LEJOG 2017

Doubt All the early enthusiasm has gone. Doubt creeps in to my thoughts. It suggests that spending too much time away from home - time away from loved ones, a month and a half off work unpaid that will drain away my finances - is a bad idea. Will I be able to cope with the schedule - 1,000 miles in 6 weeks? That means walking 24 miles a day, every day. For me, 24 miles is a standard training walk I can do drunk, backwards, at night in a hurricane. But not day after day after day. That is a different animal. I will need to become a different animal too. Forget the mile counting, I'll be walking on the clock. One third of my day needs to be walking. This is a 9-5 job. 8 hours a day. Done. If I can't do that I'm screwed. Why the schedule? The guys who are currently walking LEJOG are just taking too damn long. Day 60. Day 65. Day 70. Day 80...I don't have time for all that faffing! It's not in my nature to dawdle - and I'm not saying you guys are dawdling, b...

One person's trail trash is another's trail treasure The more often I explore, the more treasures I find. These happy discoveries are always a welcome surprise and the variety of the things I find amazes me and invites speculation on the history of the objects.  A friend helpfully displaying a roe deer skull In summer 2011 I found a TomTom satnav at the edge of a field near a busy road, thrown presumably from the window of a speeding vehicle by an enraged delivery driver inconvenienced by the infernal machine's contradictory instructions. At the end of the same field on the same evening I found one of those wide metal hoop fly fishing nets abandoned by a poacher, entangled on a barbed wire fence on the bank of the River Loddon, right under one of those aggressively written "Private No Fishing!" signs. Later that year, a little further along the same route, I found a large bag of sweets carelessly discarded by a child on Halloween, which I helped myself to. ...

Planning I want to try and avoid talking about my plans for LEJOG with the fanaticism of a prepper reviewing shiny new kit. And I want to keep this simple so there's less to screw up. The end-to-end on foot challenge breaks down into simple units which can be dealt with separately: experience, health and fitness, timescales, navigation, where to stay and what to carry. Note: the objective is to get there quickly by covering as much distance as possible as efficiently as possible. Experience I haven't done a thousand mile thu-hike before. 1,000 miles was my total mileage in 2016. Doing it in one go will be a different experience. I have some experience with multi-day walks involving O/S map navigation and rough camping - and I'm treating LEJOG in the same way, on a larger scale.   Health and fitness I've been distance walking since 2011 and have notched up a few thousand miles worth of experience. Training in 2016 laid the foundations for distance walking i...

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 t he historian who wrote  Into The Silence  ab...

I've posted my walking calendar for 2016 because it outlines what walking means to me in its most basic units: time and distance. It also hints at fitness, stamina, endurance, fortitude and other nice words. Some of the day walks were done alone. All of the larger multi-day walks involved my walking buddy. Note: these are bare-bones calendar entries and they miss out the details that made those walks unique. January 23rd Jan (Sat): 25 miles (Basingstoke circular/training route) TOE INFECTION - OOA until - [correction: it was gout as I suspected; I was misdiagnosed by the GP] February 21st Feb (Sun): 10/12 miles (Sarah's route around town) 27th Feb (Sat): 25 miles (Basingstoke circular/training route) March 1st March (Tue): 15 miles (work and back x 5) 4th March (Fri): 18 miles (out to Sherfield on Loddon via Wildmoor Lane and back) 6th March (Sun): 20 miles (Winchester to Basingstoke) 13th March (Sun): 23 miles (Reading to Basi...

Distance walking has a habit of uncovering truths and secrets one did not know about oneself.  I'm interested to see what's left of me after LEJOG. How it shapes me as it's shaped others.  Journalist Michael Herr heard a soldier remark after surviving combat in Vietnam, "I've been scaled. I'm all smooth now." Now that's interesting...I want to know what smooth means.  Mountaineer George Mallory knew that to struggle  leads to understanding. I want to understand what it's like to live to move and move freely, to experiment being nomadic, to slip anchor and drift north east with the wind until the end of the land. Hopefully this journal will be of interest to fellow LEJOGers and JOGLEers, or anyone else who's setting out on what LEJOGer Mark Moxon called "this ridiculous walk." If you have any questions, get in touch. Sam.