Summary

67k trek on South West Coast Path, just me the Dog (Arnie), a back pack and a tent.  Its one of the hardest legs of the SWCP, so it depends on whether my ankle and shoulders hold up. Arnie will be fine.

The route is in red, unfortunately its cutting off part of the map so see picture below.

Heres my blog  http://todaretodare.blogspot.co.uk/

Sob Story.....

As soon as you see those words you just know what’s coming. Someone is going to try and get money out of you and to make it easier to get you to take action they are going to tug at your heart strings.  Everyone does it Live aid shows videos of starving children, xfactor contestants tell you about being bullied at school, then their mum was run over by a bus but survived only to be eaten by a crocodile 4 years later. Well something like that :-) but you get the picture.

Anyway so now you know the mechanics, here's my attempt.

Back in 2003 I started having problems with my knees.  Every time I got out the car it felt like something slipped out and it would take like 30 Min's before it went back.

To cut a long story short to cure it I decided to run a Marathon :-) Yup I know what your thinking, all I'm going to say is I did the VLM in 2005 and I haven't had any problems with knee's since. So make of it what you will.  In case anyone's interested here's the blog of my marathon, http://grlm2005.blogspot.co.uk sorry but a lot of the links no longer work. 

During 2004 when I was training for the marathon I had a Motorbike accident and tore a tendon in my left shoulder.  That took about a year to fix and messed with my training but was OK for the actual marathon day.

After taking 5h 47m to do the marathon I decided to train more and try to run sub 4.  I was getting there with a Half at 2h 3mins, then did a massive PB at Maidenhead 10, taking 24mins of my previous time but my right ankle also gave up.  After many visits to doctor, physio and eventually x-rays I was informed that I had Arthritis in my ankle and shouldn't run again if I still wanted to be able to walk later in life.  I have to admit I did try but the pain in my ankle was clearly of the type where you’re doing damage. So that was the end of running in 2009 really.

Fast forward to 2014/2015 and I sneezed which re-tore the tendon in my left shoulder. Ill cut this short but many visits to specialists and visits for x-rays, ultrasound scans and MRI scans and they have discovered I have signs of arthritis in both shoulders a torn tendon in left shoulder and a full thickness rupture of the supraspinatus tendon (Rupture means detached basically).  So I don't know how, but I have what’s left of a muscle floating around in my shoulder and one end is not attached to anything.

So back to Arnie and Me walking 65k.  Arnie has arthritis, I have arthritis, my Mum had arthritis, my Brother has arthritis and I know many other people who suffer with variants.  I also know that whatever issues I have they are not life threatening and we all know people that have their own personal battles with the big C.

In my instance pain is a good indicator as it lets you know you’re still alive. 

So I have decided to try and raise a little money for Arthritis Research

We are going to walk 65k along south coast path from Bournemouth to Weymouth just using a small tent. It’s not going to be easy due to both mine and Arnie's body limitations and I have to carry a 16k backpack with all our food and water, but hopefully we'll get there.  As they say nothing worth achieving is ever easy.

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