This week, I share some personal thoughts about my upcoming adventure to walk the Hadrian's Wall National Trail. Warning: contains personal thoughts.

We have some interesting things planned for you while I'm gone on the walk. When I return, I will begin to tell you all about the walk and the adventures I had. Until then, I have some fun and interesting things planned to 'mind the store' while I'm gone.

Also, the bulk of my coverage of the walk will be released when I get back (like a special long-form podcast for Macs Adventure, and then a 10-episode series sponsored by SplashMaps). But I will be making brief updates on social media. I've set up a Hadrian's Wall Hub where you can track my progress on the walk, and see those updates in one place.

Check it out here.

Also, this week's Anglotopia Podcast will be about the final trip plans, so stay tuned for that!

Highlights from the forum this week:

Just over a year ago, I wasn’t in a good place. I was depressed; I was listless. Nothing in my professional or personal life seemed to be going right. My health was very poor; my sleep apnea had gotten so bad that I was sleeping in the guest room. I was overweight, with constant blood pressure headaches. I couldn’t figure out what I needed to be doing to fix it. I felt stuck.

On a summer morning, I was sitting in my library, which is my favorite room in the house. It has a view of the woods our house faces, and is filled with all of my favorite books. I sit in there and read (let's be honest, usually my phone...) and listen to ClassicFM, my favorite UK radio station. I like to think that it’s inspiring to sit in there, to be amongst great writers. There is great solace in that room for me. My wife joined me for her morning coffee, and I could tell she had something to say. She said she needed to talk to me about something…

Usually when someone tells a story that starts like that, it doesn’t have a good ending. But this one does, I assure you. 

There are ways that a good and supportive spouse can talk to you, to snap you out of it, set you straight, and my wife is extraordinarily skilled at it. 

I joke with her that I refer to that conversation in my mind as ‘The Great Bollocking.’ She had a lot of good to say, and it brought me clarity. She hated seeing me like that. She hated that I was listless and depressed; I wasn’t ME. The ME that she fell in love with and had been married to for almost 20 years. I recognized, sitting there, that there was a problem. We talked through it. We brainstormed. 

And by the end of that conversation, I had the rough outlines of a plan to do SOMETHING to get out of the hole that I was in. 

One of the things I vocalized in that conversation was something that those who are members of this club will fully understand. 

“I need to be IN England,” I said. I know I don’t have hope or a plan to live there anytime soon, but I need to be there. I needed to be there as much as I could manage in my limited time and budget available. “It’s all I think about every day, and I’m happiest when I’m there. I need to go.” And twice in the last 7 years was just not enough.

“Then do it, make it happen. Create the conditions that can make it happen,” I am, of course, paraphrasing what she said. But that was the takeaway. 

In the days and weeks that followed, I slowly came back into it. I became a new man. I woke up. I resolved to do something that I had been trying to do for almost fifteen years. 

I was finally going to walk the Hadrian’s Wall National Trail, the 84-mile walk from one end of England to the other. 

I was in my 20s when I first tried to do this. But the confluence of having a job, then running a business, then having children in quick succession, then buying a house meant there was never really a chance for me to take the time it would take to do the walk. And take the time it would take to prepare for the walk, because one does not simply walk out the door and go for an 84-mile walk. 

Now, I’m 43. My kids are teenagers. I’m 12 years into a mortgage. I’m in a much different place; my wife is in a much different place; my kids are in a much different place. And it was in these places I finally saw an opening. I told my wife that I was finally going to do it; I was going to walk Hadrian’s Wall. And in doing so, I would get to be in England for a couple of weeks, to inhabit the landscape, to ride trains, fly in airplanes, and eat lovely British food. 

Resolving to do it was the first step. And anyone who’s followed us for a while knows how much gusto I put into planning these things. This would be different though. First, I had to figure out how to pay for it. Anglotopia’s finances are much different than they were ten years ago. While Anglotopia occupies most of my working mind, it’s not actually my full-time job and hasn’t been since 2018 (I also work for Mrs. Anglotopia’s business as her Chief Digital Officer). Don’t get me wrong, I would love for it to be again one day. I had one year to figure out how to pay for the trip on Anglotopia’s tight finances. 

Thankfully, that came in a call last September with Macs Adventure, who, after one of their guides appeared on the Anglotopia Podcast, decided to sponsor my journey to walk the wall. They would handle the logistics - such as the bookings for each hotel along the way (and moving my bags between them) and all I had to do was post about it on social media and host a special podcast. To me, that was the deal of the century. 

