This is easily the biggest physical challenge of my life, Trailwalker, walking 100km non-stop from Petersfield to Brighton. What a stupid idea I hear you say, well yes I guess it is, but all in a good cause. The good cause being Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare Trust.

As a team, the four of us are taking on this challenge, backed up by our awesome support crew. Who it turns out we wouldn’t have got close to completing it without.

After months of training, aka the odd walk here and there, the odd diversion to a cricket match and the odd rain out, the day came. The night before the start we camped in Petersfield with most of the other peple with early start times. The Gurkha’s put on a BBQ and cultural show, there was an air of nerves, excitement and rain!

Alarms set for 5am, to give time to get up and get some carbs in before the 6am start time. We went off in the first group to give ourselves the most light to walk in. When picking the start time this seemed like a great plan, what we didn’t know then was that the weather was going to be abysmal! Driving sideways rain for the first 8 hours of the walk to be exact. This hit even the most experienced walkers hard, the Gurkha’s talked about how this is the worst conditions they’d seen at a Trailwalker event and their times went down from 8 hours to 11 hours.

Once it stopped raining things got a bit better. Eventhough everything was beyond wet the sun was shining and you could see further than a few meters again. This lifted spirits, spirits were lifted even higher when our support crew returned from the dry cleaners with warm dry clothes for us!

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the experience during the walk, the pain, the emotions, the commitment. If you want to know more about it, ask me, I love talking about it 😉

We finished in around 27 and a half hours, in the top 20 or so percent. Very impressed considering the longest walk we’d ever done in the past was around the 25 miles mark. And most importantly, we raised nearly £2000!

Coming up the finishing straight.

For some reason Che and I are holding Jeff’s walking sticks?!