When I arrived in Keswick on Friday
afternoon I was in confident mood, confident that I could take the worst that
the Lake District could throw at me, and confident that I could hold my own in this
race. When I finally got to bed at 3am
on Sunday morning after just over 21 hours on the mountains, I had been humbled
by the experience, humbled by the power and physicality of these peaks, and
humbled by the calibre of the other athletes in the field.
The Lakes 10 Peaks is an appealingly simple
concept – the 10 highest peaks in the Lake District within 24 hours. The website description cites 73km and 5,600m
of vertical ascent, but given that you are free to choose your own route as
long as you visit all the peaks and checkpoints in the right order, the actual
distance you cover can vary significantly.
My GPS track showed 77km and 5,450m of ascent. The race was created 6 years ago by Paul
Smith (our race director), partly to raise money for Macmillan, but also just
to see if there was anyone else out there who fancied trying to run the biggest
10 peaks in the Lakes in a single day. This
year’s group of 82 starters took the total number of people that had taken up
Paul’s challenge to over 1,000 – a superb achievement by him, his assistant race
director Mark Bottomley, and most importantly all of the amazing volunteers who
man the checkpoints in some extreme places in vile conditions… Thank you all!
So anyway, here’s how it went: I set a 3am
alarm for Saturday morning to give plenty of time for breakfast, and to get to
the 4.15am meeting point in Keswick for the coach ride to the start at Swirls
Car Park. The midges there also enjoyed
a hearty breakfast at our expense, but thankfully Paul kept the pre-race
briefing brief, so we were off on time at 5am, with a 50 minute climb to the
top of Helvellyn, our first peak of the day.
I was competing as a “pair” with Rich Knowles whom I met running the 10
Peaks in Brecon last year, and as we rock-hopped our way down from the summit,
with the early morning sun illuminating Thirlmere below us and the high peaks
to the west, we both looked forward to the day ahead with great confidence.
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| Rich and Paul in confident mood (copyright SportSunday) |
We stopped only briefly at the first
checkpoint at the southern-most end of Thirlmere – just enough time to refill
water bottles and grab a Clif Bar to munch on the move – and set on up the Wythburn
valley. The map shows several areas of
“bog” in this valley, and in this respect our beloved Ordinance Survey has
shown true British understatement. As my
legs repeatedly disappeared to above the knee into peaty water, I began to
appreciate the race director’s sadistic sense of humour, and realised that this
was going to be significantly tougher than I had expected. It was with great relief that we reached higher
and drier ground at High Raise (our next peak, a mandatory one, but not one of
the “10”), but by then the damage had been done – I would have to put up with
soaking feet for the next 10 hours and the resulting trench-foot blisters would
haunt me over the second half of the race.
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View from High Raise, heading off in the wrong direction!
|
From High Raise we followed another group
of four runners heading off a good pace along a well-marked path. About 15 minutes later I realised we were
going the wrong way. Checking my GPS we
worked out a route to regain the right path going cross-country across some
rough fell, but we had added an extra kilometre to our journey and lost a fair
amount of time. It was however a
fortunate early lesson not to blindly follow anyone, but instead to keep a
constant eye on the GPS. In preparation
for the race I had spent many hours at home making sure our route was correctly
and accurately programmed into my watch, so it was pretty dumb not to use it. Some might consider the use of GPS in a
navigation event such as this as tantamount to cheating, but the rules allow
it, and there were to be many occasions later in the day, when conditions had
massively deteriorated, when I would offer up thanks to the designers of the
Global Positioning System. Simply put,
without my watch, we would not have finished.
The next two peaks came quickly – Bowfell
and Esk Pike (the latter again being compulsory but not one of the “10”) – but
by now the weather had changed with foggy clouds being driven through peaks by
very strong winds. We jogged into the
second checkpoint on the col at Esk Hause after 4 hours 45 minutes to be
welcomed by Sarah (my wife) and Blue (our dog) who had hiked up from Seathwaite
to meet us. Blue’s welcome was as cool
as the biting wind – I think he was understandably keen to get down and back
into the warm – but seeing Sarah was a tremendous boost and she did a terrific
job in filling us up with water and chivying us on our way.
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| Conditions deteriorating at Esk Hause |
It only took just over an hour for us to
bag our next four peaks – Great End, Ill Crag, Broad Crag and Scafell Pike – as
they are all relatively close and only have minor climbs between them. The biggest difficulty at this point was
actually finding the peaks as visibility was down to less than 10 metres and locating
the right cairn was not always easy. The
GPS guided us in most cases, but for some reason I had not programmed Ill Crag
with sufficient accuracy and after 5 minutes of aimless wandering around
looking for it, a Spanish fellow competitor spotted it for us.
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| Paul and Rich on summit of Scafell Pike |
Standing at the top of the highest point in
England, Scafell Pike, Rich and I asked another competitor (Chris Tuton) to
take our photo. After a short discussion
with him on the correct way off the peak and how to approach Sca Fell – the next
peak and one of the most dangerous – Chris decided to join us and cooperate on
navigation. We were now three.
