Apparently it was billed as Training at 40 percent of full distance, but it meant getting up earlier than ever!

Last week we headed out on our longest group training walk yet, starting from QUECP and walking all the way to Checkpoint 4 near Amberley Station. We managed to meet up only a little behind schedule with a couple of cars parked at the end, without any complications this time;-)

The walking day started off a little overcast but was warm although the pace was held up (probably to our benefit) by around 200 walkers on an organised ramble heading in the opposite direction along the South Downs Way. After around 101 "good morning"s and "hello"s we resorted to French, German and Spanish salutations!

We hit the first checkpoint around 10h30 (30 minutes ahead of schedule) and took 10 minutes break to attend to feet, food and the view of South Harting:

Lunch stop was at Cocking. Stuart had turned up with only his camel-pak for company, and had thought we'd be going through Cocking, but the route stays up on the ridge, so he jogged downhill into the village to get some lunch, I asked if he'd be kind enough to pick up some milk whilst he was out. I didn't actually expect him to turn up with a pint of semi-skimmed. For a fully-skimmed drinker I found the influx of a pint of relatively fatty milk a little hard to walk on! That'll teach me!

Mid afternoon we had a phone call from the Oxfam Trailwalker office. They were just calling to see how the fundraising was going, but were quite impressed to hear we were actually on the route, not the sort of place you expect to find someone on a Thursday afternoon!

Around this point the weather was looking a little ropey, we were expecting rain at some point during the day. Luckily for Stuart he'd brought some rainwear:

Onwards towards the end, although we had a rest around Bignor Hill, which was probably a little lengthy given how tight our muscles were when we got going again.

Part of the support information we've received from Oxfam include a map-guide which features an Altitude Profile for each section. The profile for Stage 4 looks like this:

Well that's nice, but it seemed to have been uphill or flat at the very least for the last 3 miles or so. This was especially unwelcome as most of us were finding the flint-pebbles in the track were quite uncomfortable underfoot, new insoles all round please!

Finally we made it to Amberley around 6pm just about spot on target for the 24 hour target-times and 2 and a half hours inside the 30 hour target time. Guess that deserves a drink: