Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.
I lift my head cautiously, and pale daylight and freezing cold air pours into my bivvy bag. Aha – it’s a jogger, using the gravelly shoreline to get a morning sweat on, and she hasn’t seen me, so I duck my head again and flatten myself against the ground, hoping the bushes will hide me.
Crunch, crunch, crunch, skiddddddd.
Oh dammit. Read More
Take this whole post with a massive pinch of salt. Believe nothing. Test everything. Your experience may differ.
I couldn’t have written this post until a few days ago, because back then, I hadn’t walked 25 miles in one day. (Like, ever.) The 25-point-something mile walk I just did along the Trans Pennine Trail gave me a few insights, which may be universal or may be unique just to myself. Consult your brain, your heart and your legs for the actual truth here.
(Yes, this is a great big rambling disclaimer. Treat it as such.)
Anyway, here’s how to walk 25 miles in one day.Read More
The beach stretches out before me.
I’m here to see a sign – but the view grabs my attention. It says:
Mike. Forget the sign. Forget all that stuff for a moment. Looooook.
Every time, that view gets to me – especially in summer (above), but even now, in winter, with a gunmetal sea and a roaring sky and rain spattering down and whipping under your hood.
I’ve walked to that horizon and I’ve slept on that beach (in the rain) – but its power over me is undiminished. A voice inside me, joyful and deluded and completely off its head, yells, I COULD WALK THAT, STARTING NOW. ALL OF THAT. NO REALLY. JUST GIVE ME A SHOT AT THIS.
I have a book at home that’s really not helping.
It’s one of a huge number of titles printed by Reader’s Digest that you’ll only find in charity shops or in strange corners of eBay. They all share similar characteristics: incredibly well-made, beautifully illustrated, admirably well-written, usually part of a collection, and if you’re British or American, your parents own at least one of them.
(If you don’t believe me, ask them.)
This book is all about walking round the coast of Britain.
Well, not really. Nobody would be daft enough to do that!
(Oh. Right. Well, never mind.)
Every page is maybe a day’s walk – around 20 to 25 miles of coastline.
Here’s the stretch of coast I’m on right now, with Hornsea smack in the middle of the picture.
This book is a guide to the adventure of a lifetime. I’d sell my soul to do this – except, I don’t need to, there’s nobody stopping me, no gatekeepers demanding a toll. If I got my affairs in order and found a way to pay my bills, run my business while I walked, and get my girlfriend interested in joining me for at least some of it, I could just – go.
It’d take me about a year to get round the English coast, around 4,500 miles – so doing the whole of the UK, which is around 20,000 miles, would take me a bit more than 4 years. Or, I could skip the islands and cut it down to 12,000 miles, if that didn’t feel like cheating. Or I could cheat – following the general direction of the coastline but cutting out all the crinkly bits, which would shave thousands of miles off. It’s a tricky thing to get your head round.
Anyway, 20,000 miles is four years of solid walking – or, perhaps more practically, eight years of walking 6 months per year. If I started today, I’d be 53 when it ended.
And I could start anywhere. I could start at John O’Groats, which I’ve passed through many times on the way to Orkney, where I worked as an archaeologist.
I could start at Land’s End, at the other end of the UK.
I could start in Hornsea, my childhood home – but that would mean I’d be finishing in Hornsea, and that’s not a destination that would bolster me with hope for 20,000 miles.
(No offence, Hornsea. We just…need to see different people for a while.)
Right now this is what I call a 75% idea. I don’t just have half a mind (50%) to do it. I’m more resolved than that. But it’s still not a true, really-in-the-world thing. It’ll require work to piece together – and a lot of training. The mind is willing but the flesh is oh god, can’t we just go home and watch Netflix?
So, for now, I turn my gaze away from that enticing coastline, and look at the sign.
This is what I’d see if it was a sunny day. (In fact, it’s such a wet, foul afternoon that I’m afraid to take my camera out, so I’m borrowing someone else’s photo from Flickr.)
The sign marks the official start of the Trans Pennine Trail, opened in 2001, a walking route that crosses the width of England and connects the North Sea with the Irish Sea. This exact spot is where it begins (or ends). For the last 15 years it has nagged at me:
Mike. Forget the coastline. Forget the writing thing. Forget all that stuff for a moment. Look at the sign.
And at long last, I’m paying attention to it.
