Walking in a winter wonderland

Snow and a gate

The original plan was three of us to do a walk this weekend whilst John resurrected his football "career" (think all those middle aged ex-players playing in Legends games, spending most of their energy sucking their guts in for 90 minutes).  Then with Paul called to "soccer dad" duty it was down to two.  Overnight rain + prospect of it raining all day Tony took the sensible solution of going to the gym rather than risking his knee on the slippy upslopes and downslopes of the South Downs Way.  So it was just me then.

Snow (honest!)

After a detailed weather analysis out my window, yep it was pissing down, I decided to head to QE Country Park to take the opportunity to check out my water proofs ( I believe it rained throughout the trailwalker last year!), try out the MapMyHike iPhone app and generally have an opportunity to build my fitness as last week showed it was pretty bad.

On arriving as QE CP it was good to see I wasn't the only mad person as cyclists covered from head to toe in mud loaded their bikes into vans, more set off, and dog walkers were scurrying around under umbrellas.  There didn't seem to be too many hikers around though.

Once kitted up I decided to head to check point 1, the plan being to walk quickly up hills and then slow down/recover on down slopes in an effort to build up my fitness.  On my own it meant I wasn't speeding up/slowing down the rest of the team.  I planned on heading towards CP 1 for an hour and a half before turning round and coming back.

After the usual groan from calfs of "what are you doing?" up the slope out of the park my legs settled down as I nodded to other people out and about enjoying the rain, walking their dogs and fiddling with their umbrellas.  Checking my average speed I was going around 3.1 mph which was good, over the past few weeks we've averaged 2.7 and 2.3 so it's good I can up the pace - the section isn't particularly daunting but it is up/down/up/down, just no evil hills like Beacon Hill to navigate.

About 2/3rd of the way along the temperature dropped and sleet started to fall so I decided to turn back as the clouds were looking a bit ominous.  Within about 10 minutes of turning back snow began to fall, quite heavy at time, but no threat of it settling and snowing me in on the Downs for the night!  When I eventually got back to my car the temperature had dropped from 8 degrees to 2 degrees.

In general though it was a good walk - near enough 7 miles in around 2hr 14 mins.  I also got to try out my new "for goodness shakes" recovery drink.  I'm a wreck and generally feel rubbish the day after training - in the past I have used protein bars and they've worked - so I'll see tomorrow if the shake is any good.

The MapMyHike app was a bit disappointing though - it tried to save my route, failed, I then pressed "re-try" and the app crashed - so my route is not saved, but details were saved in a "workout" section.  Think I'll stick with the Motion-X GPS app we've used up until now.

Details:

Distance: 6.95 miles
Time: 2h 13min 33 sec
Avg speed: 3.1mph