Why LEJOG and Why LEJOG on foot?

LEJOG or JOGLE?

The idea of walking north until the end of the land fascinates me. So I'm a LEJOGer.

Pat Jilks decided to walk the end-to-end from north to south and flew from Gatwick to Inverness, catching buses to Wick and John o'Groats.

"It was just how I wanted to do it," she said, "and psychologically, I'd be walking towards home."  

Why LEJOG?

"Because it's there." 

That famous quote has been attributed to George Mallory in his response to a journalist from the New York Times who asked him why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. 

Because it's there is the sort of answer I expect an educated man like Mallory would have thrown at a reporter to shut him up. It's glaringly scant for a mountainous challenge like the first ascent of Everest, or even for LEJOG, and I'd be doing Mallory's expedition a disservice to use that phrase out of context. Wade Davis the historian who wrote Into The Silence about the expedition analysed the war records of each of Mallory's team and found one great commonalty that distances him and his generation from me and mine: 

"They would have seen so much death that death had nothing more to teach them, save that of their own. They were prepared to accept levels of risk unimaginable before the war."

With this in mind, it's easier to appreciate Mallory's motivation when he said:

"If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. This is what life means and what life is for."

War taught Mallory and his fellow survivors that life is for living. He also said something else that resonates with me because it puts into words a state of mind I encounter during and shortly after a particularly brutal slog:

"To struggle and to understand. Never the last without the first. That is the law."

That is Mallory's Law. He was 37 years old when he died. 

"I am 37 years old and wondering if I still have it in me."

Independent filmmaker Ron Lamothe who made the other Call of the Wild film about doomed adventurer Chris McCandless said of his own efforts to retrace McCandless's steps, "Years before Into the Wild was published I would run into others who knew and identified with the McCandless story. For many of my generation he was already a sort of cult figure. Anyway time passes. I teach high school for a while, try the ex-pat thing in Prague and then move to western Mass' where thankfully I discover film making. I end up back in school. I get married. Have my first child. Life is moving forward in predictable ways. And yet for some reason Chris McCandless remains in the back of my mind, so much so that I decide to make a documentary film about him, retracing his travels all the way to Alaska. But again life intervenes. There's another move and another baby, another film, another programme, and yet another move; every time I try to start the McCandless film something else comes up that takes priority. Before I realise it I am 37 years old and wondering if I still have it in me, unsure even if I think about McCandless in the same way I once had. I guess the time had come to either make this film and get it out of my system or get off the pot, as they say."

My circular walk on Sunday 29th January 2017 coincided with the Australian Open final between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer which I listened to on my portable radio. Federer, considered by many commentators as past his best won his 18th Grand Slam and his first win against Nadal in the Australian Open having lost three times previously: 

"Roger Federer rewound his career by about ten years to edge out his old rival Rafael Nadal in a sensational Australian Open final to take his eighteenth Grand Slam title at 35 [...] the incredible denouement between two truly remarkable players, with Federer belying his age at the end" (Mike Dickson, Mail Online, 29/01/17).

Belaying his age at 35. I'm 34. When I walk LEJOG I'll be 35. 

It seems to be the right time in my life to attempt something like LEJOG. I'm more determined than I used to be. I am more my own master. I love walking and I love the country. Domestic life is stable. I can afford to take a couple of months off work.  And If I don't do it now, will I ever do it? Pat Jilks said she felt the urge to tackle this walk before she exploded with frustration. She too managed to accrue sufficient savings and time off.

LEJOGer Mark Moxon who walked the end-to-end at 33 said he came up with the idea in Ghana after a failed attempt to walk across Africa (and after enjoying "one too many cold beers").

Some trekkers make records. Moxon highlights runner Andrew Rivett's record breaking end-to-end run of 9 days 2 hours and 26 minutes.

The time has come to make this happen and get it out of my system, or get off the pot, as they say.

Why LEJOG on foot?

I started distance walking in April 2011 at the age of 28. Why? 

