Danger in the mountains

Morning all,

I need to be careful. Whilst the weekend was a fantastic endurance challenge, it’s taken quite a lot out of me. I got about nine and half hours sleep on Sunday night, and another nine last night, yet still feel very tired. I’m going to try and get another nine and half tonight after my turbo session, which will hopefully put me back on an even keel in preparation for the run up to next weekend’s race (more on that later).

The reason why I suddenly raise the issue of being tired is one because I was yawning none stop this morning and two because my first session of the week, a swift 1700m swim, yielded disappointing times. The main set was 5 x 250m on 4:00, and I really struggled to get my times down. I was feeling the water OK, and to be fair not going too slowly, but I was a long way off (maybe 8 seconds per set) where I should be. Disappointing. I was beginning to speed up to where I would expect to be by the final set, but that was too little, too late.

The race at the weekend is the Stourbridge Stagger, a cross country ten miler in the West Midlands. Last year there was 400 entrants, and a lot of those were pretty high calibre athletes from the looks of last year’s results. The winner last year is a multiple marathon victor, who won the undulating Shakespeare Marathon in 2009 in a fearsome 2 hours and 39. His time in the 10 mile stagger was 1:03:19. If I can finish within 10 minutes of him, I’ll consider it a very strong race for me. So that’s my target – 1:13:19 (provided of course it’s the same course as last year!). On last year’s results that’d place me in the top 25, which I’d be satisfied with. Anything more than that would be a big bonus, of course, but only race day will tell what sort of shape I’m in.

Right now I’m not actually very enthusiastic about the race – I’d rather be heading up to York to see Sarah and spending the weekend there. Unfortunately, that’s not the way things have panned out, so to Stourbridge I must go. I think a bit of overtraining hasn’t helped my enthusiasm levels, so hopefully I’ll feel better after a good rest.

I think I’m feeling a bit sober too because I found out that a young lad my age who was climbing exactly the same mountain as me in the Lakes on Sunday (Catsycam) fell 600ft and smashed his leg up - http://www.mountainrescue.org.uk/news/2010_004/

It’s definitely dangerous out in the snow and ice, but always a bit of a shock when something like that happens right next to you. I never saw the fall, but he must have ascended from the Keppel Cove side about two hours after I was on the top, judging from the time I saw the Sea King rescue helicopter. I would have been coming down Raise at the time, less than a KM away, and I didn’t hear a damn thing. If I’d be looking in the right direction, I would have seen the fall. Unfortunately it’s a compound fracture, meaning it went through the skin. I suppose after falling 200 metres, the plus side is he’s lucky to be alive. Must have been terrifying. I never even thought about falling when I was on Swirral Edge, but there’s always a danger. Someone died on Great Gable in the Western fells on Sunday too, and another guy was seriously injured. Not a good day for safety.

02/02/2010