The perfect present for my thirtieth birthday, as I saw it, was achieving a hard goal. I picked one that is easy to describe and hard to do: walk 100 kilometres within 24 hours.
Mega Marsch
Mega Marsch is a series of long-distance walks held in several German cities. The longest distance is exactly 100 kilometres, and you get one day for it. I chose the München 2022 edition. I started on 21 May 2022, the day before my thirtieth birthday, and the route led into the mountains.
Mountains and night
A hundred kilometres in a day means there is no way around the night. Up to roughly kilometre sixty it went fine, and after that it was so-so, because that was the middle of the night.
From kilometre eighty it was brutal. The mountains began, and kilometres on a climb count very differently from kilometres on the flat. On top of that I got hiker's rash, a silly kind of rash and irritation that at first I took for chafing. The last twenty kilometres were the hardest of the whole route.
Shells on the trail
On the way I passed countless markers of the Way of St James, the pilgrims' route to Santiago de Compostela. The same shell pointing the direction kept appearing on the signs, because part of the march followed the very trail pilgrims walk to Spain.
Geschafft
I reached the finish on 22 May, the day I turned thirty. The whole march took 23 hours and 45 minutes, fifteen minutes inside the limit. I got a medal saying “100 Kilometer, 24 Stunden” and a certificate with my name on it. It carries the line the organisers give everyone who makes it to the end: “Du bist jetzt offiziell MEGA!”, you are now officially MEGA.
Under the photos I wrote one word at the time, and it sums it up best: Geschafft! Done it.
Less than two weeks later I set off on a much more comfortable trip around Germany, this time by train. I wrote about it in Over a thousand kilometres for 9 euros.