I wasn’t really expecting to be writing this blog post – some of you may wish I wasn’t but if so, why are you reading it? Anyway as I am, I will, so let’s get on with it…
Before I finished the Summer Spine Race, I assumed I would write my race report and that would be the end of this blog – however the Spine doesn’t make it easy to turn your back on it (I’m sure there is a Spine/back pun in there somewhere but fortunately I can’t find it). Next summer is very much still going to be Pennine as Sharon and I will be running the Summer Spine Sprint together. Even after then there will be more Spine action as I intend to give the 2024 Winter Spine a go. However even allowing for that, I wasn’t sure that the Lakeland 100 was part of my Spine preparation but I was to discover that every race can provide valuable lessons for future races…
I’m not entirely sure why I entered the 2022 Lakeland 100. I knew it was quite close to the Spine Race (a fact I’m not sure I fully appreciated last year), and whilst it is a great event, it’s quite a long way from Essex and Lake District accommodation is not exactly cheap. Camping is an option but I don’t think Sharon would be quite so happy about driving me up and down the country if I suggested she could spend two nights in a tent! Anyway the reason was irrelevant, I had entered, I’d booked some accommodation and we were in the Lake District!
The Lakeland races have more of a festival than a racing feel to them. This was particularly true this year as the theme was ‘Make Legends not War’ and the race village had been named ‘Conistock’. Last year I booked accommodation which was quite close to Coniston as the crow files – because a crow can fly over Lake Windermere. A car can’t and so getting to and from Coniston was a bit of a trek. This year I had booked a very friendly B&B only 5 miles (no crows needed) from Coniston. As a result I hadn’t bothered to bring a tent as I could stay at the B&B until Friday afternoon and the come to Conistock to register and go into Coniston to eat.
The race briefing basically consists of Marc (Race Director) doing a bit of stand-up comedy and ‘Uncle Terry’ (Marc’s Uncle?) doing the serious race briefing bit. In previous years much has been made of the fact that on average 50% of the people that start don’t make it to the finish. This year Marc asked (told) us to all support each other and try and beat the record for the highest percentage of finishers (64%).
After the briefing we had about an hour to mill around aimlessly and use the facilities, and then it was down to the start for Nessun Dorma, the official song of the Lakeland 100. It’s quite appropriate as I certainly wouldn’t be sleeping for the next two nights.
According to the barman in The Crown, the population of Coniston in the winter is 900. I would guess it’s at least 5 times that on the Lakeland weekend. Certainly the atmosphere at the start as we ran through Coniston was more like that of the London Marathon than a 100 mile trail race. However the slight downside was a bit of a bottleneck once we had left the roads of Coniston and started on the trails, one gate about a mile in created a particular hold-up. As I had no plans to race I wasn’t worried, anyway there was another 104 miles in which to make up any time lost.
There are some reasonable climbs on the first couple of legs but it was still light when I got to CP2 (more or less) at Boot and Boot to Wasdale Head is a fairly short leg with quite a small amount of climb by Lake District standards. However…
After Wasdale Head came one of the bits I wasn’t looking forward to – Black Sail Pass. My memory of this from last year was of being able to just about hold my own on the ascent but then being left as a blubbering mass of jelly by my fellow runners when it came to the descent. 12 months later and things seemed to have improved. In the last year I’ve done quite a bit of upping and downing both in the UK and Fuerteventura and, whilst I was nowhere near the quickest, I wasn’t the slowest person on the descents. I also remember finding some of the section from Buttermere to Braithwaite tough as well (CP4 to CP5) but this year it didn’t seem quite as hard. This was despite the fact it had been raining for some time by now and the rocks were very slippery. I had a couple of falls, nothing serious but enough to make me very cautious. Thank you to the runner that stopped and picked me up after a slippery bit of rock left me falling heavily onto my back.
All the checkpoints are good but CP5 has rice pudding, it was the end of the first night and the first 3 miles out of Braithwaite are very flat and runnable so all is good. When the route does inevitably start to climb again it’s a fairly straightforward climb. There id as virtual checkpoint to make sure we don’t cut a corner but after two goes at Lakeland 100 I’ve still not seen the turn to cut the corner and so have never been tempted, regardless of the virtual CP.
After CP6 at Blencathra we have the delights of the universally hated Old Coach Road. To be honest I still dislike the Cam High Road on the Pennine way more as the Old Coach Road is shorter, climbs less and has a few more bends (it clearly wasn’t laid out by the Romans). That said, no one in their right mind would try and take an Old Coach along it so the need for an Old Coach Road is questionable. I jogged slowly along it and eventually reached CP7 at Dockray – except it isn’t really, the sign for Dockray is about half a mile after the checkpoint. I guess ‘CP7 – Marquee in the middle of nowhere’ isn’t a very useful description of a checkpoint, even if it’s more accurate than ‘CP7 – Dockray’.