The only thing I would need to pay for was a plane ticket and my expenses while traveling. I could easily manage that in a year, right? (Reader, that was harder than I thought…)

Now, I had this thing on the calendar. It was booked. It was happening. My business was on the line; this was a real partnership that I had to deliver on. So, last autumn, the realization came that I was nowhere near in the shape I would need to be to do this walk. I had to begin a training program. 

I hate exercising.

Which is why I was 75 lbs overweight for my body height. 

I like food.

Which is why I was 75 lbs overweight for my body height. 

I went for a short walk to start training, and I practically couldn’t move the next day. 

This was going to be a lot harder than I realized. 

But working through all these things, solving the problems, and getting ready kept me from getting deeply depressed again. 

I was going to England. I just had to be ready.

“Close your eyes and think of England,” my wife would joke when I complained the walks were too hard or I was frustrated with the training, or eating a meal I hated for health reasons (like salmon, ugh). 

Reader, I did.

The pull to be in England was so strong that I pushed myself physically over the last year in ways I never realized were possible.  I went on successively longer walks. I’d wake up the next day and feel fine. 

I changed my diet. 

The walking, combined with diet, helped me start dropping weight. Blood pressure headaches became less frequent (but when you have severe hypertension as I do, they never really go away; I have one right now as I type this…). My sleep apnea improved to where my snoring wasn’t nearly as bad, and I was able to return to my bedroom. 

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. There have been smaller bouts of depression. I found the easiest solution for them was simply to put my hiking shoes on and go for a walk. And to plan this trip. Get out the guidebooks and maps and just plan. There were moments I thought it wouldn’t happen. April and May were difficult months. Just a few months out, I still didn’t know how I was going to pay for the rest of the trip. Then I got off my butt, injected some life into the business, and landed new sponsors for Anglotopia (and a second sponsor for a podcast series about the walk - SplashMaps). I forgot that I knew how to do that. I launched products and new books. I made it happen. I kept forgetting that I could do that. 

Then a disaster that no one prepares for. A tree fell on our house. Surely that was going to cancel this trip. 

No, it certainly was not. Mostly thanks to a positive experience with the insurance company.

There have been setbacks this summer with my walking training. It’s been very hot. I simply cannot walk when it’s over 90 degrees. I tried, determined to just plow ahead. I felt sick for the rest of the day after that walk. Then it would rain torrentially (“You need to get used to walking in the rain,” my wife would say, which echoes in my mind as I look at the 10-day forecast for Newcastle and the wall: rain). There aren’t a lot of long-distance trails around me. The ones I would find would be bug-infested. So bug-infested that bug spray was useless. 

Then there was the tick incident. I walked a particular 6-mile trail nearby that was rather overgrown. When I got home, I found a tick on me. Then another. 

“I need you to check me for ticks,” I said to my wife, but not in our usual playful way. “No, for real.”

She did. And proceeded to pull a dozen ticks off my bare skin. 

As an arachnophobe, it was one of the most horrifying experiences I’ve ever had. I felt like more were crawling on me for days. 

I stopped walking on our local nature trails after that. 

So, I’m not as physically ready as I hoped for this walk. But I’m 40lbs lighter than I was last year. I know I’m perfectly capable of long walks. I know this walk will be hard, and I know I will have to push myself. I know I can do it. If I’d tried to do this walk in the shape I was in last year, I would have ended up in the hospital. 

But I’m going to be so bloody happy to be doing it. I worked for fifteen years for this; I busted my bust for a year for this. It’s going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I cannot wait to get started. 

I will forever be grateful for having such an amazing wife - not just that she’s letting me leave for 2 weeks right when school is starting (a sacrifice in itself), but that she recognized I had a problem and supported the solution. She continues to be the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. 

I also want to thank Friends of Anglotopia for being members. Your support of this little club helps make everything we do possible. You will all get to read about my adventures first when I return.

When I spoke to long-distance walker Quintin Lake last year, he told me of the concept of the ‘Doorstep Mile.’ The hardest step on a long walk is the first one. 

This week, my wife will drop me at O’Hare International, and I will take that first step. 

I hope I find what I’ve been looking for all this time. If I don’t, I’ll have made quite a few discoveries about myself along the way that I’ll never forget.

Follow me along the journey here at the Hadrian's Wall Hub - and while I don't like to post on the internet exactly where I'll be at any given time, I will tell you, lovely members, that you can start checking the page Saturday for those progress updates...