2025 LDWA 100 – Marshals’ Event – Taking Temporary Charge of the Event (Norfolk and Suffolk)

My plan was to stay awake on Saturday night and then get the train home on Sunday night, so that I only lost one night’s sleep. It’s not even sub-optimal, as this doesn’t really feel much of a sacrifice when we have entrants that are walking solidly for nearly 48 hours. Anyway, Katie told me on my arrival on Saturday evening that I’d be taking charge, which surprised me if I’m being honest and I think delighted me…. This is the moving map that we have of entrants so that we can see where they all are and check if they’re going off course. If we see an entrant going wrong, then we’ll do what we can to get them back on the route and to ensure that they stay safe.

This is the symbol of power…. It’s the emergency phone that entrants can ring if they have any problems or difficulties during the event. As this point we had around seven checkpoints open with tens of marshals, along with over fifty walkers out there. We also had a team of drivers at HQ who could pick up any walker who retired and they would also shuttle around closing checkpoints when entrants had gone through and then moving the food and checkpoint items around where they were then needed.

I thought that I’d better calm my nerves before this moment of power, so a three course meal seemed in order and here’s the sizeable starter.

The second course was a hash brown and bacon sandwich.

Then I thought I’d better have a dessert of some apple crumble with custard to just ensure that I was fully energised.

Thanks to the kitchen crew for their supplying bacon rolls with the fat cut off for me, it was much appreciated. Actually, thanks to the kitchen crew for quite a lot of food and drink. And during the night, we were kept busy at HQ and the emergency phone did ring on numerous occasions. And thanks to Pam at one of the checkpoints for the excellent levels of gossip and updates that were maintained. At the main event in three weeks, this is all handled differently as we have a control room, RAYNET provide radio communications to every checkpoint and there are more vehicles and drivers shuttling around. But on that event we will have over 500 entrants taking part, so it’s all ten times in scale than the marshals’ event.

It was all genuinely very exciting, we got the retired walkers back quickly and there was one walker who didn’t retire at a checkpoint but at a church, and we collected him. Food was shuttled about, checkpoints were updated and we got messages on how entrants were getting on. It all seemed to go very quickly and the next day I told Katie, the organiser of the event, how well I’d done, but she didn’t doubt that…. I then refused to hand over the control of the emergency phone for several more hours and then I realised I was hungry and Katie could once again take back control.