Walk

The bloody Proclaimers have a lot to answer for. Once the bespectacled brothers from Leith recorded a song about walking five hundred miles, and then five hundred more no less, anyone who admits to walking said distances was going to be called a ‘Proclaimer’. And frankly, I’d rather not be one as I can’t stand those speccy twonks. Such a label is, however, a small price to pay for walking five hundred miles and then five hundred more, especially when such an activity has been the one thing that has kept me sane through lockdown. Country Walking magazine and an associated Facebook group have set a challenge for readers and followers to walk 1000 miles in a calendar year. Last year Elaine decided to do it and completed the challenge by the middle of August. Whilst I accompanied her on many of the walks I didn’t do the challenge myself as I was training for a half marathon. This year she decided to go for it again and despite me having signed up for another half marathon, since cancelled of course, I thought I’d go for it too. You can make up your own rules for this challenge. Some people count all their steps. Others only count ‘boots on’ walks in the country. Our own rules were to count the miles we covered on walks and any others where we might have walked somewhere rather than go in the car, such as the local Morrisons which is a handy four miles to add to the total. I wasn’t counting my running miles. We started the challenge with Walk Number One on New Year’s Day when we walked from Glengarnock to Lochwinnoch and back along an old railway. Once completed, we only had 990 miles left to go. It was a good start.

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Walking is, perhaps, the most convenient form of exercise for able bodied people. Just put on some shoes and off you go. You can go as far as your fitness will allow and if you do it regularly you will quickly build up the distance you can cover. It helps if you’ve got a nice environment to walk in. Whilst simply walking on its own is not without merit, having something nice to look at whilst you do it certainly helps to maintain your enthusiasm. That usually means countryside and luckily for us there is plenty of that around here. Country Walking magazine is forever upping the benefits of a walk in the country, no surprise there of course, the clue is in the title. Not only does it help your physical fitness, it aides your mental wellbeing too. Certainly a lot of the contributors to the Facebook group relate stories of how walking has helped them deal with depression and sad episodes in their lives. Whilst I’d enjoyed walking up until this year, I’d never considered its therapeutic effect on my mental health as, quite frankly, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my mental health. I’m still not convinced there is, though others might not agree! I will admit, however, from feeling quite low on occasions recently. When lockdown started I saw my plans for this year’s trips and events quickly get cancelled one by one. Not only that, the instruction was to stay home for everything other than what was considered essential. I was well aware that I was in a better place than many to sit out lockdown. I’m retired so I had no job to worry about. The house was plenty big enough with just the two of us and it has a decent garden to sit in. It quickly became clear just how much our lives were going to change though and I soon started to feel trapped. Whether I was depressed or not I have no idea. Those poor souls who suffer from clinical depression don’t need a major change in their lives to start feeling down (though I’ve no doubt something like this can trigger it or make it worse) whereas my little episode was definitely caused by the situation. Whatever, for the first week or so of lockdown, and on one or two occasions since, I was not the happy, cheerful chappie that I normally am. Those who know me, stop tittering. I am generally quite a happy person, it’s just my face fails to convey the fact.

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The government’s restrictions on our freedom were understandable. In the long term they may prove to have been essential or maybe not, but at the time it seemed like the right thing to do. They left us just one concession. We could go outside for exercise, initially just once a day. From the very start we went out for a daily walk. We tended to go in the evening and whilst we were limited in where we could go, the chance of being outside the home for just an hour gave us something to look forward to during the long day. Whilst we would have gone had it been wet we were lucky to be blessed with the finest, driest spring on record. These walks might not have been much in the grand scheme of things but to me they was everything. Most of the walks were ‘pavement pounding’ round Troon with some a bit further afield into the surrounding country. Most of the miles we walked were pretty familiar to us but even we, who have lived here for 34 years, discovered part of our small town that we hadn’t ventured through before or even been aware of. We passed through Fullerton Woods on numerous occasions, the budding trees gradually bursting into leaf as the days passed, the bluebells first blooming and then fading whilst being serenaded by birdsong, unmasked by traffic noise as the rest of the world stayed home. We’ve got two beaches to walk on or alongside with magnificent views across the water on a clear day of the Isle of Arran, Scotland in miniature, behind which the sun would gloriously set. We walked across land reserved in normal times for golfers and just as enthusiastically through oddly quiet housing estates, windows adorned with rainbows for NHS and other key workers, hopscotch squares chalked on the pavement by school-starved children. At first the roads were virtually empty apart from the occasional police patrol. Meanwhile the empty trains that rattled along the tracks as though nothing had changed were the only thing shattering the strange, tranquil peace of the place. Troon is not the busiest place in the best of times but now it had become a ghost town. We got into the habit of counting the other people who were out. Ten, twelve, nine, thirteen? Busy night that last one. Most were dog walkers with a few, like us, out on their ‘Boris’ walk. Or ‘Nicola’ stroll if you prefer. We’d generally do five or six miles. There was theoretically no limit as to how much exercise you could take as long as it was only once per day but people tended to get a bit sniffy at folk who were out for more than an hour or so. Those five or six miles would take upwards of an hour and a half and we did go further sometimes on our ventures into the country. We felt quite rebellious when we did. Yet our paths only rarely crossed that of others which was the important thing, surely? There are downsides to walking round built up areas such as litter – postmen’s elastic bands, discarded bags of dog shit and more recently disposable face masks are all too much in evidence – but we were walking outside in the fresh air which was the most important thing.

