Once a week I walk with my Ladies Over 40 group. Each week we walk somewhere different, which I love because it means I get to explore my city and go to places I probably wouldn’t have.
I have written about the tough walk we did already and don’t want to milk it too much but there was a lot of lessons learnt from that walk – one of the main ones was “ALWAYS take water” but that’s not the one I want to talk about now.
We were a group of 8 ladies (I think). At some point we separated into 2 groups – I was in the first group of 4 ladies. It was not intentional to split, we walked together for a while but then as it got harder, a group of ladies fell behind a bit.
The route we had chosen was 5km, or so we thought. We checked with the guy at the entrance and off we went. But we when we realised it was not, in fact, a 5km walk we were already 5km in! Basically we had walked around the mountain to the other side and had to then get back over the mountain, which meant going up and up and up and up. I think it was this point that actually broke our spirits. Had we not known where we were, the ignorance might have motivated us but we saw landmarks on the road outside the reserve and knew we were very (very) far from our cars.
Unlike a lot of trails, there was only one route, there was no short cut, no other trail we could switch over to – we had to just forge forward.
There was a point I suggested calling my husband and his paramedic cousin and asking them to send air rescue for us.
One of the ladies was really struggling with pain in her legs, I was battling a lot with the elevation (and had no water), another lady was 78 and was doing well but not particularly wanting to have to and Rosa was, we discovered afterwards, hallucinating. But we had to keep walking because calling for air rescue wasn’t really a practical option.
So we pulled together and got it done. When Rosa was ahead she would shout “We are nearly there!” (Obviously we werent but she was seeing things in the trees that looked like gazebos, so thought we were.) I didn’t believe her but the encouragement was nice and gave us something to do. We stopped often, then pulled each other up to get going again. And so it went for 4km. Lots of swearing(me), encouraging and vowing never to walk anywhere ever again (also me).
We obviously eventually got back to the cars and high fived each other and now, weeks later, we laugh about it.
It was a lesson in team work and support. The four of us don’t really know one another, I think it was my 3rd walk with the group, but we rallied and supporting one another right up until the end. It was probably one of the most memorable walks we have done so far and we laugh a lot about it now.
What lessons did you learn this week?
