A few weeks ago I walked round Grafham Water, that’s a local reservoir, it’s about 8.5 miles, and a nice flat circular route. It has a nice (well signed) parth for bikes and people. There are numerous bird watching huts, car parks, playgrounds, toilets, even a cafe.
Now, the morning we picked it was muddy, REALLY muddy, like ankle deep mush, that you just slide on and in. I nearly lost it and went over a bunch of times. It sucked.
We set off early, it was the perfect walking weather, cool, no rain, no wind. For some reason, the majority of people tend to always go clockwise around the route, so naturally we went anti clockwise.
Once you leave the car park at the Grafham water visitor center(where the big play park, BBQ area, picnic benches, and Cafe are), there is a short section of path before you have to decide, walkers can pick the water front mud bath that is a footpath, or the paved cycle path. So naturally we picked the mud bath.
Pretty quick we realized it was BAD, very bad, knowing what i know now – id have turned back and picked the cycle path, the nice flat paved route. To be fair I did know how bad it was going to be – i’ve done this route before when the ground was wet, and yet I still picked it again.
We slid, squelched and slopped the first section till we got back to a decent path. It had been slow going, draining. At the ¾ point of the walk I was hurting, and was already sore.
The final time we did the walk in was 3hours 30 min pretty much dead on. Now we weren’t slacking, but we would have struggled to do it any quicker.
This time round there was minimal mud, and what there was was avoidable. We did it in 2:30 pretty much dead on. That’s an hour quicker, just because of the mud, I was in a lot better condition at the end (i could still walk)
In conclusion, Mud sucks, specifically mud sucks your energy and slows you down. A Lot more than I expected. It’s definitely taught me a lesson in avoiding mud to save time and energy, and one I intend to learn from in future walks elsewhere.