DAY 124 - SPLIT TO TROGIR: 18.3 MILES (36,600 STEPS)

22 August, 2011

18.3 miles (Total: 1167.8 miles) 36,600 steps (Total: 2,268, 891 steps)

‘Anyone can love peace, but Jesus didn’t say, “Blessed are the peace-lovers.” He says peacemakers. He is referring to a life vocation, not a hobby on the sidelines of life.’ Jim Wallis (founder of Sojourners)

One of the highlights of the visit to Split was a tour of the ‘Sports Hall of Fame’, which celebrates the amazing sporting talent of the city. What I appreciate about any exhibition of this nature is that it contains examples of what people are capable of if they are prepared to pay the price of admission, which is undoubtedly self-discipline and vision. My visit was extra special because I visited the Hall of Fame with six Olympians whose triumphs are recorded in it and that brought it to life in a memorable way.

These people are heroes and such people are in short supply; so when you have them, they need to be put on display to inspire the new generation. In fact I would venture to suggest that the existence of the Hall of Fame and the fact that virtually every child in Split will, at some stage during their school life, pay a visit is one of the secrets of their sporting success in inspiring a new generation of sports men and women.

The visit to the Hall of Fame and one of the leading visionaries behind it is a legendary sports journalist from ‘World Soccer’ called Zdravko Reic—he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of football facts and figures and a wonderful repertoire of great stories from a life of following the sporting greats, and not-so-greats, around the world. Mr Reic had said that I should come by the Hall of Fame on my way out of the city and he would walk with me to the city limits.

I always feel a bit low when I leave a place which has special memories—Athens, Tirana, Sarajevo, so I was grateful for the opportunity to walk with someone a little bit of the way. As agreed, I arrived at 8am at the Hall of Fame, but as I turned the corner I found about forty people had turned out to wave me off, with Mr Reic walking towards me with a beaming smile.

As I got closer I recognised many of the faces of the Olympians who had shown me round the Hall of Fame.  I felt utterly inspired that these people would have so captured the vision of the Olympic Truce and its possibilities that they would turn out at 8Aam on a Monday morning to join me on the walk. Mr Reic had organised a full turn out of the press for the send off, including Pero Smocic, a brilliant young journalist from the newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija, who was going to walk with me to Trogir.

Along with the Olympians there were two sweet looking twin sisters that I assumed were the children of one of the athletes, then Mr Reic introduced them, “This is Ana and Lucija Zaninovic (pictured) and they are World and European Champions at Taekwondo and  they have both qualified for London 2012.” It was amazing to think that these young girls could be world leaders in a combat sport. Of course that was by looks, and they are deceptive, but when I spoke to them they had a very familiar steely focus and determination about their goals and competition, which seems to be a pre-requisite for sporting success.

Sarina from the British Consulate had arranged for my rucksack to be taken to the bus station in Trogir to await collection, so I only had my shoulder bag, but that was enough as the temperature was already racing towards 40 degrees and we had 30 km to cover. During the middle section of the walk we were joined by television crews, who Pero thought wanted to capture the story of “Peace walker collapses on Walk for Truce”—they were to be disappointed, but only just. This was the hottest day of the year in Croatia and we were walking during the middle of the day and I was dehydrating fast.

I left Pero at the bus station in Trogir at 5pm.  I had enjoyed his company on the walk and he now had to write 600 words for the newspaper and the deadline was 6pm.  I joked that he had never had to work so hard for a story before. I walked through the narrow streets of Trogir and across the bridges in search of a hotel, which Sarina had helped book, called The Palace—it was a perfect treat at the end of a long day.  I had a bath and then went straight to bed, but ominously wasn’t able to get much sleep as I kept being woken by severe leg cramps.

Eventually I got up and read up on leg cramps on the Internet, which suggested that they were caused by dehydration and lack of salt or stretching after exercise and tended to happen during the night when the calf muscles would contract in a spasm. I had these before and decided to take a couple of Ibrprofen and try to sleep. It didn’t work and soon it was time to get up and get going to Rogoznica.