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Eventually restrictions eased. We could go out as many times as we liked and for as long as we liked. As we were limited to the local area, however, the walks didn’t change much. With more people venturing out, the town wasn’t quite a ghostlike and we did some of the walking during the day rather than the evening. We even managed an ice cream or two as local businesses slowly reopened. We still tended to pound the same pavements though. Whilst glad of the chance to get out there were times when I started to feel trapped again. Not, as at the start of lockdown, so much within the four walls of my house, but within this small part of Ayrshire. For weeks I hadn’t been further north than Irvine, further south than Prestwick, was hemmed in by the natural barrier of the sea to the west and there was little scope to venture out east. Despite this we walked. It didn’t ‘cure’ me but it helped. We went a bit further and took advantage of the new rules on visiting family to have a walk round Glasgow. It was interesting to see how social distancing, quite easy to observe around Troon, was almost impossible in the big city. Although we did few walks of any great distance, our daily constitutionals meant the miles were mounting up.

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At the beginning of lockdown we had already recorded over 300 miles in our 1000 mile challenge. That was not a bad total for the first two and a half months of the year, especially when you consider just how rubbish the weather had been. Elaine had managed a few more miles than me and I had to clear that deficit with a some extra lockdown walks. Many of those 300 miles were the same local pavement pounding we would be restricted to for the subsequent three or four months but some were what we would consider ‘proper’ walks – following a predetermined route round a part of the country like Walk Number One on New Year’s Day. We even managed a few miles in London on the Capital Ring when we were there for a weekend away at the end of January. A weekend away? Do you remember those? Trips away aside, there are plenty of places to go for a walk within an hour’s drive of here. I suspect when we decided to take the 1000 mile challenge we had hoped that most of those miles would be accrued on that type of walk. Events rather put the mockers on that but by mid July all our Troon pavement pounding meant we were closing in on the target. As restrictions eased once more we finally managed to venture out further and had a walk up Glen Ness, a delightful hidden valley up near Loch Doon, which pushed us into the 990s. By July 15th we had just 3.1 miles to do. I measured out a circular route from our front door of exactly that length. It was, perhaps, the most boring walk of the lot but meant we crossed the finishing line exactly as we entered our driveway. It was a whole month earlier than Elaine’s solo effort last year but the situation had been so unlike 2019 it seemed like a completely different challenge.

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We had been very lucky with the weather. Spring’s outstanding weather would have helped us through the long days of lockdown had we been walking or not. The solstice saw things change and so far the summer weather has been as poor as it was good in spring. We still managed to walk though. Finding a gap in the summer rain or simply walking through it meant we achieved our target 197 days after we’d started, an average of 5.08 miles per day or just over six miles per walk if you exclude the 31 days we didn’t record any milage. These figures pale into insignificance compared with some on the Facebook group who announced they had reached the 1000 mile total before the end of February. Others in the group are only just reporting that they have done 500 miles to become a bloody Proclaimer. That’s the point though, it is not a race. It is purely a personal challenge and the pace at which you complete it is of no concern to anyone else. Now the challenge has been completed, is it time to hang up my boots? No. For a start I don’t have any boots to hang, just walking shoes and trainers, but we don’t intend to give up walking. Our focus might change though. We no longer feel compelled to go out every day. Whilst there are still restrictions on life, lockdown is more or less over for most of us and hopefully will remain so. A walk round Troon when it is pissing down, or even when it isn’t is not as appealing or indeed necessary as it once was. We can now go for walks away from the local area and have done so. The emphasis now is on quality rather than quantity. Not that quantity was ever the most important thing. No, I walked to help me keep active, to have a shared goal and spend quality time with Elaine and above all, to stop my mind heading off to all those dark places that I was surprised to find existing in my head. I might not like being called a Proclaimer but I’m happy to proclaim the benefits of walking.

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