Somewhere between (not) Dockray and Dalemain I started running with Mark Baines. Mark was a very entertaining chap and as it was by now getting quite hot and my feet were getting sore the distraction was welcome. The last mile or so into Dalemain is a bit of a trudge and I think we were both in our own little worlds of foot discomfort by that point and so we lost touch as we approached the checkpoint (also I stopped for a tactical toilet visit).
At Dalemain my first necessity was to get my shoes and socks off and have a look at my feet – they didn’t look great, more prune than foot really, and a couple of large blisters. I left my feet exposed and concentrated on the other essential tasks, changing my head torch battery and getting some food and drink. I didn’t bother to change the batteries in my hand held GPS as I’d only taken it out of my pocket once and unfortunately dropped it and cracked the glass. It still worked fine but my watch was providing all the navigation I needed. That makes it sound like a conscious decision, if I’m honest as I hadn’t been using it I just forgot about it, anyway, wouldn’t be a problem, would it?…
My feet actually looked a lot better for 15 minutes exposure to air and so I taped them up and put on clean socks. I had wondered if waterproof socks would be necessary given that the Spine Race had been quite dry underfoot. However this is the Lake district and much wet ground had been covered already and I still had Bleamoss to negotiate.
Dalemain to Howtown is quite straightforward but then we come to a section enjoyed by most as much as the Old Coach Road – the climb up Fusedale. However, once again, I hated this less than most people, in fact I would say it was my best section of the race. As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m not very good on technical stuff. The Fusedale climb is more of a slog up grass and mud and so much more in my comfort zone. I just gritted my teeth, found my rhythm and powered up, overtaking close on a dozen people on the way I would think. The down section was OK too but then it goes into a path lined with bracken alongside Haweswater Reservoir. The issue with this is that it becomes quite hard to see the path – and it has lots of trip hazards. Fortunately I negotiated it all without incident and arrived at Mardale Head. Last year Mardale Head was a bit depleted by the time I go to it owing to very hot weather. This year had much more of a wet vibe to it, although it had still been hot in the afternoon. Anyway, even better than a decent selection of drinks was the fact that my friend Megan was at the checkpoint. We had a bit of a chat about all things running and I’m hoping she is going to tell me how to not die on the Cheviot Goat (currently dying is the odds-on favourite for my result if I do that race).
Last year this was where I met Mary. This year I was entirely on my own slogging up Gatescarth Pass. It was getting dark, had started to rain and basically all I could see was my feet and the occasional fleeting glimpse of a never ending supply of up. Eventually the path got bored with up and started to go down at an angle that wasn’t any more pleasant than up. I was now getting a little worried about cut off times, unfortunately the marshal at Kentmere agreed that I was a bit close and so I left checkpoint 11 in a slightly stressed state, trying to keep the best pace I could.
The Garburn Pass is like the Gatescarth Pass only slightly better but the climb out of Troutbeck began to really annoy me. Ambleside is at the top of Lake Windermere and so one of the lower points on the route. An apparently never ending up seemed entirely unnecessary as it would have to have some corresponding down. As you might realise my mind wasn’t working too rationally at this point! Then as I approached Skelghyll Wood my head torch gave that characteristic pattern of flashes which is Petzl for ‘I’m going to switch off soon’. I ignored it. Then it gave the pattern of flashes which means ‘I’m going to go into a low power mode which, against all logic, makes it harder to see than if I’d just switched off completely’. I was beginning to think I wasn’t meant to finish Lakeland 100 2022!
A short interlude to consider my mental state and how my mind works. At the beginning of the race, I was wondering how far I needed to get before I could gracefully bow out. After all, I’d had Covid a few weeks before, I’d done the Spine Race, no one would criticise me for not finish LL100 would they? Move forward several hours and I’m now in a position where a DNF may not be my choice, suddenly it becomes absolutely imperative that I finish! I’m fairly sure I would never DNF a race that I could still carry on with. I ‘voluntarily’ DNFed on Summer Spine 2021 but realistically I was never going to finish the race at that point anyway, I was far too damaged and slow. I may have thought about it but basically the answer to ‘where can I bow out gracefully?’ is, for me, at the finish.
Anyway we left me with a failed head torch. This was particularly annoying as the same torch on the same settings had lasted all the first night no problem. I’d put a fully charged battery into the torch at Dalemain so why had it died? It is possible that the rain had got into the bag the spare battery was in and discharged it, or one of my batteries may not be as good as the other, I don’t know, but I do need to find out. From out of nowhere as far as I could tell, an angel appeared – whose name I now know to be Jackie Shore. She was running the LL50 and kindly put up with my cursing and grumpiness and provided light for me to find my back-up torch with. Which didn’t work. Cue more cursing and grumpiness while I changed the batteries. Now I’m at home and have checked the batteries I assumed had died, they seem to be OK. The torch has two switches, one for on/off and one for beam setting, did I press the wrong switch and not realise? Had I put one of the batteries in backwards? I don’t know but with Jackie’s help I sorted my torch and stomped off down the trail, convinced that someone up there hated me.
