On November 1st, Sammy and I did a 40km walk around the Yamanote Line in Tokyo. The Yamanote Line is the loop circuit of the overground train system, and the train itself is a pretty iconic symbol of the city for many people (especially train enthusiasts like me and my Grandad). On the line there are 30 stations, and Sammy collected the station stamps at each one, whilst I drew a little piece of art. The point of that was because my grandad would love to have a complete collection of the stamps, so he gets something that brings him joy, and my Nanna loved art so the pictures were for her. It’s like I thought walking 40km wasn’t enough of a challenge ha. I started a gofundme page for my task, and in the end, we raised nearly 600 quid for charity (582pounds to be exact), which we were really proud of. We’re so grateful to everyone who donated.
When we paid the charities we split it 50/50 between Breast Cancer UK (for my Nanna, who fought 2 types of Breast Cancer in her life,) and Muscular Dystrophy (for my two Uncles, my Nanna’s son, who died young due to the condition). Sammy and I topped up the amounts to cover the gofundme fees and rounded each Charity donation to 300 quid each. It felt so good giving the money to causes that mean so much to us.
Originally, I didn’t know how long the walk would take as we had no time to train in the run up to it, (as death happens suddenly, you know). In the end, we completed the walk in one day! We left our apartment at 7am and finished walking at almost 11:30pm. It was a long day but the weather was beautiful. The lack of training meant that we both almost killed ourselves pushing through the challenges. The main one being finding the place of the station stamp at every location (in particular we spent almost 2 hours walking around Shibuya station to get that stamp, meaning we missed the cafes and rest spots I had planned for the second half on the route because everything was closed, and we intended to get back for 9:30ish but it ended up being gone midnight). Looking back, we should have stopped in Shinjuku and just finished the walk another day, but we were due to fly back to England in December, and we were very busy at work, not to mention the rainy season had finally started, so we really didn’t feel there was much opportunity to do it otherwise. Anyway, I definitely do not recommend this sort of thing for people who haven’t trained for such an event. On the way home, I actually ended up passing out on the platform of Kinshicho station. I’ve never fainted out of exhaustion before, but it’s not an experience I ever want to have again. Stay safe folks, do your training before big exercise events – don’t be silly like I was!
On a more positive note, little did we realise that the date we had picked (1st November) was the 100th anniversary of the train route we walked! We literally could not have timed it better if we’d tried. The universe wanted us to get it done that day, and we made sure not to disappoint. Along the route were special posters, stamps and even markets to commemorate the Yamanote line, picking up some of these souvenirs for me and my family felt like the perfect token to represent what we were doing in Nanna’s name (little did any of the JR merchandise team know that at the time of course).
I’ll post some of the pictures of the day below, along with all the little “artwork” pieces. I hope you like them (although for sure, you can see which ones were done towards the end of the day when my brain was starting to shut down hahahaha).
