The unexpected can and will happen you are pushing boundaries, and this walk is no exception.   Experience affords you some control, the ability to forsee obstacles and problems and the wisdom to prepare, train and organize to prevent or manage them.   However, sometimes, especially when you have a neurological condition, the dice land on a roll you never anticipated and then, as Lou said in Wall-street:  Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss. 

Day 3 started off perfectly, on the road by 7:30 AM with beautiful weather and a fairly short walk to find the Dornoch bridge, where I continued to test out our live stream and Jim Kroeger met me at the north end (See the FB live).  

What’s that facility over there?  John: “That’s Glen Morange, we will walk right by it.”  …..Several people stop me  along the way to say thank you and get a photo, which is always great and a real boost.

We come off the bridge in fine fashion and stop the distillery, just to see it and taste a few blends, the on to crank out some miles.

I start really cranking,  this is what I am here to do…… but wait, as we reconnect the team points out that I am “listing” to the left, quite seriously.  Crazy, but I am totally unaware, so I write it off and keep trudging forward with a bit more thoughtfulness.  But then, I start to experience some serious pain and imbalance in my core, hips and Gluts, which is now effecting my walking.

I stop on a busy corner to stretch and amazingly three cars stop and ask if I need any help.  I get up  and feel much better, looser, more normal.

As we make our way further south, we see beautiful golf courses on the sea, forests littered with beautiful chanterelle mushrooms and sweeping estuaries.  We take the ferry from Nigg to Cromarty,  where we find John’s long-time friend waiting for us on the other side with drinks in hand.  After all, it’s John’s birthday……….

We carry on and my “list” now feels like I'm in a battle with gravity, defying the laws of nature, what is going on, I’m in a lot of pain.   I tell John and Jim to keep going and I attempt to stretch the problem away.  By now it’s clear, relief is allusive.  The RV scoops them up around 7 PM to take them to John’s party, which I regretfully decline, as I have some miles left to do,  to reach our dail.y goal. It's hard to believe the 30 mile buffer is going to be completely gone now, I'm in denial…..

I keep walking, but can only  make it a few hundred yards and have to lay down, which is harrowing in itself.  There is no median here and the space between the roadside and the dense “bushes, is about 1.5 feet.  I have reflective clothing on now, and many people are  stopping to see if they can help, which I decline.  Until ……..after a lengthy discussion with a cyclist, who I turned down his offer of dinner with his family, returned to ask if he could put together a care package, I relented and he was back in 10 minutes with a warm halloumi grain bowl, chips, chocolate an a wee bottle of Scotch.  The hospitality and thoughtfulness was so amazing, I’m still blown away.

After a 30 minute dinner or so, I began walking again, by now it’s 9:00 PM and it is starting to rain.  After five more compressed cycles of stretching and moving forward, I find myself really unable to even walk 5 steps, my back and hips are completely locked, and at an angle that is tearing up my entire torso.  I lay down 12 inches from the road, thankfully traffic has slowed to the point of a car every 5 minutes.

I lay on my back as the rain softy filters through the trees hitting my face and a strange calm comes over me as I realize there is nothing left to do, nothing I can do to go even another step.  So, I call my wife and explain and then Kristy (one of our board members who’s Aunt helped me out tremendously with all my medical problems on the first walk.  

We find a Physio clinic and Kevin Murray gets a 9 AM appointment for me, right before they close for the night and then picks me up from the road.

Alan, an all around wonderfully nice guy who was helping drive the RV put us up for the night and with his wife both took amazing care of us, I fell asleep immediately, in a massage chair.

Up and at’em at 7 am, rushing out of the house to meet with a Council woman and her husband, for a photo shoot then directly to the Physio, who was pretty baffled by the nature of what was happening.  After extensive discussions and physical testing parameters we both agreed that it seems not to be skeletal but rather muscular in nature.   It wouldn't be until later that night, after extensive reviews that I would fully understand exactly what was happening.

