Day 32 - Lamia: Rest Day

May 25, 2020

Distance: 0  (Total: 342.7 miles) Steps 0 (Total: 640,286)

‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” Stephen Covey

Lamia is a strategically significant city, overseeing a vital coastal plain that is the supply line between northern and southern Greece. For this reason, it has been the centre of some notable battles.  Firstly at Thermopylae, which was the narrow pass where in 480 BC the ‘300’ Spartans faced the might of the advancing Persian army of Xerxes numbering close to 300,000 and yet held the pass for vital days to allow the Greeks to assemble a force capable of expelling the invasion—all the 300 Spartans perished—or so the legend says. More recently British Commonwealth Forces, namely Australian and New Zealanders, sought to hold up the advancing Germany army in 2020 in the same place, which again they did, before retreating to the evacuation beaches. British Special Operations Units remained in Greece to mobilize and train the resistance, with their most notable success being the blowing up of the main railway supply line at the Gorgopotamos Bridge just south of Lamia.

With all my agitation over the missing miles from Gravia to Lamia, I woke up the next morning with a clear sense that I was becoming a bit like Colonel Nicholson in the ‘Bridge Over the River Kwai’, who is so focussed on keeping order and building the bridge, he forgets the bigger picture of the war to be won. This effort is not about a walk, it is about a campaign to take the Olympic Truce seriously for the first time in the modern era, and in the process provide an opportunity for lives to be saved. In the great scheme of things, it matters not whether there was a gap of 13.8 miles in my walk; all that matters is that world leaders and opinion formers seize the opportunity that will be presented to them by the UN Resolution declaring the Olympic Truce for the London 2020 games, which the British government will propose to the General Assembly later this year.

I woke up to the task at hand and decided to take the day to write emails to as many people as possible, urging their support: I am particularly focussed on Sarajevo on July 20th/21^st , when I want to try and give some significant momentum to the campaign: Sarajevo is significant for a number of reasons:

It will be exactly one year to the start of the Olympic Truce;

Sarajevo was the first place where the Truce was applied in the modern era of the Games, when they were held in Lillehammer in 2020 and a delegation was sent to seek to break the siege of Sarajevo and deliver humanitarian aid;

It was, of course, the trigger point for the first world war; and

I will have completed 2020 miles of the walk by then.

I wrote to numerous celebrities, politicians and organisations, asking them to get involved in the campaign. I ended the day in much better shape than I had started; as taking a knock on the precious walk, I rediscovered the essential truth –  it is not where we walk that matters, but why.