The Space Hoppers

The 2011 Trailtrekker was one of the hardest, if not the hardest, physical challenge any of us have faced. On the way around, we found ourselves discussing how we would try and explain the difficulty to people. It sounds straightforward - 100km - 62.1 miles - two and a half marathons. People do ultramarathons of that kind of distance. The winning team, a team of runners, completed the course in just over 14 hours; they quite literally got back in time for tea. And therein lies the biggest difference.

The route

To understand, maybe we need to go back a few months. We realised that we all had the necessary level of fitness to take on the event. OK; 62.1 miles is a long way, but you just put on foot in front of the other until they tell you to stop. It's not cross-country skiing. The problem, as Oxfam's own literature confirmed to us, is that over that kind of distance, any slight twinge in a shoe turns into a blister. Every slight ache in a knee turns into a crippling limp. Every slight gait irregularity can end up meaning shooting pains. Forgetting to adequately hydrate, wear sun protection or pack the right hot and cold weather gear can mean an early - and ignominious - end to the event. The weather can change in moments, so the required kit list is two pages long - and you use almost all of it. Mountain Rescue even stop you a few times and search your kit to confirm it's all there. This is serious stuff.

The key is not really about training, but practice and preparation. We had several months to find out what our bodies did under stress. So we planned in a series of long walks: 22 miles on road, 26 miles over the South Downs, all of these being early starts and late finishes. In the beginning, we discovered exactly what our bodies did - fall apart. Boots were too old and blistered our feet indiscriminately in the last few miles. Shorts rubbed. And rubbed. And rubbed - and we waddled home with gasps of pain whistling between our teeth. London's various branches of Blacks, Millets and Decathlon were graced with our discerning presences as the kit bill began to mount and we invested in exactly the gear we now knew we needed. None of these walks should have even bothered us, but instead they presented checklists of tactical changes each time.

Training on the Thames footpath.

During one of these walks, I sustained a strain injury to my left knee while walking on a steep grassy camber; barefoot, carrying my horrible blistering boots. By the end of that walk the knee wouldn't bend without sending lances of pain up the length of my leg. It took 6 weeks of physiotherapy, ultrasound and painful exercises before we left for the Yorkshire Dales, and it was still throbbing on the way up. For the length of the walk I was checking my gait and mainlining ibuprofen, and at every checkpoint I had a military routine of icing, stretches and massage. It genuinely could have ended the event for me at any time, but thankfully it didn't.

By the time we left, we actually had some inkling of what we were about to face, which more than any of us had had when we first read about it. One of our diligent support crew had dug up the previous year's results, where out of the huge number of teams that started the event, less than half made it to the end. Sobering stuff, but we were determined!

We slept in tents close to the start line the night before the event, waking after 5 hours of sleep at 4.30am to a dawn chorus of mobile phone alarms. Staggering out of our tents into the freezing cold, we headed for the showers. We all had a mental preparation routine from all that training, chiefly surrounding our feet: wash, dry thoroughly, talc feet and boxers, apply vaseline to sensitive areas. Dress. We set about this routine with all the adaptability that you might expect from people who have woken up at what is - let's be fair - the middle of the night.

Except the showers were shut.

This was not a good start; still, there was a cooked breakfast waiting, and by the time we headed for the start line, we were either prepared or prepared enough to make it to checkpoint 1, "only" 17.6km in. So off we went, and enjoyed what was essentially a really nice walk. The route from Skipton to Malham is the kind of distance that a walker might take on as a long walk on a walking holiday, then settle down in a pub and enjoy the scenery, so by the time we made it there to our grinning support crew, we were in good spirits. We had worked out (naively, in retrospect) that a challenging target time was 24hrs and we were well ahead of our splits to make that time.

Go go go...

A word about the support crew: they were superstars. We all remain convinced that for a lot of people, success or failure on the Trailtrekker hinges on the skills and planning of their support team, and on that basis, we had every advantage. We were greeted with grins, chairs, hot food, replacement gear, refilled water carriers, massages, ice and everything we needed at each stop, even though it turns out that they had to contend with genuine travel issues getting from checkpoint to checkpoint, lack of sleep, bad weather and darkness. Thankyou guys!

