The man who walked instead of slept

What were you up to at 7am last Sunday morning?

For most of you the answer will be firmly asleep. Perhaps you a few of you were up feeding your pets, preparing breakfast in bed for a loved one or simply enjoying the pleasure of a lie in. At 7am last Sunday I was finishing a marathon and regretting the decision.

“It will be fun”, “What an experience”, “it’s really not that far”: words uttered by one of my friends trying to fool us into signing up for Shine, a night walking marathon through London. I, ever the gullible individual, fell for the lies hook line and sinker.

So the night came and with a belly full of carbs and butterflies we began, one foot after the other, until night became day.

The first few miles blended in to one as London had not yet gone to bed. It wasn’t until the streets of London were only populated by drunks and darkness that time began to slow to our walking pace.

Every mile became a milestone or rather a coping mechanism, one eighth through, a fifth, a third until we reached the alluring point at which we would not walk any longer than we had already walked: halfway.

However, it wasn’t until 21 miles in that it all began to get a bit tricky. With only 5 miles left my two friends, who were also foolish enough to fall for the lies, had to pull up. That left little old me; I plugged in my headphones and thought I would just power walk the last miles. I lasted only one of those miles when the pain started to slither in.

What I didn’t know back then was that the pain was a stress fracture to my foot and I just thought I was getting tired and should power through. With two miles left the pain began to really radiate through my whole body. I sat outside the Houses of Parliament, closed my eyes and tried to unmake the world. Twenty minutes past and with the rain falling I realised that there was no other choice I must finish.

The end was reached slowly taking me 9 hours and 50 minutes to walk from Battersea Powerstation, around the city of smoke and right back again.

Despite all the pain every dark cloud has a silver lining: over £900 raised for Cancer Research UK. So if you fancy donating and easing my pain as I keep my foot up to heal please click on the link.

While I may be forbidden from exercise for a month I will keep my goal of doing a run or endurance event for charity once a month for a year, even if it does leave me in a cast!