High Peak Marathon 02/03/07

The high peak marathon is 42 miles of hilly, boggy, tussocky muddy "track" interrupted by peat hags the size of a bus and bogs that have swallowed lesser runners whole. In previous years snow and ice have been the main obstacles, this year the ground was wetter than a very wet thing and we had a mix of rain, snow and hail on the way round.

Starting at eleven in the evening, Dave Rogers, Stevie Bell, Manny Gorman and myself trotted off up and down the first 16km (10 miles for imperialists) which was reasonable track and road with a mud slide down Win hill chased by a cute little thing with bunches in her hair. The next twenty miles was mainly bog, with some areas of deep bog and the occasional submerged bog that swallowed two of us up to the waist. The kind of thing that puts the f in kinell. Dawn came along with the cold and as we reached the highest point on the course the snow started coincident with the peat hags that made route finding interesting. On the trot down to the last food stop Manny died. He was found later in the tent eating and standing in his sleep. In fact the retiring teams looked considerably more able to continue than he did But if exploding knees and achilles held on by a thread don't stop Manny then death has no chance and shortly after he was hopping around the rest of us like an ex-leper taking pictures. As we neared the finish the sun came out along with the hale, but the descent down to the last checkpoint was an easy trot and we even managed to run up the road to finish 18th in 12 hours 25 minutes.

Apparently a few of the fellow competitors were a little unhappy about the Scottish teams language, can't imagine why. The main cause of the expletives was the 100000 watt searchlights on their heads ruining night vision and making our candles seem a little inadequate. Next years team name is the ARP wardens.

Posted by Trevor Richens on Sun 11 Mar 2007 | 1 comment

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