36 days to go
World Ultrarunning day and what better way to spend a long day in the hills than with a lovely young ultrarunning friend recceing another part of my 62@62 challenge route.
We weren’t the only people to make an early start in the hills on this bank holiday Saturday. Our first port of call, the popular Bowfell, was already pretty crowded and we saw a great many more people trekking towards its summit as we moved on. The same was true of the Old Man of Coniston but our other tops were less popular and by the end of the day there were few folks to be seen – in fact only us. The weather was a bit mixed, lovely sunshine, with many snow showers which came to nothing. It was very cold and I needed my warm midlayer all day.
A big part of the preparation is the recce which is a word that could be used to describe any other path in life you encounter for the first time. You rarely get the ideal line first time; there are accidental detours along likely looking paths that turn out not to be so good and there are deliberate diversions to explore something that looks appealing elsewhere. Sometimes you dawdle, at others you can speed up and occasionally you need to back track. Often unexpected hurdles appear. On this recce I knew where the hurdles were, the start of a descent off a craggy edge at the end of our loop, but we took it slowly and carefully made out way down-climbing the rocks, completed our mission and rewarded ourselves with lemon cake.
There are parts of my route I’ve needed to look at multiple times and there are some bits I’ve yet to recce for the first time. It’s never going to be perfect but it will hopefully be a bit easier having done this preparation.
Believe you can and you're halfway there