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| Chris climbing Foxes Tarn waterfall |
Planning for the event, it was the ascent
of Sca Fell that had most worried me. I
knew that we would not make the 10am deadline to be able to use Lord’s Rake,
and indeed I was not sure that I would have wanted to use that precipitous
route in such poor visibility. Given
that Broadstand was declared out-of-bounds by the race director as being too
dangerous, we were committed to the climb up the Foxes Tarn waterfall, a longer
route which involves a descent from the “coffin box” at Mickledore, and thus
also a longer climb up. In theory it is
the “safer” route to the summit, but whilst our good friends at the Ordinance
Survey might humorously mark it as a “footpath”, in fact it is an all-fours
scramble up a 45-degree boulder-filled waterfall. Rich struggled manfully to conquer his
vertigo.
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| Rich overcoming his vertigo |
At Sca Fell peak we bumped into
an elderly local “man-of-the-mountains” type in his tweed cap, staff and plus
fours who asked what we were up to and what route we had taken. We explained the event, our route up to the
peak, and the restrictions on Lord’s Rake and Broadstand. His response was “ar’ve dun Broadstand many
a’time, nowt wrong wit’ it” – no doubt he did it in his trusty hobnail boots
armed with nothing but a slab of Kendal Mint Cake.
At this point there is a major route
decision to be made: the standard route would involve descending back down the
Foxes Tarn waterfall, climbing back up to Mickledore, then taking the Corridor
route to Great Gable before heading west on a very long out-and-back trip to
Pillar. We had decided that we preferred
the alternative route, heading west off the summit of Sca Fell down to Wasdale,
then climbing up Black Sail Pass to bag Pillar, before heading back to Great
Gable. Whilst slightly shorter in
distance, this route does involve significantly more climbing, but to be honest
the deciding factor in choosing the alternative route was that it avoided going
back down the dreaded waterfall! In the
event, our choice was the most popular with around 70% of competitors going
that way.
It was not until the results were published
that Rich and I realised that we were actually leading the “pairs” race at the
top of Sca Fell, but Mark Clayton and Kevin Minter in their matching
fluorescent yellow shirts – a smart move given the fog! – were only 5 minutes
behind us. However, if it is the case
that there is no easy way up Sca Fell, it is also true that there is no easy
way down, and whilst we floundered over steep boulder fields, our rivals used
their local knowledge to find a speedier and less tiring route, and pulled out
a lead that we were never to recover.
We limped into the checkpoint at Wasdale at
1:15pm after eight and a quarter hours on the go. The tricky descent of Sca Fell had sapped our
thighs, and by now my wet feet had started to blister on the soles. We had a team discussion on how we were
feeling, and it was clear that our pre-race targets for times and placings were
proving to be completely unrealistic. We
agreed that from now on our race was only about one thing – finishing within
the 24 hour cut off. We knew that we
had seriously underestimated this course, and that we still had some really
tough hours ahead of us. Rich suggested
that we stopped in the pub at Wasdale for a beer – I guessed it was a joke, but
had a feeling he might have been serious!
Following the Black Sail Pass path out of
Wasdale, our spirits were boosted by having agreed our new goal and by the easy-going
conditions. It was not to last. Towards the top of the pass the path steepens
considerably, and given the path had petered out, I decided there was little to
lose in “cutting the corner” and heading directly uphill north-west to gain the
track to Pillar. After 30 minutes of scrambling
on all fours up a 45-degree scree slope, with Rich’s vertigo causing him to
teach some new swear words to the bemused sheep watching us, we finally got
back onto the Pillar track. I am not
sure my decision was particularly popular with Rich or Chris, and from then on
I decided no more short cuts!
The walk up to Pillar is long and tedious
with several false peaks, and by now the wind was really getting up so the
exposed summit was not somewhere to linger.
The good news was that this was our 8th peak: 80% of the way
there! The bad news is that this was
only the halfway point in distance, and given that over 10 hours had passed
since the start, we now knew that our best-case scenario was finishing in the small
hours of the morning. Turning to head
back eastwards along same route we had climbed, we were treated to a
spectacular view of our next peak – Great Gable – 5km away. Lit by the late afternoon sun, it had the
appearance of a champagne cork: circular with a flat domed top and
vertical-looking sides, and absolutely no obvious route up it!
It took nearly 90 minutes to get to the
Beck Head checkpoint at the base of Great Gable, and by some cruel joke the
lovely evening sunshine had now turned into a howling gale pushing rainy clouds
over the passes and the peaks. I am not
sure what the marshals at Beck Head had done to offend the race organisers, but
this was one horrible place to have to spend the day. The amazing dedication and good spirits of
these volunteer marshals is humbling (that word again!) and I can only repeat
my thanks for their support and encouragement.