I woke up one sunny spring morning with a stoned hangover and the realisation that if I didn't get up and get out of the house on that day at that time, I would never do so, or do anything, ever. The winter before I did some casual running in the countryside south of Basingstoke where a small hill gave me a commanding view of Hannington's TV mast which occupies a hilltop on the other side of the Loddon valley. In daytime the mast looks like a slender missile perched on the hill; at nighttime it's lit brightly with red warning lights to alert pilots. I grew up staring at that TV mast wondering exactly what it was, where it was and how to get there - an ambition I wasn't to realise until decades later. 

In 2008 my friend Kevin first informed me that it was possible to walk from Hook to Basingstoke, a distance of about 5 miles. He undertook this walk regularly and had done so since the 1990s. I was slightly offended by this because he a South African knew the area where I'd grown up much better than I did. He also casually disposed of many of the objections I threw up around trivial issues like access rights, lighting fires, the Countryside Code, sleeping on the ground, time keeping, drinking whisky at 6 AM and rough camping  in England. He lived more freely than I did. Compared to Kevin I was a stuffed shirt in a cubicle. This was a revelation. I needed to know more.

We went rough camping in a private woodland near Hook in Hampshire. It was mid-summer. The woodland was mixed pine and deciduous, and littered with the usual junk one finds in woodlands in this area: pheasant pens, keep out/private signs and gamekeeper trails. Kevin brushed my concerns aside with an "Ah fuck 'em Bruce, have a beer" - and that was that. I drank a beer and watched as Kevin assembled a tarpaulin shelter and lit a fire. We drank a lot and we talked about anything and everything, we cooked sausages over the coals of the open fire and we weren't bothered by anyone or anything. I woke up cold in the morning on the bare earth with my heels in the ashes listening to the thump in my head. I felt like shit but I was feeling like I was more free than I had been the day before. This might sound particularly daft to you adventurous types but for me it was the beginning of a shift in fundamental ideas that have affected the rest of my life. 

We camped in the same woodland in mid-winter the following year and in the morning we were busted by the gamekeeper on his quad bike. He was preparing for a pheasant shoot later that day and wanted us gone. Being young and green I didn't know how to handle him. Kevin did: he said we were training for a trans-African expedition sponsored by the Arnold Schwarzenegger Foundation to assist disabled children climb Mount Kilimanjaro, he was sorry we had trespassed and he was certain it was public land. Apparently it belongs to the Right Honourable James Harris, 7th Earl of Malmesbury. Oh well. We promised we would never do it again - the children of Africa would benefit as a consequence of our fealty to his Lordship's generous countenance. The gamekeeper let us go. 

  

It became clear to me that I could go where I pleased if I really wanted to. This took a while to sink in, but when it did, I started thinking big. 

Big first materialised in the form of the treacherous and epic first journey from Basingstoke town centre to the mythically mysterious Hannington TV mast, a spur "there and back again" walk of 14 miles which was successfully accomplished in 5 hours at the expense of terrible blisters. 

This gave me confidence. I started exploring. When I found my legs I pioneered routes out of town, 20 milers to Reading, to Winchester, along Chesil Beach from West Bay to Portland, to Reading and back again, I walked 35 miles from Basingstoke to the sea in a day; Kevin and I walked from Basingstoke to the New Forest in 3 days. To get from nothing to that level of regular distance walking only took 3 months of walking every weekend. I was fit. I was alive. Everywhere I could see on the horizon I could walk to. I'd never felt better.   

With enough of the right type of training, I can walk LEJOG. I know my feet. I know what they're telling me when I've been walking for 12 hours straight and the end isn't yet in sight. I know many of my strengths. I've found many of my weaknesses. The trail has uncovered them all. As Henry Rollins said in reference to weight training, "The iron doesn't lie."

LEJOG isn't the toughest walking challenge or the longest, but it is arguably the most iconic. There is no established national trail linking extreme north and south. The route is not commercialised. There is no official guidebook. Descriptions of LEJOG come from those who have walked it themselves. I want it. I need it. It's now or never.