Where I walked last week: Amsterdam - Amstelveen- Ouderkerk aan de Amstel

I'm skipping my long walk this week in effort to give my knee a chance to heal from a small injury. It has been bothering me since wadlopen, nothing major, but it gets pretty sore after my long training walks. I'll take this opportunity to write about last week's walk, however, since I haven't done that yet.

Last week I finished a training walk of 20 miles (32 km)! This was a big milestone because it is the distance we will be walking each day during the 3-Day event. For the first leg, I walked from my house in the northeast part of Amsterdam, to the Olympic Stadium in the southwest part of town, where I attended a short meeting with one of the sponsors for our upcoming race. Since the sponsor just happens to be a running store (de Hardloopwinkel), I took the opportunity to buy another pair of shoes that I could rotate with my existing pair. I wore them out of the store and walked the next 15 miles in them and my feet still felt pretty good afterwards! Seeing my new, VERY bright pink shoes against the grey pavement has a great motivational effect.

Aren't these the loudest shoes you've ever seen?!

After that I headed to Amsterdamse Bos, and dropped off some flyers for the race. Speaking of the flyers, my talented friend Natale at nat + neo created them for us and this is how they turned out:

I left the Amsterdamse Bos and walked to Amstelveen, where I took the opportunity to stop by my in-law's house for a drink and a sandwich before continuing on to the second half of my walk. From Amstelveen I walked across a polder to Ouderkerk aan de Amstel. A polder is a low-lying piece of land that has been reclaimed from the sea, and approximately 27% of the land in the Netherlands wouldn't exist if it weren't for the highly ambitious engineers that figured out how to hold the sea back with dikes and levies.

From Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, I followed the Amstel river back up to Amsterdam. The entire walk ended up taking me seven hours, including stops. My legs felt very tired the last couple of miles and I had to bribe myself with an ice cream cone to continue on rather than calling Eric to ask him to pick me up (hey, bribery works as good on me as it does my kids!). My legs felt pretty stiff the next morning, and it wasn't until the end of my second fitness class of the morning that they start to loosen up. I probably won't walk this far again before the 3-Day, but I am glad that I got one 20 miler under my belt!

This Last week's walk: 

Distance: 20 miles (32km)
Time: 7 hours
Weeks Left: 4
Amount Left to Raise: $338