Malham Cove

We moved off on the steep climb between CP1 and CP2, the most spectacularly beautiful of the stages, due to the fact that daylight was still very much in evidence and the route takes in Malham Cove and Fountain's Fell, commanding incredible views of Yorkshire. Or at least - would have done. On the way out of CP1, Mountain Rescue checked our packs to confirm we had warm and wet weather gear; a weather front was coming in. As we climbed Fountain's Fell, we found ourselves surrounded by thick low cloud and the majority of the stage was spent in the oppressive, quiet, damp clutches of the weather. Around this point, all mobile phone reception disappeared, and, although we didn't know it yet, that was the last decent signal we would see until Skipton hoved back into view the next morning.

Physically we were all still firing on all cylinders, if starting to get sore, and around 3pm we arrived into Horton In Ribblesdale, where the checkpoint had the air of a carnival - because, as it turns out, there was a carnival on the go. And the finish line of a mountain marathon. We feasted on hot beef stew, handled our footcare routine, and headed off, via a cameraman who interviewed us on our experiences so far. We hope our suggestion that a long walk is best powered on ibuprofen and whisky makes it into the promo videos; we were quite serious! By this point we were on a steady oral dose of both.

It was at this checkpoint that we encountered our first casualties; people struck down with horrific blisters mostly. The sense of seriousness was palpably increasing, and we were thoroughly kit-checked (head torch, full waterproofs, hat, gloves, survival bags) before being allowed to leave, weaving ourselves through the unsympathetic runners, driving through our poles with renewed determination.

Excuse me mate - could you take a photo?

Yes, poles. We walked with poles. Why? Because they take somewhere between 20% and 50% of the cumulative stress off your knees and ankles, which is what will destroy you on this sort of walk. In the safety briefing beforehand we were told to use them for almost every step we took, along with an exasperated rant about the British attitude towards them - "go abroad and everyone uses them. Here for some reason we consider them an old person thing". Of course, that didn't make us like it. I had to use them; any break I could give my weak knee could mean the difference between finishing and not. The others ended up having to use them too from this checkpoint onwards; we had already walked further than any of our training walks after all, and we would grow to hate the constant clattering of pole into gravel and the inability to easily eat food or don or remove clothing without having to deal with the evil aluminium horrors.

We set off knowing that it was on this next stage that night would fall, that it was the longest stage by far at around 6-7 hours, and that by the time we got to CP3, at around 10pm, we would be exhausted. Our hot meal and foot prep had left us feeling refreshed after CP2, but we were sore, and deeply aware of the fact that we were hours off the halfway point, and the temperature was going to drop.

This halfway point came as we tacked up the side of a mountain into a monstrous headwind. Until the painful, giddy final stage, it was around this time that we faced the darkest part of the walk psychologically. That mountainous trek was spent in unaccustomed silence, as we drove through poles and feet, battling wind that made breathing difficult on a steep gradient that sapped the tired muscles. It wasn't until one of us broke the silence with a simple: "I hope everyone else is feeling as shit as I am" that the spell was broken and we all collectively realised that this was just simply a hard part of the walk and it would be over, rather than being our own private, individual failure.

From that point on there was an awful lot of downhill through the water stops at Cam Farm and Deepdale (by this point we had become somewhat psychologically reliant on the consistently bright, chirpy and helpful volunteer and event staff at these wonderfully well stocked and organised break points). This included the longest sections of concrete road which not only taxed the legs but also increased the annoyingness level of our clattering poles, motivating Nick to proclaim that he would never use them again (caveat: unless they're necessary!).

The casualties mounted further - we saw people with hypothermia wrapped in silver blankets. Whole teams sat dejectedly in circles looking at the remains of a team-mate's feet. We were still going strong but it was starting to become obvious why this event has such a high drop-out rate.

We didn't get many photos of the night-time.

As darkness fell, we were passed by an event vehicle and told to light the glowsticks dangling from our packs. These ethereal, dancing blue lights would soon become one of the few sights we would be able to make out in the distance for the next 6 hours. Shortly afterwards we lit our headtorches, and shortly after that, we stumbled into CP3 in Buckden - now really starting to show the miles but still a good 20 minutes ahead of our target time. Our support crew tell us that they too were suffering at this point from the early start, long day and frustrating directions, and resorted to doing the Charleston in the long grass of the checkpoint field to keep themselves entertained.

