On Saturday, Ludo, Fred and I walked from London (Hyde Park) to Weybridge, where Mommas lives. The 30km planned route follows the Thames and shortcuts a bit through Richmond Park and Bushy Park.

It's quite interesting that many aspects of an ultramarathon were visible here. It was particularly obvious with Ludo, as he was facing the unknown. Looking at how did the whole thing go helps me a lot to understand how people (and myself first) come to run ultras.
  1. A symbolic goal. Ludo actually came one day with the idea of walking from London to Weybridge. He had very little knowledge how far it was and how nice the route could be (and neither did I). No matter the route, start and finish cities took the first place. The first step towards ultra seems to find this kind of symbolic goal. For example the UTMB is a loop around the highest peak in Europe, which is highly symbolic. Furthermore, it's interesting to notice than during the UTMB 113 people withdrew at "La Fouly" (km102), wheras only 30 did it at "Praz-de-Fort" (km111), however easy the route is in between. That was the 100km symbolic effect. Most of the successful ultras carry such symbols.
  2. Back to Earth. To some extend, we just wanted to see whether it was possible to do on foot what everyone does by train/car. That's a kind of come back to the origins when humans had to walk. Nowadays we are nearly teleported by train from one city to another. Train windows give us very few idea of what is outside, whereas inter-city trips on foot build a physical link in between well-known places. London and Weybridge are now in the same world to us. Furthemore it's nice to realize you can walk or run what people do by car/train or even by plane for some happy few.
  3. Preparation. Preparation is crucial in ultra. Given the route, (too?) little credit was given to it this time. Only the typical thrill while looking at the distance on a map ;) ...
  4. Suffering. Last kilometers were rather long, due to nice blisters. But resistance to pain is the first quality of an ultrarunner... However, I've not heard any "I will never ever do it again". Should I conclude that this walk was not long enough ?
Although not particularly warm, the weather was very sunny (and we even walked by a garden with palm trees 8-) ):

good weather  palm trees
Among other curiosities, we saw many red deers in Richmond Park.

Ultra start.