For Four Days, the World Felt Different

For four days, I walked fifty kilometres a day. I came home with sore feet, very little sleep, and a renewed faith in people.

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By Friday afternoon, every step hurt.

After four days of walking fifty kilometres a day during the Nijmegen Four Days Marches—the world’s largest multi-day walking event—I had reached the point where my feet objected to almost every surface. The next morning, the short walk to the supermarket felt harder than some of the longest stretches during the event itself.

Yet that isn't what I remember most.

What stays with me are the people.

Every village seemed determined to keep forty-five thousand walkers moving. Children stood along the road handing out cucumber slices, cookies and sweets. Churches served us free coffee. Complete strangers applauded as we passed, as if finishing the walk mattered just as much to them as it did to us. Along the route I kept running into familiar faces. Friends from the fantasy community. People I’d interviewed years ago. Listeners who recognised me from my podcasts or from my social media posts. Even the Klingon cosplayer I'd once posed with at Comic Con somehow appeared among the crowds. With tens of thousands of participants, none of those meetings should have happened. Yet they kept happening.

Walking fifty kilometres together has an interesting effect on people. Conversation becomes easier. Pretence disappears somewhere around the thirty-kilometre mark. You talk about books, life, work and dreams simply because there's nothing else to do except keep putting one foot in front of the other. I spent much of the week with friends who are organising a new fantasy festival. We talked about storytelling, community and why so many people feel at home in worlds filled with elves, dwarves and dragons. By the end of the week I found myself sketching the mythology behind their festival in my notebook. Apparently, sore feet don't stop the imagination from wandering.

On the final day, someone said something I’ve heard after almost every fantasy convention I’ve ever attended: “I wish the real world were more like this.”

I understood exactly what she meant.

But perhaps we’ve got it the wrong way round.

Maybe this is the real world.

A place where strangers encourage one another, where generosity is the default, where differences matter less than the simple fact that we’re all travelling the same road.

The news rarely reports on that version of humanity.

But it's there.

Sometimes you just have to put on your walking shoes before you notice it.

This article is based on the latest episode of my podcast The Walk. If you'd rather hear the story in my own voice, you'll find the podcast player at the top of this page.