As I came into Ambleside I passed another group of runners who helpfully told me to turn right. I got the junction and stopped. They caught up with me and assured me right was right. I didn’t disbelieve them, it was just by now taking me some time to decide which direction was right. One very stressed runner finally arrived at the Ambleside checkpoint and told the world he wasn’t happy, he was probably going to get timed out and God hated him. A couple of volunteers calmly assured me that none of this was true and that I should go inside and haver a hot drink. Once inside I told another volunteer God hated me and I was going to get timed out. He looked at me in slightly stunned disbelief and informed me that if I could average 2 miles an hour I would finish inside cut-off and had time for an hours sleep if I wanted – he also pointed out that I was surprisingly dry considering it was raining which possibly indicated God didn’t hate me – or that I appeared sufficiently annoyed that the rain didn’t dare land on me. I had some soup, didn’t have a sleep but left the checkpoint feeling much calmer than when I had arrived.
A small group of LL100 runners caught me up on the way to Chapel Stile. I more or less managed to hang on to them until the checkpoint, although it was clear that they were faster than me. At the checkpoint I had another nice surprise of a volunteer nature, Raj Mahapatra. I met Raj on the Spine Race when he arrived at CP1.5 and was eminently more suitable than me to buddy up with Sabrina, whom I’d walked with from Malaham Cove to Malaham Tarn when she was having hydration issues. He was his usual friendly positive self and supplied me with food and liquids before I left the checkpoint. I left before the group I’d come in with as I knew they were quicker than me so I wouldn’t be able to keep up with them and I felt if I waited for them and left with them they might feel compelled to stay with me, which wouldn’t be right for them, so I left and as I expected they passed me less than two miles out of the checkpoint.
The first point of real note after the checkpoint is the Chapel Stile Stile. This thing is so big I assume the village was named after it. For those that have never attempted to conquer it, it’s one of those ‘ladder’ type stiles over a dry stone wall – but built for people who are at least eight feet tall. I managed to haul myself onto the bottom step, which meant I could then reach the top, drag myself over and slide/fall down the other side.
I must have been having a really good conversation with Mary at this point last year as I didn’t recognise any of it! I just followed the route on my watch through various twists and turns and wet bits. Eventually I arrived at Blea Moss, much further from Chapel Stile than I had thought. There is a virtual checkpoint after you leave Blea Moss to ensure you don’t cut across the bog. Last year the path was dry but this year it was a bog, possibly not as much of a bog as the bog we weren’t allowed to cross but a bog nonetheless. I used my waterproof socks to just wade through as fast as possible and get onto the road.
Now I was onto a section I recognised – which was just as well as my watch decided its battery was flat and it was going to save my run and shut down. Phone was dead, handheld GPS was dead, watch is now dead. I could put new batteries in the handheld but I really should have done that before at Dalemain. As a last resort I had the ‘Foldie’, a written route description. As a last last resort I had a map and compass – however whilst I had time, I didn’t have that much time. As it was by following people and a vague memory of the previous year, I got to Tilberthwaite without incident.
Although the last leg is only 3.5 miles, it does have some quite decent and fairly technical climbs, followed eventually by some reasonably technical descent. As I had found on other parts of the course, I was better this year – and I did stick my bum out as Mary had told me to do last year. Once I was down I started running as it hurt my feet less. I say running, possibly lurching would be more accurate, yes, on the last leg the lean had returned! I ran through Consiton to much cheering and crossed the line, smiling for once, with over an hour to spare!
So this has turned into a very long report given I wasn’t planning on writing it at all. Am I happy with my performance? I was a couple of minutes slower than last year, which I wasn’t expecting, but the weather was much worse so maybe I did better than I thought. I finished anyway, 39% of those that started didn’t.
What did I learn? Don’t cut corners and don’t take anything electronic for granted. I should have replaced the batteries in the handheld GPS at Dalemain as I intended, even if I wasn’t using it. I should have checked out the life of both the batteries for my head torch and waterproofed the spare better. I don’t know what he problem was with my back-up torch but I can’t remember if I tested it before I packed it, also I should have become totally familiar with its switches before packing it.
As I said (and you’ve probably noticed) this report is quite long and that is without mentioning the fabulous fancy dress at the checkpoints. There seems to be a pattern in that I hate this race at the beginning and end up loving it by the end. As I said at the beginning, next summer I’m running the Spine Sprint (46 miles) with Sharon and I’m hoping to do full Winter Spine in 2024, so I will probably be back to LL100 next year as part of my training for that, Despite my successful Summer Spine finish it would seem that he only way is still Pennine!
The Only Way Is Pennine... 