SPORT WALK

Learning lessons from a brutally tough challenge

By Roger Burlinson

It’s very easy to think of Sport Walking challenges purely in terms of your experience in the moment – what they give you both physically and mentally at the time. But for a long time now, I’ve understood that the real value of taking on challenges is what you learn from them and how that can help you improve and grow. Like they say, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.

And so it was for me with Hurtwood 50k – a suffer fest, a tough challenge made brutal by storm conditions. Hurtwood really hurt! In the moment, I could only deal with what I faced (alongside everyone else) and staying focused on challenge management – eating and drinking right, holding the right pace, dealing with self doubt, that sort of thing.

But within 24 hours of finishing, I have complete clarity on everything and have a very different view of my performance and the experience. I’ve learnt about my fitness, my strength, my preparation and my resilience and you can learn from what I learned too. This growth doesn’t just benefit your Sport Walking though, it goes into the pot and shapes how you cope with every experience in life.

I won’t lie, I was a little disappointed with my performance at the time. I felt as bad in the last 10k as I did in the last 30k of my 100 mile non-stop challenge on the South Downs and this was bugging me! How can I be feeling as bad at 40k as I did at 130k? What’s wrong with me?

Of course, you only have so much scope to question things in the heat of battle. Figuring out a positive explanation for why I was beginning to struggle towards the end, while out there still struggling, is difficult. You can work out simple things or process your pace and derive a likely finish time but anything nuanced? Forget it.

All I could think of was that I was going to miss my target time by a long way (for me) and would probably miss my second target, so that wasn’t the time for a post mortem (in name only, thankfully). I had to tell myself to stop trying to figure out what was going on and to just make sure I got home with the best speed I could, while also making sure that the various muscle pains I’d started to have didn’t get worse. They did get worse but by refocusing on my technique I managed to keep them in check.

Sat here now writing this, all the things that were confusing and frustrating me are as clear as if they were manifest in physical form right in front of my eyes! The upshot of that is that I can deal with the reality of my performance (which was much better than I was giving myself credit for at the time) and harness this learning to help me prepare for the next challenge.

So what caused my troubles on the day? Well, the first thing to say is that, really, I didn’t have any! Even in that last 10k at the end, my form was still good – my cadence, technique, aerobic ability was all there. I was overtaking runners on the horrible technical descents, harnessing fully my ‘Free Speed’ approach and I was also picking them off on the climbs or whenever they were forced to walk, which later on, was whenever the trail rose by any degree – so even on false flats.

So it wasn’t any kind of breakdown of my ability or my overall performance, it was peripheral elements which, at the time, you think can’t have a major impact on you, but they can! First up was my mental focus going into the challenge. It’s hard to overstate how much I was looking forward to Hurtwood 50k. Four years between major challenges is a long time and I was itching to get out there.

The organisers offer a rolling start for anyone who wants it, an hour and a half ahead of the main mass start. I think this is a great idea and I opted for it, especially being a walker in a field of, from what I could see, was almost 100% runners. I’d already had to postpone my entry of this event for a year, so that extra hour and a half was a wait too far!

By chance I found myself at the head of the queue to punch in the little dongle everyone had to keep tabs on athletes through checkpoints and led out the whole rolling start field. This was my first minor error. After four years of nothing and having looked forward to this race for over a year, I was so pumped I may have let my enthusiasm drive me on a little more than I should. Don’t get me wrong, I was walking within my capability but it wasn’t just about the pace.

Some runners started walking within 500m of the start, which I thought wasn’t a good sign for them but more than that, it meant that the expected flurry of runners passing me and disappearing off into the distance leaving me all alone didn’t happen. This is always a dangerous situation for a Sport Walker early on in a challenge. ‘Live bait’ can derail your pacing discipline and it’s far too easy to go harder that you maybe should, in moments when people around you aren’t going at the same speed as you are and you have the power and ability to overtake them.

That was how it was in the first 5k or so for me. I wasn’t racing anyone but the runners around me seemed determined not to leave me for dead and build up a nice gap. So whenever the trail rose up, I caught them back up and, not wanting to deviate from my pace, used my climbing technique to get past them. Of course, in doing so, I was going deeper than if I’d been on my own and was simply holding my pace. This need to maintain your own pace, combined with the need to get past people going more slowly, has a price and it’s very hard to execute an overtake without paying it!