We have to immediately head off to an with interview and broll filming for the SLT Scotland.  When you're doing 40 miles a day you're constantly under the pressure to get in miles, it's nearly impossible to do much else. I'm walking slightly over four miles per hour, but the math just doesn't work, you can calculate it on paper and say that if I walk an average of 3 1/2 miles an hour this is how long it will take but it always takes longer, from stoplights to stoping and talking to people to grab me a very quick bite to eat,  the seconds add up quick and you're constantly on the clock.  But we are here to raise awareness for the disease and how to live better with it so we must take the time to meet with people and we do so that puts even more pressure on the miles.

Despite getting a great night sleep, having a massage and going through a complete physical evaluation and intervention resulting in a pain relief and stretching routine from the Physio, the cycle continues the next day and appears to be even more aggressive than the day before. I am really struggling to walk and I am in constant pain and I can't correct my posture…this is hell.

I even deployed a tens unit for about four hours, experimenting with pulse width & frequency modulation etc. etc. which worked a bit but then began to impart side effects from constant muscle simulation that was layering another issue on top of everything else.     

Being an engineer and growing up in a household where if you broke something, you fixed it yourself, I had a lot of success over the years fixing stuff I probably had no business fixing.   It's 17:45 and we are due to go on the News at 18:00 and the team is in the RV preparing to watch the news , and I'm trying to make it there.   Instead, I’m laying in a field on my back yet again, starting to think about what reality means to the situation.  I was so on the edge at that time that I can't remember as I'm writing this if I made it back on my own or if I was picked up, I believe it was the latter.  Everyone seems very relieved when I start out the conversation being open to discussions about taking some rest and recovering.

The fundamental underlying principles of this entire endeavor are about bringing people and organizations together to help people live better with Parkinson's disease while we work together to find a cure. I think I've said this and written this so many times that It sometimes feels like a bumper sticker, a soundbite,  but as I’ve seen in the past, inspiration comes at the most unlikely is Times i and when you have amazing people willing to work together, the result is always greater and more impactful than any individual can bring to the table, and that’s powerful stuff.

So I was and remain incredibly inspired and thankful of the fact that the team had already spoken internally about the situation, and has a plan to provide me with a day to recover, by walking the entire days distance including some miles from the day before, to keep us on our schedule. 

I spent all my waking moments researching the symptoms I have, to find the root cause and found very quickly what I believe to be the answer, which is the Pisa syndrome, as in the leaning Tower of Pisa  (At least someone had a sense of humor about this). I'm going to avoid getting into the details of this condition, but symptomatically it appears to be identical to what I am experiencing and it's root cause & remedies have yet to be determined. Please see this article for more information, I thought it was pretty good: https://medium.com/parkinsons-uk/posture-and-parkinsons-ask-the-expert-dfc9e1215697

Well, now I have a name to the condition but no clear perspective on specific causal mechanisms or factors to mitigate going forward other than those that already have been employed.  So, then the only thing left to do is take the last remaining factors that could be contributors and remove or reduce all of those like pack weight, trunk control and rotation, lateral translation, etc, and start walking again, albeit very thoughtfully.

I walked 7 1/2 miles first thing in the morning and felt really good, and I will begin tomorrow by walking 13 miles and then we will assess how I feel and it is my hope that I'll be able to begin walking the entire distance again, but knowing the team is there to help me if I need it, gives me the confidence that together, we will see this successfully through..  

I am slated to go out at 7:30 AM, the adventure continues… 

Please consider a donation: https://walk4parkinsons.org/donate

The Long Walk for Parkinson's is turning out to be a metaphor for living with Parkinson's disease, in Forrest Gump fashion, you never know what you're going to get, but when you have a team around you as great as this, the journey becomes the destination and it's an incredible reminder that we can all use a little help sometimes and not only is that OK, but being open to excepting help is real strength.

For John, Ivonne, Grant, Alan, Jim, Kevin and everyone who has supported us, thank you!