Rasita My Family, My Animals, My Food

And not my last 18km.

The Walk

I’ve done it now. I have pushed myself, especially since I felt at the 16km mark I needed to stop and had reached my limit.

The morning started off early, at sunrise in fact. It was overcast, cool and very beautiful as we watched the sun rise through the light clouds. It looked like a promising start to the day. It was about 4 hours in, maybe a little earlier, that the heat started to make itself felt.

The walk started innocent enough, following some mountain bike trails which eventually led onto reasonably maintained service roads/fire breaks. When we started going places that looked unkempt, had trees across the paths and still had cobwebs across them (I caught heaps of cobwebs early on) we could almost imagine we were far from civilization, if it hadn’t been for the building site, or the houses which bordered the state forest.

It was hard going and I was grateful of the walking poles I had to use. Some downhills had loose gravel/dirt and slivers of fine, but sharp rocks on them. These were most frequent on the downhills which you couldn’t actually see the path beyond until you were almost on top of them. It certainly was good practise, and we kept a nice steady pace averaging around 4km/hr despite the terrain.

There was one uphill, that even my hubby said nope to last time he went cycling in this area. It was steep and took us to where we wanted to go, off the beaten track and to the service roads.

I must thank Audrey for her map reading skills as she was the one who guided us and without I would have been lost. I felt a little confused about direction that day.

Overall, it was good fun and I will do it again (I have to if I want to do 100km in August), but first I want to recover from this walk. Apart from a little chafing under my arms and sore muscles, I have a monster blister on my right heel which was caused by a teeny tiny stone which got in my shoe at the very beginning and I was unable to get out.