Coast to coast walk

From 6pm yesterday until 7am today, I participated in an attempt to do the coast to coast walk. It's a 36km trail designed by Singapore NParks connecting parks from west to north of Singapore. It has 10 stops. I stopped short of 8. The reason? My legs were in pain and I couldn't drag them for another hour. And we were already at 38km sooo...

This is the official route of the walk.

Route grabbed from NParks

We started at Lakeside MRT walking through Jurong Lake Gardens, Bukit Batok Nature Park until the Hindhede area of the Bukit Timah Nature Park. There were so many signposts throughout the walk especially at the first 2 checkpoints where you can see signages every 100 meters so you wont get lost or veer too far away from the track. What was confusing was that following the Nparks app, it leads you to parks that you will see along the way but don't necessarily have pit stops.  So we went to Bougainvillea park looking for the pit stop only to find out there was none. For the succeeding ones, we just skipped them and completely focused on finding the pit stops.

This is stop 3 off Bukit Timah nature park

Stops 1 to 3 were quite nice in my opinion. 3 to 4 was basically walking along the stretch of Dunearn Road so it felt like a regular day-to-day walk. 

One of my favorites was the Adam Road to McRitchie stopping by Kheam Hock Park to enjoy the swing in the playground. That was also at past midnight so there were very few people on the road. The most interesting was passing by Bukit Brown Cemetery on a misty evening. There were 5 of us, some were walking ahead, some were walking behind. But once we had sight of the tomb, our pace somewhat adjusted without talking about it and all of us were suddenly walking together, huddled.

We also met other a few walkers along the way. One group was walking the reverse direction. 

My least favorite was from McRitchie to Bishan AMK park. At that point, we were starting to feel the strain of walking on our legs. And since we were somewhat in the city, we were walking in concrete pavements without seeing trees so it felt tiring. At km 30, we stopped for a break in a random bus stop. At that point, we were doubting whether we could still go further or not. 

In my experience, re-starting after breaks was always difficult. I cant seem to bend my legs. It was no different after the 30km break. But I pushed myself, took my earphones out and listened to a walking playlist. By some miracle, I felt like my legs were ok 5 minutes from that break. I felt like I could finish the next 6 km.

The walk along Seletar Riverwalk was another favorite. It was along a reservoir so one side, there's the reservoir and on the other side, there are trees. It was also almost sunrise so we would come across early morning runners going around their runs.  They're so inspiring.  

Walking under a bridge (or an expressway?)

 At that point, everything was already painful but my legs were on autopilot so I was ok. But once in a while, we would stop for a break and those were not friendly to my legs.  So in our last break, I was already walking slowly.

At some point, we saw Coney Island and I thought, yay, it's just a few more steps!  But I was wrong. From the riverwalk, there was no direct path to Coney Island and one needs to go around Punggol Waterway Mall to go to COney island. Knowing the distance it would still take to reach Coney island and back to the taxi drop off area, I called it quits. I already dragged myself for 8 kms and I just want to do it anymore. And it was not even a situation where I'd think if I'd regret my decision. I was sure that I wanted to stop. So I stopped.

This is us at Stop 7. The guy on the left and the lady on the extreme right both finished it!

Two of our friends went until Stop 9 though and they clocked 41km!!!

Looking back, I think the walk is a good experience! But be prepared to walk more than 36km. 

Oh, and do it in the evening! the weather is much much cooler and there are less people on the road so you can take off your mask and breathe better.