Hello, please let me introduce myself. My name is Keiron Young, I’m a teacher, tutor and founder of the Consett Hiking Group. This is the first blog post charting a journey to the Hadrian Hundred, the LDWA’s flagship event in 2019.

Like all of you reading this, I love to walk. There is a growing awareness of the physical and emotional benefits of walking: the space to breathe, the space to think and the space to move are ever more important in a digital world of distraction.

Walking gives me time to recover from the stresses and hassles of everyday life.

In the early days my walking story centred around a search for wildlife, the flora and fauna of the wooded river valleys of County Durham and Northumberland. I also walked a lot because I didn’t drive, the silver lining to what at times was a massive inconvenience.

But as time progressed I began to walk further, spending whole days either walking with friends or on my own, escaping into the countryside. I have fallen in love with the fells, compiling my list of summited Wainwrights and dreaming of high altitude adventures to follow my first up Mount Kinabalu.  This year I’ll be heading to Everest Base Camp after last year’s trekking down the west coast of Australia and then over to Queensland and its wonderfully bio diverse jungle terrain.

But I digress. This blog will record my progress as I prepare to walk further than I ever have done before. 100 miles in 48 hours.

The furthest I’ve walked to this point is 34 miles in one day.

They were 34 painful miles as I recall with my feet blistering from ill-fitting shoes and my arches, lacking the support of my usual insoles, collapsed to send shooting pains into the hefty calves I’ve developed over the years.

I, and my feet are in better walking shape these days but I’m under no illusion as to the size of the task. As those of you have completed a 100 mile challenge will know, a 50 mile challenge needs to be first completed (in under 24 hours) to qualify for the 100. I have my eye on The Foot in Two Dales Challenge set up by The Irregulars in North Yorkshire. This coming weekend, I will be doing the Durham Dales once again, a stunning 30 mile loop around the hills and dales of a much unheralded county for walking.

So I hope you will join me, support me in my quest to get to the Hadrian Hundred. Walking is a huge part of my life, the context in which I see new places and meet new people. Joining the LDWA has opened my eyes to new paths and different routes around our spectacular region. The Hadrian Hundred will be the biggest challenge I’ve undertaken thus far and the road to it starts here.

Keiron Young