The same happened on steep and technical descents. I found myself needing to pass slower runners, partly to maintain my target pace but also because, quite frankly, in those conditions, you had one choice – fly down the descents on your feet or slide down on your butt! The descents at Hurtwood are not to be taken meekly. You need to have confidence in your descending and to commit to them at speed because putting the breaks on will lead to a fall.

So, with the technical climbs and descents, there were two elements that were already, from early on, taking me deeper than I’d expected, simply in order not to lose pace and time.

Now…. about those conditions. It was fowl. This edition of Hurtwood 50k was truly brutal. The terrain, the landscape, the whole area of Hurtwood, which includes the ‘Surrey Three Peaks’ of Pitch Hill, Holmbury Hill and Leith Hill, is a stunning landscape and has some of the most engaging and fulfilling trails going.

I grew up not that far away, at the foot of the North Downs, which are just north of the Hurtwood range but territorially, they’re all within your portfolio of trails. So I know this place really well and have been going walking there since childhood and then, when mountain biking first hit the UK, the trails around Leith Hill were our No.1 go to location.

These are sandy, rocky trails that are quite challenging under foot in places, with lots of water erosion causing the trails to become quite rough but they’re a delight to walk on because of that additional testing aspect to them. I was expecting a lot of water on the trails because of the nature of the landscape but I thought the bedrock would keep things relatively civilised. Oh how wrong I was!

Of course, walking a route in training is a whole different ball game to walking a route along with hundreds of runners but the trail conditions on the day weren’t just down to footfall. Storm Darragh had gone through 24 hours earlier but there had also been quite a bit of rainfall ahead of the race weekend and Darragh was kind of the last straw.

With trails that are already saturated and then large numbers of runners going through, it doesn’t take long for the topsoil to morph into mud and then you’re facing an additional stress on your muscles. Your movement becomes much more dynamic, three dimensional even, which might sound odd but you find yourself having to move sideways as well as forwards, simply to work through the mud and debris.

And there was a lot of debris on the ground. About six or seven kilometres in, we encountered a small tree which had keeled over that morning, completely blocking the trail, so we had to detour around and leap over a large drainage ditch. Then, about another kilometre up the trail, as I was walking along, there was suddenly an almighty loud crack just to my left and I turned to see one half of a tree detach itself and fall to the ground! That’s when I knew that staying really alert at all times was going to be essential.

The first phase of the route went from the start in Dorking, along the Greensand Way over to Winterfold Wood on the western end of the Hurtwood Massif. Dorking is famous for being the home of Box Hill, which featured in the Olympic road cycling race of London 2012 but for me, this was the town I went to school in, so it had extra meaning.

The Greensand Way leads you up and over Leith Hill, then Holmbury Hill and then Pitch Hill, before continuing west along the ridge top to Winterfold Wood, where the turn around loop began. This was, essentially, an out and back route, with a large loop at the turn around. The nature of the route contributed to the state of the trail on the way back because you had double the footfall on the main tracks, which kind of leads us nicely back to the conditions.

Despite the sandstone bedrock and the generally free draining nature of trails in this area, such had been the deluge and impact of the storm, which continued to rage during the race itself, the trail conditions were really bad. Mud was everywhere, the technical climbs and descents became treacherous very quickly and there was even one stretch of trail lasting at least fifty metres, that was shin deep mud, with no alternative lines – you just had to plow through it.

Elsewhere there was thick mud all over the trail with a stream of water running down the middle of it, which was the best line, as you were walking on the bedrock but, at the same time, you were walking through water. I had Gore Tex lined shoes but even they can only hold out for so long and once the water or mud rises above shoe level, there’s nothing they can do.

And this is where I think the seed of my later suffering was really sown. It’s one thing to walk strongly, holding a good technique at a planned pace but shift onto trails that are more like a ‘Tough Mudder’ course and your technique goes out of the window for large sections and the extra physicality of how you’re forced to walk takes its toll, not so much on your aerobic capacity but on your muscles and their resilience.

With the rough surfaces and needing to ‘free speed’ it down all the technical descents, my feet and ankles were taking a far bigger hit than if I’d been on hilly terrain with tracks in good condition. Of course in the moment, you’re enjoying flying down these descents and are happy with your performance, especially finding that runners are getting out of your way but you don’t realise the physical impact this is having.