Tomorrow, I head southwest – diagonally down East Yorkshire and into the city of Hull, through Hull, along the river, and to the Humber Bridge, where I’ve identified a few likely spots for a spot of overnight bivvy bagging.
It’s a 25-mile route, and that’s got me deeply worried. My personal record for a day’s walking is half that distance – and that was back in 1995, when I was 20 years younger. I’m poorly trained, my knees aren’t so great these days, and I’ll be carrying a fully-laden backpack.
I can think of many, many reasons why this won’t work.
My feet will be ruined before I’m even halfway. I’ll turn into an unhappy, snivelling, pathetic shell of a man, filled with self-pity, and I’ll sit and eat all my sandwiches and BelVita breakfast biscuits in one go and then feel too heavy to continue, at which point I’ll find a bus-stop and go home. My camping stove will explode, taking me with it. My rucksack straps will break, and I won’t be able to repair them. My legs will cramp. Or maybe I’ll rationalise my way out of it like any sensible person would: I’m an adult! This is foolish! What’s the point? Grow up! Conform! Be responsible! Mid-life crisis!
However, nobody likes a whiner, including myself, so I think I’ll just set off first thing in the morning and see what happens.
Sometimes the stories and voices inside your head are an utter waste of your time. Sometimes you just have to shut everything and everyone up, and just find out for yourself.
I guess that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow, then.
PREVIOUSLY: A Mile A Day #10: Why I Hate Walking As Much As I Hate Writing
NEXT: A Mile A Day #12: How To Walk 25 Miles In One Day
(Inspired/adapted/stolen from semi-rad‘s brilliant blog – and h/t Al Humphreys for making me aware of it.)
I hated going for a walk this morning, but that’s nothing new.
I also hated sitting down to write this, especially these first few minutes. These minutes are why a lot of people don’t write, and I cannot blame them. Starting to write is always shitty and brutal. My brain tries to stop me with lazy-person propaganda, fake news and lies, and then it tries to distract me. Statistically, the time I’m supposed to start writing is when I’m most active on Facebook or most likely to do chores.
I’ve tried tricking myself, getting up earlier, but it doesn’t work. There’s no ducking around it. You just start, and for 60 seconds or so, it just feels terrible.
However, experience has taught me that not writing feels a lot worse:
Day 1 of Not Writing: “My Writing is Shit.”
Day 2 of Not Writing: “I Am Shit.”
Day 3 of Not Writing: “Everything Is Shit.”
So I pick the option that makes me feel least bad. That’s usually what gets me started.
(Well, that and not being able to pay my bills if I don’t.)
Then, for the first 10, maybe 15 minutes of writing something, I’m faking it all the way. I’m faking it now, as I write these words. It takes a while for actual writing to kick in, and until then I’m just present, a professional lorem ipsum generator, keeping the seat warm until Actual Mike hopefully shows up.
Walking’s like that too.
Mentally and physically, I could be a lot fitter. My anxiety & stress levels in 2016 were catastrophic, thanks to severe illness in the family and the effect it had on my plans and my ability to focus and keep a smile on my face. I’m still rebuilding myself. My mind isn’t tough, it’s prone to bleak moods that rush in like unexpected squalls out of a blue sky. I get frustrated when this happens, the same way I get frustrated when my knees start aching after a few hours of walking in a way they never used to. I want to take myself back to the shop and say, Am I still under warranty because this thing is NOT working like it should.
Walking helps, but not at first. At first, it just amplifies everything that’s wrong. I’m absurdly grumpy when I set off, and my body complains until it warms up. I feel like I’m operating a mechanical version of me, like Ripley in her Power Loader in Aliens. It never feels like I’ll be able to continue, but experience tells me that’s not true, so I keep walking against the current wishes of my brain until all its lies are exposed.
I approach walking (and cycling, and all other forms of exercise I’m easing myself back into) with a militant attitude. I can’t be trusted. I have to assume every thought I have until I’m actually out there is self-defeating bullshit designed to get in my own way and hand ultimate victory to all my enemies. I brim with resistance – as coined by Stephen Pressfield in his wonderfully motivating productivity guide, The War Of Art.
Resistance is smarter than you, so you can’t argue it down. You beat it by bloody-mindedly defying it. There’s no other way. And after a while, it hurts less and you get more done.
That’s how you get better at stuff, and in this case, that’s how I became a better writer.
