Not Another Sponsored Walk

When I began this year, I meant to be on a sponsored walk by now.

Actually, when I finished last July’s sponsored walk of 300 miles, I thought, ‘I wonder whether I could have managed 400?’  After all, in July I had been hampered by the hot weather, and had also been trying to fit my walking challenge around normal domestic activities like cooking meals.  If I had already been in good shape at the start, and had set out to walk from dawn to dusk, six days a week, in the comparatively cooler but still fairly dry weather of May, or at a pinch June, I might even be able to manage 500 miles in a month.

I started receiving emails from February onwards asking me to do sponsored walks for various good causes, including the Big Issue Foundation, which works to help homeless people in the UK overcome poverty and social exclusion, and ActionAid, which works with women and girls living in poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America, though at the moment it is also working with Ukrainian refugees.  They all looked like good causes, but I thought I should probably also offer sponsors the option of supporting a conservation charity such as the Woodland Trust, in thankfulness for beautiful woods to go for walks in.

I emailed some of my friends and family about this.  One friend, who takes a highly pragmatic approach to exercise – he doesn’t have a car and walks everywhere, but doesn’t see the point in taking exercise for its own sake – said that he would rather sponsor me to do something useful like pick up litter.  Personally, I would rather he sponsored me to do that, too, if I had unlimited space in my dustbin in which to put all the litter that people drop. 

However, the council only collects non-recyclable waste every three weeks, and our dustbin holds about three sackfuls.  This means that, if PDB11 and I haven’t generated enough non-recyclable rubbish of our own to need to fill a bin-liner, then every three weeks I could fill our dustbin with maybe three bin-liners of discarded food wrappers and broken hubcaps found by the roadside.  Collecting this much rubbish constitutes perhaps an hour’s walking: a useful chore, but hardly a challenge.

Admittedly, I could do more if I faithfully washed and sorted the discarded cans and bottles I found, and put them out with the recyclable waste, which gets collected weekly.  But I’m not quite virtuous enough to do this.

Another friend, who is herself an energetic swimmer, mountaineer and runner, and a fundraiser for various organisations, and who had sponsored me last year when I was fundraising for TreeAid, pointed out that she couldn’t sponsor everyone for everything, and that it was a bit too soon to sponsor me again.  After all, quite apart from my previous sponsored walk, I had just been asking all my friends and family for donations to the Innocence Project, an American charity which works to exonerate innocent people wrongly imprisoned, in lieu of Christmas presents.

Other friends and family encouraged me to go ahead, since, as several people said, ‘walking is good for body, mind, and spirit.’  I hadn’t yet decided what I wanted to fund-raise for.  Altruistic motives were not really uppermost in my mind.  I wanted to test myself: my physical capacity for walking, my mental capacity for finding my way around routes I hadn’t explored before, and my emotional capacity to do this without bursting into tears or losing my temper for no immediate reason. 

At the same time, I knew that there are always lots of good causes out there which need more funds, so making it a sponsored walk was a way to make it achieve some good.  Yet at the same time, I knew that there were plenty of more immediate ways in which I could achieve good.  If I wasn’t busy training for a fitness challenge, for example, I could apply to do voluntary work in a food bank, or help fund-raise in a less self-promoting way by working in a charity shop.  I could spend more time with lonely friends, or write to prisoners.  I could do some of that litter-picking.

Instead of going for a long walk every day, I could go for moderately long walks (8-10 miles) with PDB11, or shorter walks (4-6 miles) with my friend Essex Granny, since both of them want to work at getting fitter this year.  Essex Granny, who only moved to Somerset a couple of years ago, is still learning her way around the local area, and as she can’t read maps but has an amazing memory for any route she has walked once, she enjoys it when I show her new routes.

So, yes, I knew that challenging myself to spend a month doing nothing but long walks was just self-indulgence disguised as charity.  However, I didn’t mind this, if it wasn’t for its potential effect on mental health.  Exercise, particularly country walking, is good for most people’s moods, but my brain seems to be wired a bit differently from most people’s.  It’s a toss-up whether walking twenty miles a day will bring me home feeling serene, or angry and paranoid from low blood sugar. 

When I took last July’s walking challenge, it was one of only two months of 2021 that I didn’t need to take antipsychotics to be able to sleep, but this was only because I was physically exhausted enough to collapse by the end of each day.  It didn’t mean that I was sane.

So this means that if I’m out all day, even if I send regular texts to confirm where I am, PDB11 has no way of predicting what frame of mind I will be in when I come home.  I might as well spend every day going out to the pub to get drunk, or experiment with assorted mind-altering drugs.  It is unkind to put so much stress on him. 

Nevertheless, he knows that he is not responsible for my emotional state and cannot protect me from myself, and that I have to learn how to manage my own moods.  And we both know that, whether or not an individual day’s walking is a good or bad trip for me, solitary walking overall helps me to be more confident.  And in the meantime, my being out of the house does give PDB11 more freedom to get on with activities – whether playing music or sawing wood – without having to worry that the noise might distract me when I’m trying to concentrate.

So a month-long walking challenge might have been worth doing, even if I myself wasn’t entirely emotionally stable, as long as PDB11 was.  However, he has been going through stressful times himself recently, and not just because of my problems.  Even when I was only disappearing for training walks a couple of times a week, being away from each other for twelve hours at a time was starting to feel like too long.

It came to a head one day when we were both heading to Shepton Mallet for writers’ group, but PDB11 was busy in the morning, so we agreed that I would walk to Shepton in the morning and have lunch, and he would drive there to join me later.  After writers’ group and a quick visit to the supermarket, I decided that I still needed more exercise, and walked home.  I arrived in the evening to find PDB11 feeling lonely because he had hoped that I would come home with him in the car, but I had hurried off before he had had time to suggest this.

On balance, a time when we are both emotionally vulnerable probably isn’t the best time to take up a challenge which will take me out of the house all day, every day.  But, as our circumstances have changed since February, so have those of the world.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian refugees are in desperate need of help.  In my home village of Oakhill, as in the rest of Britain, many people are opening their homes to refugees, and a group of hosts have set up a fundraising page to help provide everything that these refugees will need.

But at the same time that we donate to help Ukrainians in Britain and elsewhere, the other problems across the rest of the world haven’t disappeared.  For example, millions of people in Afghanistan are starving, and the UN Refugee Agency is dealing with emergencies in many countries including Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan, Venezuela, and Yemen.

So I need to fund-raise to help the Ukrainian refugees near me, and to help the Disaster Emergency Committee and the UN Refugee Agency help all refugees, whether European or not.  Maybe I should choose a different sponsored challenge.  Or maybe, probably, a lot of you are going to donate to those charities regardless of anything I do or don’t do, just because they do good work and the refugees need their help.  Why not have a look at their websites now, and see what you think?