This tale, story, or rant (whichever it is), starts with the Burbage Skyline race. This race is the Tuesday after both the Keswick to Barrow and the Fellsman (which are on the same day). For those who don’t know, the Keswick to Barrow is a “walk” from, yes, Keswick, to Barrow in Furness. This is almost entirely on roads, and a total distance of 40 miles through the lakes. The Fellsman on the other hand is 11,000 feet of climb over 62 miles of paths, open fells and bog, covering a large portion of the Yorkshire dales.<\/p>\n
I most recently did the Keswick to Barrow the Saturday before Burbage last year, and to be truthful, it hurt. Lots. Deciding that actually racing at Burbage 3 days later would be a fairly bad idea I was going to go and take photos of other people racing. I just wore random shorts and stuff so that I couldn’t take part by accident, however I obviously needed to take fell shoes so I didn’t fall over whilst wandering around and hurt myself further. At least that is what I think I was telling myself.<\/p>\n
I got a lift to Burbage with Stuart “Shelf” Walker (of silly Hadrian’s Wall fame, ask youtube), who as it happens had been doing the Fellsman at the same time I was doing the K-B. He had apparently had a miserable hypothermic time in a bog and had stopped after 45 miles or so. To cut a long story short, we both got excited and did Burbage anyway and all I had achieved by not taking running stuff apart from shoes was less comfort and more sweating.<\/p>\n
This year, to avoid doing the Keswick to barrow again, because I have exams on the same day as the LAMM and from a slight pub based nudge I ended up doing the Fellsman with Stu. I’m sure I saw a dark peak vest floating around at the start, but I have no idea who that was and didn’t see them at any point after this. We had a couple of different plans for how long we were going to take, depending how we felt. Within seconds of setting off the “5 mile an hour the whole way round” plan went out of the window on account of it being a bit ridiculous. However many other people seemed to think it was a great plan, so heading up Ingleborough we were rapidly heading towards the back of the field.<\/p>\n
Over the next 35 miles or so this changed, as we managed to stay on a 15 hour schedule overtaking a fair few who had set off too fast in the hot weather. Apart from the oppressive heat and occasional little boo this part of the race was thoroughly enjoyable. From 37 to 44 miles is basically bog very similar to the top of kinder, which slowed us down beyond the 15 hour target and also made us rather knackered. However Shelf seemed rather pleased that it was still light and not pissing it down, and therefore was better than last year.<\/p>\n
After this point we were put into groups for safety as it gets dark, and there are only 2 serious climbs and 16 miles left, so mentally it briefly starts to seem like its all downhill from here. Unfortunately my feet were now falling into small pieces and as one of the group pointed out; this would probably take us 6 more hours. Which it did. I spent a fair amount of this time swearing under my breath. I also spent a fair amount of this time swearing loudly not under my breath. We didn’t even manage to drink any of the whisky Stu had carried the whole way round, and after much though, I decided that Great Whernside in the dark is one of my least favourite places in the world.<\/p>\n
We finally finished at about 3 in the morning after 18 hours and 7 minutes, 6 hours down on the winner (Mark Hartell) in joint 47th place. Although the last part of the race was one of the most upsetting things I have ever done to myself, as soon as we finished it suddenly felt completely worthwhile and a few hours sleep in a tent in the car park and some bacon and sausages later, felt much better and extremely pleased. I did at this point feel much more sorry for the people still finishing after 23 and 24 hours than for my feet.<\/p>\n
And so, 3 days later I was again not in any way racing Burbage, and this time I had definitely not put any fell shoes or running stuff in the car so that I definitely couldn’t run. I had made the mistake of not removing the fell shoes or running kit from the car since finishing the Fellsman. Some “I’m at a fell race” excitement and borrowing of money then happened, and for the second year in a row had a sore legged shuffle around the route.<\/p>\n
The official results are this:<\/p>\n
7 hours of road running = Burbage skyline time of 54.25 Therefore Fell running for long periods of time must definitely do less damage to you than road running for long periods of time. Or possibly I have got fitter over the last year. Or running shorts and tops may make you 5 minutes faster than normal shorts and t-shirts. Or I could have just tried harder this year. Who knows.<\/p>\n Thanks to all the Fellsman organisers and scouts helping out at the race, for organising it and feeding us on the way round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This tale, story, or rant (whichever it is), starts with the Burbage Skyline race. This race is the Tuesday after both the Keswick to Barrow and the Fellsman (which are on the same day). For those who don’t know, the Keswick to Barrow is a “walk” from, yes, Keswick, to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carshare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dpfr.org.uk\/wp_dpfr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dpfr.org.uk\/wp_dpfr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dpfr.org.uk\/wp_dpfr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dpfr.org.uk\/wp_dpfr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dpfr.org.uk\/wp_dpfr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dpfr.org.uk\/wp_dpfr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dpfr.org.uk\/wp_dpfr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dpfr.org.uk\/wp_dpfr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dpfr.org.uk\/wp_dpfr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n10 hours of fell running followed by 8 hours of fell shuffling = Burbage Skyline time of 49.17<\/strong><\/p>\n