avoid hills if I can.

The walk back to Thames Ditton was a little longer than planned (22 miles) and took almost 4 ½ hours, but in total I completed a little over 40 miles for the day and am satisfied that my training has me in good condition for Château-Thierry.

Todays map — Todays route showing my ‘shortcut’ on the way down to Reigate

Garmin Art – RichardWalksLondon.com

March 8, 2015TrainingGarmin Art, Garmin Connect, Green Park, London City, Map My Run, Southwark Bridgeadmin

This blog is called RichardWalksLondon, yet most of my walks are outside of London City itself. So today I decided to go for a walk around the streets of London.

Starting on the A4 next to Green Park, and finishing near the Southwark Bridge I used my Garmin to write the name of this blog across the streets of London. This is referred to as “Garmin Art”.

Garmin Art - Richard Walks London (.com) map — Richard Walks London (.com) map

Garmin Art is not as easy as I thought it would be

I was limited by the layout of the streets which made it difficult to form the letters exactly as they should appear. Letters containing diagonal lines such as the capital ‘R’ at the start and the ‘w’ and ‘k’ in ‘walks’ were especially difficult, and in order to do the ‘London’ I decided to drop down to the river after completing the ‘walks’ as I was unable to fit ‘London’ into the layout of the streets to the right of ‘walks’.

‘London’ was further complicated when I found that the street that was going to be the left side of the letter ‘n’ was closed to all traffic including pedestrians, and as a result the ‘n’ had to be moved to the right and became a lot smaller than planned.

I used MapMyRun to plan the route. It took several attempts to work out how to fit the letters and words into the street layout, and the planning time took longer than actually walking it. In the end the walk was only 10 miles although I have also planned a much larger route (100 miles in total) which I might do during the summer.

The maps for todays walk can also be viewed on:

Map My Run: http://www.mapmyrun.com/workout/896248073
Garmin Connect: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/714014579

Somewhere past Feltham

March 7, 2015Trainingparkrun, Stains Reservoirsadmin

My wife asked me this morning (at 5am) where I was going for parkrun today.

I couldn’t remember and replied that it was somewhere past Feltham – a small understatement!

It was Upton Court parkrun that I was heading to – a 3 hour, 15 mile walk there followed by a 4 1/4 hour, 21 mile walk home.

I had decided to run Upton Court parkrun today as it was the closed parkrun to where I live that I hadn’t run previously.

I left home just before 6am which meant that I would have to walk a good pace without getting lost in order to get to parkrun before the 9am start, and covered the 15 miles in 2 hours and 52 minutes. In order to stay on track I used Google Maps on my cellphone to give me directions and arrived at Upton Court Park with 15 minutes to spare.

After parkrun I decided to take a different route home, intending to walk around the southern side of the Stains Reservoirs, but ended up missing a turnoff and walking around the top of the reservoirs instead.

I did get the opportunity though to walk up onto a walkway that goes between two of the reservoirs and took a few photos, but as the walkway was going in the opposite direction to home I decided not to take the walkway, and saved it for another day.