Evolution is a good thing. No designer would have thought to create a memory system that recalled painful events but made it difficult to visualise and remember the pain itself. And so I can say with little precision that The Trailwalker 2010 event was the most awful voluntary thing I have ever experienced. Oh, was its despicable agent ever well camouflaged. A vile and cruel enemy, lurking until kilometre 55 that struck simultaneously on several fronts in several guises. I suddenly realised I was just a passenger on this 100 km walk. Pain used my feet as a pawn in a war with my will. I cursed my ancestory. I had just learned I am the evolved product of generations of determined people who didn't use their feet enough.
The pain in my bruised soles burned on every step, lessened with speed but returned with unwanted dividends on slowing. Lucozuprofen was a trusted ally for kilometres until my sugar-averse body decided a dose of nausea would protect it. Around there, kilometre 55, things go decidedly hazy. Where there had been fields of wheat and barley shimmering in the breeze, now there was nothing. A beautiful sunrise, worthy of comment yet compromised by team mates whose earbudded music was actively displacing their own hells. I broke my own code. I listened to The Kaiser Kings and Arcade fire on speakerphone but as invigorating as Closer and Intervention anthems are, I had become the cheerless, careless, dehumanised, sociopathic walking machine # 246C (aka 1074).
March or die said my head, recalling pain-seeded stories of soles falling from overused feet. Take that said my feet (and oddly enough, so said an Oxfam marshall who was telling walkers of Take That reforming for a limited time - talk about pain!). By then I knew victory would be mine. I would and did defeat pain by walking through it safe in the knowledge that it was ephemeral.
This time.
This time.