Great Gable is not a long climb but it is
quite technical with large boulder slopes demanding considerable care in the high
winds and poor visibility. In some ways
the descent is more difficult – there is no marked route and it’s all too easy
to end up on top of a cliff or a steep scree slope. The fog had made us totally reliant on GPS
for route finding, and with my watch battery hitting 10% I was thankful that I
had brought a second watch to switch over to.
I think the small group of short-course competitors that we guided down
off the peak was pretty relieved as well.
Just over an hour later, nearly 14 hours
after the start, we rolled into the next checkpoint, the YHA at Honister
Pass. We were totally exhausted, our
thighs were shot, Chris was struggling with some digestive issues and
desperately needed a toilet, and my blisters made every sharp rock feel like a
red-hot poker being jabbed into my soles.
But, we jogged into Honister with elated smiles on our faces because we
knew that Sarah would be there to meet us, offering practical assistance and
moral support; we knew that there would lashings of hot sweet tea and hot food
available; we knew we could access our drop bags, which for me meant the relief
of a change into dry shoes and socks; but most importantly I knew that if we
could get to Honister then we could get to the finish. For sure, there was still
a lot of distance yet to cover, we still had the dreaded Skiddaw to climb, and
it would take us another seven and a half hours, so we would have to dig
deep. However, the rest of the course
was relatively straightforward, and even if we had to crawl up Skiddaw, I now
felt that somehow we would get to the finish.
Leaving Honister we decided to detour from
the standard route, instead taking the road down towards Borrowdale and then
heading north on the Coast-to-Coast path – an alternative that is slightly
longer but has much easier conditions under foot, and is downhill all the way
to the next checkpoint at Nichol End. As
we walked, and occasionally jogged, north alongside Derwent Water we could see
Skiddaw ahead of us, looming ominously over Keswick. Whilst the lakeside conditions were mild and
warm, we could see that dark clouds were accumulating over the last of our 10
peaks. With their perverse sense of
humour, the organisers had kept the longest single climb of the route for last,
and we now knew that not only would that last climb be in the dark, it would
also be in bad weather.
At Nichol End we caught up with Bernhard
Corfe whom we had last seen at Pillar over 8 hours before. He was slumped in a deckchair considering
dropping, but after a quick chat agreed to join our group heading for
Skiddaw. We were now four. He was a most welcome addition to the team as
he was really strong on the 2-hour climb – with his red head torch pointing
backwards, he literally gave us a guiding light to follow in the dark and fog. Reaching
the last of our 10 peaks at 20 minutes past midnight, I had anticipated some
form of minor celebration. However, with
a gale force wind belting horizontal rain into our faces and making any form of
communication impossible, it felt a dangerously exposed place and we just
wanted to get down and somewhere warm as soon as possible. Despite visibility of less than 5 metres, the
GPS guided us quickly and surely to safety, and within minutes we were warming
up with a slow jog on the path down towards Keswick and the finish.
The
statistics:
- We came 49/50th out of 65 finishers, with 18 DNFs and many others switching to the short course: only approx. 50% of the starters completed the long course
- We were 2nd in the pairs
competition out of three finishing pairs
- My GPS recorded a distance of 77km, 5,450m
of vertical ascent, and 8,500 calories
- The equivalent flat distance was over 120km
- Our time of 21 hours and 2 minutes was
nearly twice that of the winner (Ross Litherland) who came home in an awe
inspiring 10hr 46mins
- The average time for the 65 finishers was
just under 18 hours – the calibre of our fellow competitors is truly humbling
Lessons:
1. This is not a “running” race. It is just too
steep, rocky and technical for anyone other than the real pros to spend much
time running. I ran for less than 10% of
the distance. Given this, my training
programme of running five and a half minute kilometres around the largely flat
local parks was not particularly useful – better preparation would have been clambering
over wet boulders in a wind tunnel, whilst blindfolded.
2. When they say this is a navigation race
they are not joking. When the weather is
bad, navigational competence makes the difference between a finish and a DNF.
Good route choice can save not just seconds but half an hour; bad route choice
means a leg sapping scramble over boulders or though a bog. Planning and preparation is essential, as is knowing
the route and terrain well enough that you can find your way in the fog. Never
just assume the group you're following knows where they're going!
3. Protect your feet! Wet feet can be tolerated for a few hours, but
five to ten hours of wet feet means trench foot and blisters. If the sadistic race organisers must put a
massive bog near the start, either find a way to keep your feet dry, or carry spare
socks in your backpack.
Final
Thanks:
I have already expressed my thanks to the
race organisers and the amazing race marshals.
However I will finish with thanks to Sarah: for putting up with my
absence for endless hours of training runs; for crewing for our ever-expanding
team, being there for us with encouraging words and practical help at the
checkpoints; and most importantly, for saying “yes” when I asked whether I
could do this event on our wedding anniversary!