So, the interesting thing about this experience is the impact the technicality of the trails and the ground conditions had on my performance. It wasn’t at all about having residual strength throughout to handle climbs, it was about how well my body, my joints and my muscles were holding up against the extra physicality.

This is how you can feel as bad after 40k as you do after 130! I don’t think anyone would suggest that the South Downs Way is a breeze but there’s no escaping the fact that, on the whole, the trails are more benign in their nature than the Hurtwood range. It’s not about the steepness of the climbs, how long they are or how sustained your effort needs to be, it’s all about whether you’re able to settle into a solid rhythm and work at a consistent pace. During my South Downs Way challenge I was. At Hurtwood I wasn’t. Nowhere near because of the combination of the trails themselves and the trail conditions on the day.

So…. lessons? Well, getting a bit excited at the beginning and maybe going a bit too hard in the first few kilometres is a pretty tough nut to crack. This is all about instinctive action and so the main thing is to be aware of how you’re approaching these early miles and to work to reign in your enthusiasm.

The next thing is not to make assumptions about distance and your ability to handle a given distance, perhaps because of previous experience. 50k for me, should have been a walk in the park but I failed to approach this challenge with consideration for the specific nature of the terrain and, most importantly, the course profile.

You have to approach a course like this (with many more short, sharp, steep and technical climbs) differently to one with long, steep but sustained climbs. On a course like Hurtwood it’s harder to get into a rhythm on a short steep rise, so it’s more about going deeper on each ramp, possibly going into the red for a moment and then recovering afterwards. The only issue with that being that it’s continually undulating so that recovery is harder to come by.

So, preparing for this course needed far more repetition on steep sharp climbs than I trained with. I trained a lot with big long South Downs climbs, which were good for building overall strength and resilience but not so helpful for short severe ramps and the anaerobic state I’d be in climbing them.

The other thing that wasn’t on my radar was the impact rough and technical terrain would have, together with the added brutality of the trail conditions from the bad weather. I just focused on training for the distance and with big long climbs to give me hill strength. Being far more dynamic on the trail tested my tendons, joints and muscles more than anything walking up steep long but relatively level tracks would, so I should have done far more work to build ‘robustness’ into my preparation. That means, training much more on rough, technical ground, where I could build up resilience to more dynamic stressing of the muscles, as well as supportive strength exercises that specifically work on this kind of weakness.

So, the result of my post mortem on Hurtwood 50k 2024, from my perspective? Well I feel a lot better about my performance now than I did at the time. My average pace was around 8:30/km, which in those conditions was pretty good. I now know, by looking at things with a clear head, that what caused me to feel so bad towards the end was the accrued pounding my body was taking from the trail conditions and the need to be far more dynamic on the trail, rather than any failing ability.

I know that I was able to outperform runners both on the technical descents and on many of the climbs, so I can feel good about my technical ability and, also, the sharpness of my responses. But, more than that, I know that well executed Sport Walking techniques like climbing efficiency and ‘free speed’ descending, can stand their ground alongside running.

Overall though, I’ve learnt the importance of diving deep into every challenge you take on, to build up an approach to that specific test, not simply to that distance or the overall landscape. Hilly terrain in one location can be as different as night and day to hilly terrain of equal height somewhere else, so it’s not enough to just prepare for hills, you have to prepare for the specific nature of the trails on those hills.

Likewise, a 50k on terrain like Hurtwood is completely different in terms of the impact it’ll have on you to another race – in my case I was constantly wondering why I was so far off my personal best for 50k (six and a half hours), about an hour longer in total . I was thinking only of the distance, ignoring the nature of the terrain, which at Hurtwood was much more technical and challenging under foot, let alone the trail conditions on the day.

So, if I were to have to distil down all my learning from this challenge into one sentence it would have to be: Always prepare for the specifics of the terrain, not just the distance! Oh and don’t be too hard on yourself until you’ve got evidence to back it up!!

Hurtwood 50k – My Challenge stats:

Challenge distance – 50 kilometres (watch measured 53km total distance)
Finishing position – 334 (out of 406 within cut off)
First walker (saw no other walkers although there could have been a few I didn’t see)
Watch time – 7 hours 36 minutes
Official timing – 7 hours 42 minutes

Total course elevation – 1,349 metres

Highlight – picking up a Strava Course Record for walking the segment leading up to Leith Hill.

See my full Strava stats here.