(Sometimes I think I’m being pathetic and self-important, thinking like this, The Tortured Writer (TM). Writing isn’t hard, the same way archaeology was hard, or proper professions are hard! And yes, there’s truth here, but ultimately, it’s just more resistance. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Stop gabbing, haul ass.)
I’d love to now say something inspiring about the joy of writing/walking kicking in and transporting you to a deliciously comfortable realm filled with sensual pleasure and moist, unbridled joy, but the truth is, you just get used to it. Writing well is a state of flow, and when you’re flowing, you’re not aware you’re enjoying yourself. You’re just doing it. That’s just who you are right then.
You might as well ask, Am I enjoying breathing right now?
But there is satisfaction. It feels good afterwards, and sometimes at the time. There’s learning how the world works, by attempting to see it better and attempting to put it into words. Even the worst walk and the most soul-destroying piece of copywriting teaches me something new.
And then there’s the relationship between the two. I have my best ideas when I walk (and my second-best ideas in the shower) – which mirrors studies elsewhere. It makes sense: your brain is part of your body, your body is raised to an elevated state of excitement, your brain is too, but has nothing to do, so….bingo: idea explosion.
(There’s also the ambient noise around you as you walk. Get it right, and it helps you think creatively in the same way coffee-shops do.)
I have a theory about long-distance walking: if I show up and pretend enough times, I’ll one day be capable of doing well enough to not be totally disgusted at my inability to do it. It’s kinda working that way with my writing, so I’m applying it to walking as well.
I’ll stop writing now, so you can stop reading. Because it’s February. Remember that thing you said you were going to do this year, but haven’t started yet? That’s your resistance at work.
Anyway, I hate writing and walking. But you should totally try them.
PREVIOUSLY: A Mile A Day #9: Why Power Lines Don’t Fry Birds (And Other Natural Wonders)
NEXT: A Mile A Day #11: The Art Of The Start
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It’s a cold, grey day in East Yorkshire: a grit-your-teeth day, as the cold nips at exposed flesh and the drifting rain ruins hairstyles, drips from eyebrows and makes everyone grumpy.
It’s mid-afternoon and the high street is nearly empty, and the gulls have taken over. They festoon the roof of the Methodist church in an interesting way – and I decide to pay attention.
For starters, why are they all pointing the same way?
Unfortunately I have no idea how birds work. Despite my late father being an avid ‘twitcher’, and despite being a proud member of the RSPB’s Young Ornithologist’s Club, I’m clueless. I know they flap, and have feathers. I know certain types of them found at British seaside resorts will steal your chips/fries if you’re not paying attention. And I know they’re distantly related to dinosaurs.
But that was about it.
In fact, as my research uncovered this afternoon, birds are supremely useful to long-distance walkers.
Here’s how.
Generally speaking, perched birds point into the wind. It’s the best position from which to take flight, and it stops their feathers getting ruffled the wrong way (which is probably supremely irritating, but it also vents precious heat in cold weather).
It also may have something to do with being able to communicate better. A human analogy here is useless: we’d turn away from the wind to chat to each other. But then, bird ears aren’t external like ours, so maybe they don’t suffer that roaring sound that makes us shout “EH?” at each other like we’re elderly Canadians.
Anyway, that’s the best guess from the world of bird science.
Here’s how it’s useful to walkers: it turns birds into a useful substitute for weathervanes, except working in reverse. Too close to the ground to tell which way the wind is blowing (or trying to spot a weather wind?) Simple: look at where the birds are pointing. That’s where the wind is coming from.
Every looked at a bird perched on a power-line and thought, “how are you still alive, dude?”
The answer is, birds can take it – and so could we, if we did it right.
This next paragraph comes firmly under the category of Never, Ever Try This For Yourself Ever, Seriously, I Saw You Think It Just Then, You’re On A Verbal Warning, Just No In Every Way.
Birds avoid going BANG because they have both feet on the power line. Electricity is the flow of electrons from one state of electrical potential to another. On the wire, everything is at the same state – and the electrons don’t flow. No flow = no electricity. We human beings get electrocuted by wires because we’re usually touching something else, most commonly the ground, earthing us into destruction – because that creates a current that flows through us with catastrophic results.
If we create a current, we’re dead.
Birds don’t, so they’re not.
