- Experiment with the Ron Hill carbo depletion diet in the week before your attempt. Three days on meat, salad and fruit juice will guarantee that your body uses up the reserves of fat you need to go up and down mountains for 24 hours. Loading carbohydrates all day Thursday will guarantee you feel out of sorts when you set off, without replacing the stored energy you have just used up.
- Go to Pete’s Eats and eat an “Even Larger Breakfast” five hours before you set off. The mountain of sausage, bacon, black pudding and fried eggs will place a huge load on your digestive system, make you feel queasy, and prevent you eating more sensible slow-burn energy food like flapjack and cake in the final hours before the run.
- Confuse your supporters by sending out the wrong version of your schedule on the night before your attempt. This will make it harder for them to keep a weather eye on your pace while you are in the hills.
- Run past one of the summits while navigating a section you haven’t recce’d in darkness and mist. This will force you to spend precious time in a state of confusion while you reorientate the map and then go back up the hill in the wrong direction.
- Having gone back up and down the summit you have just run past, you can now become preoccupied with your navigation and forget to put on enough clothes to keep warm. You should now give your stomach plenty of time to chill before trying to put down a bottle of energy drink. This will guarantee that you throw up.
- Leave a bag of cold Yorkshire fishcakes in your support vehicle. Don’t eat them. Don’t eat any significant quantities of slow-burn food during your attempt. Concentrate instead on a diet of jelly babies, gels, energy bars, Raspberry Ruffles and caramel sports bars. After a few hours this will produce a slapstick succession of surges and slumps that will make your supporters wonder if you have lost your marbles. Eventually the surges will disappear from this cycle and you will recognise your fate. You can now abandon the whole bloody thing and go to the pub.
Thanks to the wonderful friends who turned out to help me. You were fantastic and I feel humble. I am now planning another attempt in late May or early June if anyone is prepared to turn out again. I promise to be more sensible next time. DH