How To Finish The Parish Walk: My 3 Most Important Tips
I love the Parish Walk. It’s the Isle of Man’s equivalent of the London Marathon, expected to raise around £600k for charities each year. An 85-mile walk around the island. All to be completed within a 24-hour time limit. Only around 10% of starters finish. It’s a gruelling physical and psychological challenge.
Having just completed this years event in a time of 19 hours and 11 minutes, and having completed the event 4 times in a row now (2021-2024), here are my 3 top tips for success:
Understand your motivation. Why are you doing what you’re doing? When you have a really clear understanding of your motivation it’s like a superpower. Your ‘why’ will drive you on through the bleakest of bleak moments.
Focus on the right things. It’s easy to get distracted from the task in hand and start telling yourself a negative self story about the future. It’s important to catch yourself in these moments and turn your focus back to what matters most in that moment. In my case, hydration, fuelling, and pacing, rather than sore feet!
Put a great team around you. Ultimately you are the one who has to put in the performance but it’s extremely difficult to perform at your best without a great team around you. Great teams know how to provide you with the optimal balance of challenge and support. They also give you hope when you’re suffering… an inevitability in the Parish Walk!
[I’d like to thank the lovely people at St John Ambulance & Nobles Hospital who unexpectedly became part of my support team this year, helping to look after me and rehydrate properly after the finish.]
I hope my learning about what contributes to success can help you.
How can you use these top tips to improve outcomes in your performance domain?