Part 1: How I Walked 60+ Kilometer in One Day
It’s a long road ahead, filled with fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but also rainbows
If you haven’t read it yet, here’s the Prologue
Walking creates bonding time with myself. It slices open a pocket of space, and encourages me to share. I would think about trivial stuff, and ponder life’s questions. Where the mind wanders, I follow. There’s no judgment, only introspection if I allow it.
Believe it or not, I had actually thought about walking around Hong Kong Island several times before. Only back then I didn’t make it happen. Most likely because I didn’t write it down, and so it was snatched away by the whirlwind of life. Other times it’s because fear, uncertainty, and doubt flooded my senses, and had me fled in terror. Since in my mind, I was already seeing it as a painful endeavor. What kind of people would think about walking long distances anyway?
What ultimately gave me the courage to attempt such a challenge though, did not arise from a single source of empowerment, but a combination of factors that I’ve been cultivating to this day. You can read all about it here.
I then put together a haphazard plan within a week, and thought that I could figure stuff out as I go, like how to walk faster.
My journey began on 14 September 2021. Following a modified training schedule, I walked 8km that day. And if getting showered and seeing a half rainbow afterward was any indication of a perfect beginning, then I must have had it pretty good. And just 4 days later, on 18 September, I was graced again by nature, this time in the form of a full rainbow. If seeing 2 rainbows in the same week does not translate to “this is going to be fun”, then I don’t know what to think anymore.
Things progressed slowly at first. I didn’t feel too tired after each walk. Then a month into the training, on the day after I had barely completed a 20km walk, I discovered some alarming news.
I tracked my walks with a smartwatch, but I found that the GPS data it provided constantly diverged from the route. To verify this, I enabled tracking on my phone (I didn’t use it before so as to conserve battery). And by comparing the results, I confirmed that the watch had been overestimating the distance traveled. And the number would get increasingly inaccurate the further I walked. What it meant was that I had been walking below my targets.
I also learned that I was blind. I couldn’t see what was right in front of me. Specifically the posters and billboards for the HK Marathon. I couldn’t believe the amount of time I must have passed by one of them, but didn’t realize the problem, which was that on that day, half of the Hong Kong Island coastal trail will be closed off for the event. And I didn’t notice it until a week before. At the end I diverted to hiking for that special occasion (and it was my first time meeting someone from a dating app).
There’s more. The schedule I referred to would only prepare a person to walk a 42km+ marathon length trail. So I had to convert the distance manually and adapt it for my use. And that was where things started to go wrong. The numbers on my schedule were astronomically off the course, and I have to chalk it all up to numerical instability. I still don’t know if it was an error with the formulas, or some jumbled values. But since I did not save the initial calculations, I wound up doing it again. And after I reorganized the schedule with those revised numbers, I was even more surprised to find how far behind I was. The walk on the following week would be 34km, an increase of a whopping 12km, or about 70% in distance compared to the 20km walk I had done.
And without a doubt, although I had finished the 34km, the next 2 days I was limping around the house, with my calves crying murder. I may even have shin splints, and it was just awful.
That was when I started looking into recovery tactics.
Part 2 will arrive next Friday.