(Some power-line engineers actually use helicopters to do repairs, to avoid touching the ground. It’s still insanely dangerous work, with the added thrill of huge metal blades whirling a few feet above your head, bobbing up and down with every gust of wind. I’ll pass, thanks.)
You probably know that on clear, calm days, birds take to the air and ascend to great heights, warbling and chirping happily and making everyone feel like everything’s going to be OK.
They’re able to do that because of pressure.
Birds have a tiny pressure receptor in their ear called the paratympanic organ, and it responds to changes in atmospheric pressure. When you see birds circling high in a blue sky, that probably means the bird’s inner ear is deliciously pain-free, the pressure is stable, and the weather’s going to stay clear. Yay!
But if they’re staying close to the ground, the pressure is changing, and probably causing them pain – a kind of atmospheric hangover. They stay low to minimise the pressure gradient they have to fly through. If that’s happening in good weather, you can bet foul, wet weather is rapidly approaching.
And if there are no birds at all?
Thanks to their sensitivity to infrasound (very, very low-frequency sounds), it’s possible that birds can hear storms approaching from days and days away – and alter their flight patterns accordingly.
In 2014, golden-winged warblers in Tennessee all scarpered en-masse, just before a huge storm front barrelled in and lashed the landscape with a total of 84 tornadoes. Once the bad weather had moved on, the warblers all came back.
So – can’t see any birds at all?
Well, forget walking.
Start running.
BONUS: Check out this stunning piece of music composed using birds sat on power-lines. (Hat-tip to Suzi Richer for the link.)
PREVIOUSLY: A Mile A Day #8 – Yeah, But Is It An Adventure?
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The path stretches out in front of me, yet again.
I’m using the same photo from Day 4 because it’s the same view. Except it isn’t. I’m looking further, imagining what’s over the horizon – because in a week’s time, I’m going to attempt something stupid.
But is it stupid enough?
For the last few years, I’ve been trying to come up with a good definition of “adventure”.
This was somewhere near:
And this was the closest I’ve got so far:
But even that didn’t adequately capture it.
Take this very series of blog posts I’m writing and you’re reading, for example. Are they an adventure?
Nah.
They’re a challenge, a diversion, a quest to see stuff and think things and stretch my writing skills. I have no illusions about this. I’d need to work a lot harder than this.
Adventures are pretty easy to spot. Here’s a wonderful one from the other day:
A young Chinese man decided to cycle home for Chinese New Year. He did this because he didn’t have the money for the train (he was sleeping in internet cafes, a popular way of saving cash in China and Japan) but still wanted to get home to meet family – so he decided to cycle it.
Now, at this point, less adventurous souls would have opened a map, look at how far the route was, turn pale, and come up with an alternate plan.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t read maps.
So he set off anyway, apparently undeterred by (or oblivious to) the fact that his journey would be 1,700km – the distance from London to Algeria – during an incredibly cold Chinese winter.
This is all pretty adventurous, but what happened next is what really puts the seal on it.
After 30 days of cycling, he was stopped by the police, because he was cycling up a highway designed only for cars. He was 500km into his journey at this point.
It was now that True Adventure struck: he was informed, probably by someone who will require therapy later, that he’d been cycling the wrong way. He’d spent 30 days increasing the distance home from around 1,700km to over 2,000km.
Police and toll-station workers promptly had a whip-round, and paid for his ticket home. This is the happy ending he deserved, and a great relief to us all.
Now, this story is probably far from unique. Quoting the Telegraph:
“Many of China’s 282 million migrants are making the trip home ahead of Lunar New Year, which is on Saturday.
About three billion trips are expected to be made across China during the peak 40-day period, including more than 350 million rail journeys and 58 million flights.”
But the cycling-the-wrong-way thing? That’s special. That’s glorious.
That takes a very special gift for extracting maximum adventure out of already highly adventurous circumstances.
That’s why he’s a hero.
The way I see it, this was an adventure for three reasons:
So, with this in mind, I can finally define adventure as follows:
A word on defining “stupidity”:
In today’s world, this is a negative term, meaning “ill-thought-out” or “lacking smarts”. However, it’s also often used to denote things that look absurd to an outsider until they have the reasoning explained to them in great detail, at which point they get reluctantly won over, and say something like, “You know, that’s totally insane and I love it.”
That’s my definition of stupidity here.
It means “I know I look daft, but that’s not the point. You’d love the point, trust me.”