We were cared for tenderly on arrival, fed up with bowlfuls of stew by the light of many head torches, had an essential laugh or two and then finally, reluctantly - after a mammoth one hour rest stop - headed off on what was the shortest stage at 11km. Unfortunately, it also had one of the steepest climbs of the entire event.

We had passed quite a number of teams in the last stage, which had been good for our confidence. Whereas in the first two stages, where it often felt like we were in a column of Trailtrekker walkers, from this point on, things thinned out considerably. What we didn't realise, as we left CP3, was just how much that essential one hour stop had cost us. As we approached the steep climb towards the end of the next stage, we started to re-pass teams that we'd overtaken hours before. Not that it was easy to tell; by this point we were walking in a bit of a dreamstate. Ahead of us was a pool of light cast by our headtorches, and a little further ahead, usually a will-o-the-wisp of distant glowsticks dancing around the walkers' packs. Every time we stopped, to adjust clothing or make emergency running repairs, the white glare of headtorches would appear behind us and urge us on. Tiredness was setting in, and a few of us were jumping at shadows.

By the time we staggered into CP4 in the pitch darkness around 2am, we apparently looked like death warmed up, but we were determined to make this one a quick stop and not lose so much time. It was easier said than done, though - normal foot repairs had become difficult as hands no longer reached feet. Food was hard to digest and soup was the best we could manage. Two of us had developed a tendon inflammation in our feet which made it hard to lift our toes, so we'd had to adopt a flat-footed walking action, which meant that blisters were starting to form. The temptation to fall asleep in our chairs was hard to resist.

The final phase was 22km, from Conistone back to Skipton, but we knew that within an hour we would start to see daylight. We plodded on, and would have happily slowed down to a crawl and made it in in a perfectly respectable time, were it not for a text message from our support team:

"Space Hoppers currently 24th and on the home straight".

Talk about a red rag to a bull. Ahead of us were two teams, about 400m ahead, and we had been consistently overtaking for the past few hours. We did a stock check: we were carrying a few injuries, we were exhausted in a way with which caffeine could no longer help, we had a few blisters, it was around 10 miles to the finish, and all we wanted to do was get to bed.

So let's get there quicker.

After all, we had clearly adopted a long pit-stop strategy and were on the fresher, softer tyres. Everyone else had all the same disadvantages, but we had all the advantages. We were full of stew and half crazed through painkiller misuse. We drove harder, took the two teams ahead and focused on the horizon, always looking out for the next team's heads to appear over a hill.

We arrived at a point in the walk which we recognised from one of our training walks (we had actually made the effort to travel up to Skipton for a weekend a few weeks previously) and recognising the home straight gave us even more impetus as we started to reel in team after team. Around this time, we realised we were running on fumes. We could just about sustain our furious pace, but we were having micro-sleeps and heads were lolling. We must have looked like the living dead as we cheerfully passed teams with a "good morning" and a rictus grin.

On our training walk in the area, we had encountered a bull which had given us such a Withnail experience (run at him, flapping your arms) that we had christened him Geoff Woade. Sadly he'd been moved somewhere else (presumably to spare walkers the opportunity to scream movie quotes at each other in a state sleep-deprived histeria) but the memory was enough to give us a last bit of mirth and wake us up from our collective reveries, and we had one last push on the last few miles into Skipton.

As we arrived into the town, we passed another team, limping. One of them had such bad thigh chafing that blood was spattered down his trouser legs. Despite our destroyed state, we all gave thanks for our intense preparation and for the professionalism of our support team, while at the same time realising that in the last couple of hours we had overtaken seven teams. Go nutrition!

That's actually a bottle of Black Sheep Bitter.

And then we finished. On crossing the line, our supporters provided us with beer to spray and the news that we were in 18th place, so that last push had been worth it.

The camera work says it all.

And then we collapsed. While we slept, three of the 7am start teams came in with faster times overall, so our final placing was a very respectable 21st. Only 50 teams completed the course, one third of the number who had started the event.

And maybe that is the crucial figure that sums up why walking this sort of distance non-stop is so hard. Walking solidly for between 22 and 32 hours is not about the walking. It's about sleep deprivation, physical resilience, friendship, teamwork, and sheer bloody-minded determination. It's not a race. But it is kind of a race.

A week later, we are walking normally again.