Saunders Lakeland Mountain Marathon 2009

4-5th July 2009

This year I decided to enter the Scafell Class (which is the hardest pairs class) in the Saunders because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and for once I actually found someone else equally crazy and willing to give it a go. I met Rachel at the Highlander Mountain Marathon and we thought we would be about the same speed, but as she lives in Birmingham we didn't get the chance to test this out until the event. Fortunately as it turned out we couldn't have been better matched.

The Scafell class was 24.9km with 1530m of climb on the first day and 21.1km and 1035m climb on Sunday. Straight line distances but who knows how far we actually went..

The event started from Coniston and went over the Coniston, Duddon and Eskdale fells. The route on the first day seemed to visit every corner of the map with lots of route choice as there were some really long legs including one from just below the Pike of Blisco to an impossibly steep looking gully near the top of Slight side. We seemed to have a good run and the weather held out ok, with only the occasional shower which was actually quite refreshing. We both throughly enjoyed it but were relieved to get to the mid camp after 6 1/2 hours as we were starting to get tired.

The second day was tough, shorter but rougher terrain, and we were already feeling the effects of the day before. But we were still determined, and ran pretty hard. We had another good run and even managed a sprint finish at the end of another six hours on the hill.

We were up against some tough competition, with two really top class female pairs teams taking part so were not surprised to finish as third female pairs team, although that hadn't stopped us trying! But we were very happy with our position of ninth overall, out of the 25 or so teams in the Scafell Class.

It was a really enjoyable and memorable weekend!

Results are here www.slmm.org.uk/2009/overall

Posted by Elsie Riley on Tue 7 Jul 2009 | 5 comments

Category Mountain Marathons