Milestones

I have passed a few milestones today. At half past eleven this morning I was passing kilometre 13 on the Voie Verte, the redundant railway track. The track starts at the old Lavelanet railway station, 2 kms from the centre of town, so I had walked 15 kms. I still had 9 kms to go before I reached home. At that 15 kms point, I had clocked up 4,000 kms for the year.

More notable figures for today. It is the 25th anniversary of the day I met my wife Gay. It is also the 25th birthday of my granddaughter Alexandra – Alex’s birth was the reason Gay and I met.

Clearly we are back in France and back to normal walking patterns. Today I am hiking 24 kms, after walking just 7 kms a day in the hospital park in Indiana. Things have changed a little while we were away. The Pyrenees are blanketed with snow. The weir which we see as we enter the carpark in Lavelanet is pounding with water instead of the trickle there for the past few months. I think we can say that winter has arrived and the drought is over.

More statistics. I have already exceeded my training target for the year. The plan was to average 10 kms a day, which would have given me 3650 kms in total for the year. I am already well in excess of that - clearly more to be done before the end of the year, although there will be interruptions.