Almost a Munro!

Trailwalker Training Walk 11 - 26/04/08 with Sasha and Katie - 18.5 miles from Dorking to Leith Hill and back. Av speed 2.48 mph. Total vertical ascent 2750ft

A Munro, I'm told, is a Scottish mountain over 3000ft high. Well out total vertical ascent was only 2750ft but it was close enough for me!! For locals, that's the equivalent of going up and down Box Hill almost 6 times, so all in all a pretty good effort I feel.

However my Memory Map toy tells me me that the Trailwalker event is some 8000ft in total ascent, so we've got to get used to the hills!

Over all this was a good walk, though it did seem that we went slowly overall for some reason, and I'm not really sure why. Provided the path was not muddy we kept up a good pace and never really stopped for long, other than for half an hour at Leith Hill for lunch (where we were disturbed for the whole time by a bunch of D of E kids mucking about!) and another 10 minute stop for plasters and a wee rest. We had a couple of toilet breaks and the like, but did that really account for our slow mph? Maybe the mud slowed us down as we gingerly picked our way round patches that we kept encountering, especially on the Wotton Estate, that much of the early part of the walk was on. We didn't get badly lost ever, though we made a few small wrong turns, and found one footpath blocked, which caused a bit of a diversion.

We're doing a full marathon distance on 11 May along part of the South Downs Way so hopefully assuming that is reasonably marshalled etc we should be a little quicker.

I think by and large we fared well, though Katie's hip/groin seems to play up after about 10 miles, so hopefully a trip to a physio might help sort that out. It's probably muscular, but worth checking as 50 miles is a long way to go if it was causing her the discomfort it was whenever she went up a slope.

You'll see from the maps that we didn't do the full circle, but following our enforced diversion we decided we deserved a car to pick us up, so fortunately Katie's boyfriend was able to come and rescue us. we'd done out target of 18 miles so nothing lost!

I've got some mutterings in the camp about boredom whilst walking, so any ideas as to how to tackle it gratefully received!!