How to walk 100km

How do you go about walking 100km? A few kilometres at a time is a good place to start.

Probably before you ask ‘How’ you go about walking 100km, you should ask ‘Why?’

We think we’ve come up with a pretty good reason.

This year, seemingly for no apparent reason at all we entered the Oxfam Trailwalker challenge. This involves walking quite a bit. Just so that you don’t get lonely you walk in a team of four, not in a relay kind of way, in a everyone walks the full 100km together at the same time kind of way. It seems like a pretty unnecessary thing to do, but here’s the thing, I think it sounds like fun. And there we have it. ‘No apparent reason’ becomes a reason.

It isn’t just any regular run of the mill 100km walk either, it’s a fundraiser for Oxfam. Each team has a minimum fundraising commitment of $2000 that they must reach in order to qualify. So all-up a pretty win-win situation. We get to go on a wander and Oxfam get some much needed money to support their anti-poverty initiatives in the Pacific and SouthEast Asia.

So this is where we find ourselves now. We’ve signed up, we’ve started raising money and somehow between now and April the 6th we need to improve our fitness enough to walk the 100km (preferable without weeping openly) and we need to fundraise like crazy for Oxfam.

Fitness

This one has been easy so far, we just get out and enjoy the outdoors. Here in New Zealand that’s pretty easy to do, just have a quick look at the gallery for photographic evidence as to why tramping  (hiking for those of you not from NZ) in New Zealand is pretty fun. When we aren’t frolicking gleefully from hilltop to hilltop, Ben goes mountain biking around the Port Hills and I run away from Zombies. Nothing gets you out of bed and down the road at pace first thing on a Monday morning like the threat of an impending zombie apocalypse. Rule #1: Cardio.

Fundraising

So far we’ve tried bake sales and encouraging people to buy Oxfam Unwrapped gifts (People buying these can just credit the purchase to our team as they go through the checkout). But we have bigger better plans, which will be the subject of future blog posts. Oxfam do some pretty good work, so if you are keen to help out, you could always visit our team fundraising page.

So how DO you walk 100km?

It remains to be seen if what we are doing is what you do to walk 100km, we will all know in April whether it worked out or not. It seems to be going well so far. Run away from Zombies. Walk up a hill. Rinse and repeat.

The images in the gallery are from three of our more interesting training walks: Mt Somers, Avalanche Peak and Cass–Lagoon Saddle.

By the way, we’d love to have your support over at our team Facebook page.