Bikinis and Bermuda Shorts: Holy Busted Blisters Batman!!

On May 7th, Sarah and I, joined by Louise Park, attempted the 24th Annual End-to-End walk of the island of Bermuda. It involves starting in St. George, and walking along the south shore, down the railway trail and all the way to the dockyard. A total distance of 24.1 miles. As I am writing this today, 37 days later, I still have scars from the blisters on my feet. How's that for foreshadowing.

Realizing this was going to be the farthest distance we have ever travelled on foot, Sarah and I made a few training walks. Our farthest one was probably about 15 miles in which I got a blister on my foot. In an attempt to curtail this, I bought some padded gel insoles for my shoes AND after taking some advice from a walking website, got some Vaseline to rub inbetween my toes and my feet. Not sure if it made it worse, but it certainly didn't help.

We took the bus from Hamilton to St. George's pretty early to get there for the 8 am start. It was packed. We tried to wait for Louise who missed the bus and by the time we got on, we had to stand the entire 30 minute bus ride to St. George's during which the bus driver drove like he was running from the police. Louise had a nice comfortable bus ride on the next bus in which she was able to sit down. Definitely going to keep that in mind if we ever attempt this again. While we were waiting for the walk to start we looked around the town hall area of St. George. Saw a pirate ship and went in the town hall and sat at the Governor's desk. Louise got there a few minutes later and we decided to get an early start on our 24 mile walk.

Governor's Desk. It was another week until I was able to put my feet up like this again.

Getting an early start

Needless to say, it was a very long walk. Beautiful day however. There were refreshment stands every few miles where we could get snacks and water. At one of them, while Sarah was changing her socks, I struck up a conversation with a reporter from the local paper, the Royal Gazette. He wound up using my quotes in his article and I had a part about how I hoped I could make it to the end as I was worried about my flat feet getting blistered. (more foreshadowing). Unfortunately, I didn't save the article and it has since been taken down from the website. This is my quote:

One of the early walkers was Nick Whelpley and his wife Sarah. “I've got flat feet, so I'm at a disadvantage.” “I'm trying not to let the blisters stop me from making the end. We've just been coming along on our own most of the way. But the people out here for us have been very supportive.”

And we kept walking, and walking, and walking, and walking......

One mile in, 23 to go!!

My feet were already starting to hurt at this point!!

Already blistered

We stopped at the 10 mile sign to change our sweaty socks, which was also the start of the railway trail. Until this point, we had been walking on the road, but now, we were on a dirt trail for the home stretch. I had huge blisters on both my heels. Gingerly we all put our shoes back on and kept going. I made it almost o the Southampton Princess when we had to walk up a steep hill. On the way up, I felt a shooting pain in my left foot and began hobbling. Sarah and Louise quickly started to disapear and made distance between us. Now, if Sarah is walking faster than me, I got problems. After I took off my shoe and looked at the damage, I quickly realized the 6 miles I had left to walk probably weren't going to happen without risking some serious injury. After talking to the girls, and getting some encouragement that it was ok to quit, I hobbled down the bus stop in front of the Princess, making sure to take off and hide my walking number so as to avoid ridicule. The girls kept going on without me and I hopped on the bus to meet them at the finishline at the dockyard. I felt pretty bad about giving up, yet as the bus ride went on and on and on, I realized just how much farther I would have had to walk and realized I had made the right choice. When I arrived at the end, I quickly made my way to the medical tent in search of some guaze. They told me that all contestants got a free pair of flip flops and I proceeded to hobble on over and get the most comfortable pair of flip flops ever. I have since put them on, not so comfortable, haha. Anyways, I made my way to the finish line, knowing it would be at least an hour and a half until Sarah and Louise arrived. While waiting, Holly and Evey walked through, They had done the Middle-to-End walk, which I think is the way I will go if I participate again. We made our way to the Frog and Onion Pub where we got some frozen drinks to cool down. They finished their drinks and hopped on the ferry to get back to town before it got too crowded. Another brilliant idea from people who had obviously done this before. I waited a little while for Sarah and Louise and they both made it all the way. Really proud of them, I quickly led them to the flip flop tent. Exhausted, we went to the ferry terminal and quickly realized that we weren't going to be able to get on it as it was too crowded. Luckily we were able to get on the bus and get out of there. It was definitely an experience, and while I'm disappointed I couldn't make it all the way I really doubt I'm going to try to do it again next year. Think I'll be perfectly content to do the Middle-to-End OR ride a bicyle from End-to-End. My feet hurt just thinking about it and hopefully the blister marks will disappear some day!!!