A word on defining “disaster”:
This really means “things not going to plan.” Real disaster isn’t funny, obviously – but this definition covers the entire scale of not-to-plan-ness, from exciting, enlightening serendipity to fate-cursing misfortune.
Using this Venn diagram, it’s easy to determine if you’re having an adventure or not.
If you’re fearful and everything’s going wrong but you’re not having any fun in the process, you’re a masochist and should immediately find the nearest pub and reassess everything.
If you’re appreciating, or will someday appreciate, the delicious, life-enriching absurdity of it all, and you’re also a bit terrified, but so far, everything has gone 100% according to the plan you created before you set out, sorry, it’s not an adventure yet – but I sincerely hope things are about to go tits-up for you, because you’ve worked hard and you deserve it.
And if you’re doing something entertainingly daft and things are going hilariously wrong but you’re not actually afraid? Well, you’re a wuss. You’re not even trying. So scale up the challenge until your bowels turn to water and your knees tremble: that’s the sign you’re on the cusp of a good, solid adventure.
OK, back to the railway lines.
How does this rank, this thing I’m doing next week? Let’s see:
So no, it’s not an adventure yet.
But hopefully, it might turn out to be one.
PREVIOUSLY: A Mile A Day #7 – Cleaning Your Boots Like A Loser
NEXT: A Mile A Day #9 – Why Power Lines Don’t Fry Birds (And Other Natural Wonders)
What happens when you give up on your dream of being a writer?
It was the start of 2009, and I was about to find out.Read More
Today I met one of the world’s greatest travellers.
I found him hunched down behind a bench, just round the corner from my local Tesco. It was a foul night for a walk, with the rain siling down and gusts of wind flinging it in your face, but it didn’t bother him one bit. He’s seen far worse. This isn’t proper weather.
I wouldn’t say we’re friends, but we’ve met before. I first found him lurking in the bushes about 20 feet away from here, back when I was walking home from school, when I was not much more than a pair of shorts and a mop of brown, tangled hair. I was closer to the ground back then, but I still had to crouch to say hi…
And then – I’m ashamed, so ashamed about this – I cleaned my shoes on him.
What he’d call proper weather, if he was capable of speech, is something way beyond my feeble imagination.
Around 80,000 years ago, this part of Yorkshire was locked in ice. Global temperatures dropped, the world slid into one of its many, many Ice Ages (for reasons we’re still somewhat unclear about), and the glaciers crept south, extending crushing fingers of ice down the eastern coast of what would become England. If you imagine a wave breaking downwards over the UK, then East Yorkshire was the furthest south it could reach, the high tide mark, a place for leaving things.
That’s how the traveller got here – but it’s not exactly an easy piece of deduction.
He’s something of an eyesore, being lumpen, an unhealthy shade of grey, and weighing well over a tonne. It’s almost impossible to imagine a body of ice strong enough to lift and transport a rock this big hundreds of miles south, from where he crumbled out the side of a Scottish mountain a staggering amount of time ago…
But then, it’s impossible to imagine a single journey lasting 50,000 years.
What’s that bloody great rock down by the garage, I’d say to friends.
No idea. It’s just a rock. It was always there. Why do you even care? Come play football, you’re such a loser, they’d answer.
This attitude always disturbed me (not being called a loser – they probably had a point), and now I think I know why. To those friends, this rock was invisible (and to many people still is, even though it was moved to its own display area with an information board). It was so relentlessly there that they ceased to see it – which is the exact thing I’m fighting with this series of walks. If it’s hidden in plain sight, I’ll learn to look harder at it.
So, I’m adding geology to my list of things to learn about – with Richard Fortey’s magnificent (and aptly named) The Hidden Landscape as my guide.
But for now, I show respect to one of the world’s greatest travellers in the best way I know how. Nearly three decades after I first did it, I go round to the back, where nobody can see me, and clean my muddy boots on him.
Once a loser, always a loser.
(The Hornsea Erratic, as it’s locally known, is now a celebrated local landmark – and has been turned into a geocaching site. All that said, it’s not exactly a stirring sight. It’s just a rock. However, Tesco is just round the corner and you can get a can of Red Bull, sit on the rock and wonder what the hell you’re doing with your life. I urge you to try that sometime.)
PREVIOUSLY: A Mile A Day #6: Hey Sky, Why So Pushy?
NEXT: A Mile A Day #8: Yeah, But Is It An Adventure?