SPORT WALK

Insight by Roger Burlinson

If you’re taking on a major Sport Walking challenge, it’s likely that you’ll want, if not need, some help in the shape of a support crew. Support crews sound quite professional but, in fact, they’re normally just friends or family that travel your challenge route, popping up just when you need them to give you fresh supplies of food and drink, together with all the moral support you could need to smash your goals.

But how do support crews become these high performing entities giving you exactly what you need, when you need it? Well, to a greater degree, you make them what they need to be. How, you ask? It’s all about you first figuring out what you’re going to need and when, what you want and why and then making a detailed plan for them to carry out on your behalf.

That’s the preparation part but crew selection is also really important because there will come a point in your challenge, if it’s a long one, where they may need to take full control and make decisions for you, so you want to make sure you’ve got good people who can do that and who will make good decisions. It’s no good asking your best mate to crew for you if he or she is always late, has no sense of direction and ducks making tough decisions – that’s not going to end well!

Identify your needs

The first thing to do is identify your needs – what do you actually need the crew to do for you? If your challenge is long but not excessive, you may only need someone to be at one place to give you fresh stocks of electrolytes and energy bars, if it’s longer and more involved though, you may need your crew to provide you with numerous support stops and to be ready with changes of clothes or shoes if you need them.

So it’s really important to set out in detail, for yourself, what you think you’re going to need, how frequently you’ll need it and how viable it is to have a support crew provide it, as opposed to working with event pit stops.

Of course, if your challenge is a personal one, as was mine in 2019 when I walked the South Downs Way, then you won’t have the luxury of event pit stops and so your crew has a much bigger role to play. They will need to be mobile restaurant, food and drink supplier, safety officer, personnel manager, therapist, the list goes on!

The basic fundamental of this stage of your planning is to know how long you can realistically go for with the food and drink supplies you’re carrying from the start – what are the distance points where you’re going to need fresh supplies? This is the information you need to plan for the very basic level of support.

Identifying how far you can go before needing fresh supplies is only the start though because it’s unlikely you’ll be able to meet your crew at the exact point you’ve identified where you’ll likely run out of drink! You may need to re-stock with food and drink after 25km but what if there’s no access point at 25km? Also, if it’s an organised challenge, there may be rules on support crews staying away from certain checkpoints.

So, you first have to identify your need, then see where access points are and then find a suitable one that’s as close as possible to your need. You may need to compromise, if it’s the case that, for instance, the only meeting point is 20km in, not 25, in which case you need to take that opportunity because waiting longer may lead you to run out. It’s a delicate balancing act of spreading your support stops out enough but not risking running on empty. Lastly, get Google Maps location points for each support stop, so that your crew can just input them and follow directions to get there.

Once you’ve got the basic structure of your support stops set out, you then need to work out what you’re likely to need at each stop. There will be points where you’ll need new supplies of food and drink to carry with you but you also might want to eat something else at a support stop that doesn’t involve replenishing stocks, so set out your plan for what each stop is for and what you want.

Choose wisely

It’s best if you can hand pick your whole crew yourself, rather than asking a friend to help and to round up some others to help them. You need to know that when you’re stressed and not feeling great, you’ll get on well with everyone. You need to know how they will react and to trust that they’ll be there for you when you need them and that means actually knowing them for starters.

You also want to pick people who you can be sure will get on together as well. The last thing you need is to arrive at a support stop to find a massive argument taking place! You can never be 100% sure that everything will go smoothly, after all, it’s likely your crew will be experiencing this for the first time but if you know people well and feel that they’re cool heads in a crisis, they’re more than likely going to be right for the job.

While this is a team effort, you do need to appoint your most trusted friend or family member as team lead. It’s really important to have one ‘senior’ role and for the whole crew to understand that this person has the last word. If the hierarchy is set from the outset, there can be no disputes within the crew, as to who should make final decisions.

Give clear instructions

Once you’ve got your basic support plan set out, you need to tell your crew everything. Don’t worry about sounding over specific or fussy, it’s essential that they have a clear understanding of what you perceive your needs to be, even if they themselves think something might not be necessary. This is where you need to be really upfront and honest with your crew. You need to tell them that some things may sound unnecessary or odd but this is how you need them to be.

You need to have full disclosure with your crew. If you want your spare socks laid out in a particular way on the boot of the car ready for you to make a swift shoe change, they need to know that and if that feels a bit excessive, you need to affirm that’s what you want. It doesn’t matter why, it’s enough that you want something a certain way because this is all part of your challenge management – how you cope with all the things that could arise in a challenge.

You also need to tell your crew what your weaknesses or fears might be – they need to be able to react swiftly if you start to show signs of stress in a situation and if they know why that might be, they can act better in your interest. All these preparations are so important because out on the trail in the middle of a challenge is not the time or place for them to make discoveries about you. You might not be rational due to fatigue and if they don’t understand why that is and what they need to do to help you, then things could go bad very quickly.

You also want to draw up an ‘if that, then this’ list for them. This gives them clear instructions formulated by you when you’re fully coherent of what to do in certain situations. So, for instance in the extreme, if you start to become delusional, the crew lead needs to throw the towel in and pull you out of the challenge, this kind of thing. Write down all the scenarios you can think of and what you want them to do in each situation and then they can feel happy that they have full clarity on what to do in any situation.

Power of Attorney (or the equivalent)

The last thing you need to do is to accept yourself that once the challenge starts, the crew should have the power to make decisions for you at certain points. Now this might be hard because, after all, it’s your challenge and you should be able to say what goes but the thing is, after a certain amount of time out on the trail, you won’t be the best person to make certain decisions, so you need to come to terms with this fact in advance, so it doesn’t throw you completely off balance on the day.

It doesn’t have to be about your crew taking over because you’re failing though, it could be that they encounter something ahead and need to feel that they can make an executive decision in the best interests of your challenge and seeing you complete it. We had this exact situation on my South Downs Way challenge. Unbeknown to any of us, a major cycle hill climb competition had taken over the car park where we had a planned support meet, so Richard, my crew lead just texted me to say something like “bike race taking place at the next planned support stop, car park closed. We’ll meet you at the car park after. It’s only another 2k. Are you OK for supplies?”

OK, so there wasn’t a lot they could do about this but they still took control of the situation and just told me what the change of plan was, rather than asking me what I wanted to do and this is the important point for both you and them. If they can make executive decisions on the ground, which potentially change your plans, they can save you the stress of trying to figure out what you want to do as an alternative and in the heat of battle, that’s indispensable help.

In normal situations though and for the majority of the time, the crew will respond to what you want as you go along (even if it differs from the plan) because you’re going to fancy a piece of food or want to adapt things a little – it’s completely natural and you can only plan so much. But it’s when the challenge is in the latter stages, especially if you’re going long, that your crew may need to step up their control over what you do and you need to be prepared for that.

Have this discussion in advance and then they’ll know when they need to step in if needed. In the majority of cases, it will be things that you would want to do anyway, it’s just that you’re too fatigued and have forgotten it. Your crew aren’t going to suddenly insist that you have a complete change of clothes at 80km or start feeding you food you don’t like. This is simply about them becoming your brain and taking over decision making.

The most important thing to understand is that having a support crew with you on your challenge enhances the experience. You’re in this together and while you do the walking, they are just as much a part of it as you and you succeed as a team.