Why I Didn’t Much Enjoy The TGOC 2013

Be warned, this is a grumpy, maudlin post

Mick & I have now walked the breadth of Scotland five times and its length twice. Of all of those walks, the TGOC this year was by far my least favourite. Even a couple of weeks after the event, the rose-tinted glasses haven’t hit (in fact, such is my lack of enthusiasm, that I haven’t even looked at the photos yet, never mind downloaded them). I’ve now had a while to contemplate what was awry with this year’s walk and my opinions haven’t changed from those I expressed at the end of the walk. I can pinpoint two key reasons that muted the experience for me this year:

1. I hurt my wrist on Day 1 and spent the next few days in a lot of pain and the rest of the time just in pain. It still seems incongruous to me that a poorly wrist can have such an effect on a walking trip, but it affected all sorts of things, from being wrong-footed in crossing streams with only my left walking pole, to not being able to lift my own pack onto my back to not even being able to dig my own holes.
2. Whilst the weather wasn’t ostensibly bad, Mick hit the nail on its head when he described it as ‘dreary’. After we got over the first four days (Days 1 and 3 were just plain wet whereas Day 4 was snowy), we had very little rain. The problem was that even when it was dry we spent too much time either in cloud or mist, and thus didn’t get to enjoy many views. For me, the whole joy of walking in Scotland is the surroundings and when I couldn’t see those surroundings it just added to the gloom created by Point 1 above.

Not a photo from this year’s walk, but it may as well have been

There were a couple of other contributing factors too:

• I started the Challenge with a woeful lack of fitness, which wasn’t helped by the challenging route I’d planned. Entirely my own fault on both counts.
• As I see the Challenge as a social event, I like to go through sociable places and if we’re going to link the same places together more than once, then I feel obligated to plan a different route between them. The problem is that there was a reason I picked the route we originally walked between those places and, when I’m standing there on the ground, I realise that I don’t want to walk this year’s convoluted route, but the one that I planned the first time around. But then I feel like a failure and a fraud for not walking the route I said we’d take … and I’m still failing to come up with an answer to that conundrum.

At the end of Day 1 (when I was having a grump associated with a particularly low moment when I discovered that my sleeping bag had wet patches and my maps were sodden) I declared that I was never going to do the Challenge again. At that point, none of the above points were factors in that rash declaration, yet my opinion hadn’t changed remarkably by the time we reached Montrose.

Of course, I’d not been home for three hours before I started looking at maps again. I’ve outlined (and gained Mick’s approval for) another route across Scotland, which I’m just in the process of plotting. It’s a route that’s a bit different from what we’ve done before, and I’m particularly looking forward to walking it. The jury’s out as to whether it will be walked as part of the Challenge or not (but if I was a betting woman, I wouldn’t bet a pint against).