Roll on spring-a-ling-a-ding-dong.

Good morning folks

I hope you are all in finest February form.
After the 527 day long month that is January, it is always a massive (financial) relief to finally get to the fleeting 4-weeker that is February.
I am determined to keep this particular blog relatively short, and not the sprawl-on-a-thon that it normally is.

After a few false starts and a strange back problem, things are kind of coming together-ish fitnesswise. I have found a brilliant Chiropractor, for whom I don’t have to sell all my internal organs for. Reasonably priced & bloody good! Still not sure what the problem is, but like the battered Ford Cortina that I am, I keep limping on.
It is wrong to wish time away but I am really not a fan of winter one bit, so roll on spring (or even straight into summer) for me please.

The Beast!

It seems that nowadays runners are keen to part with lots of their hard-earned for something even bigger, even better and even harder than the last thing they did. I get that to a point, but it is also good to keep things simple sometimes.

The Wadsworth Trog fell race is a big 20 mile/32km loop from Old Town, above Hebden Bridge. A classic winter bogtrot, also known as “The Beast”. It has been going for years and is a great no-frills winter Pennine race.

There are harder, higher and longer races, but the weather on the first weekend of February can be rather fickle, so 20 miles is more than plenty long enough for me thank you 🙂

It was an 11th hour decision to race. I was entered for the Mickleden Straddle on the Sunday but plans for that all fell through and after saying I would never, ever go back to “The Beast” after a disatatrous race in 2002, I entered on the Friday night, for the next morning.

What happened in 2002?
At the time (apart from being 23 years younger) I was actually running quite well. Hindsight wisdom tells me now that it is an ominous sign to be running well in February, as it meant a lifetime best run in the Three Peaks race in April and then an off-a-cliff decline straight afterwards!

In the 2002 Beast, with 2 miles to go, myself and a lad called Dave from Darwen Dashers were 4th & 5th. The clag was lower than our shoe laces and neither of us were especially au-fait with the route (which is a nightmare in poor visibility).
Back then kit rules were a bit more lax. I was going through a ridiculous everything ultra lightweight phase and had a compass that weighed one nanogram, but was worse than a compass out of a Christmas cracker. Convinced that we had gone wromg, we stopped, took a bearing and headed back the way we had come, eventually meeting a massive group of runners coming towards us, so we went from 4th & 5th places to 24th & 25th and had a bit of a motivation dump! What had gone wrong? I had a good map, all marked up properly, but did I?*

Fast forward to 2025.
As I was originally going to race at a different race on Sunday. (The Mickleden Straddle, a beauty of a race, fast, runnable, good going with one tricky bit of nav. Only 12 miles, so no great shakes if you blow up), I didn’t really have any good race food in, gels would have to do, plus some dubious (very) out of date peanut butter and mystery bars. I did know that I had a map in the chaos zone that is “somewhere in the shed”.

I located the map, packed my tucker and all was set.
My first mistake was making the error of arriving mega early.
Give me an hour and I am absolutely fine. Give me 2 hours and I will ALWAYS faff/chat 1 hour and 55 minutes of that 2 hours away.
Chatting to a friend, I asked if the course had changed (since 2002) and was told “Yes”.
As I frantically tried to get a fuller picture of this route change, time was evaporating away.
As luck would have it, it was a clear day. Otherwise I might still be between checkpoint 7 and 8 now.

Kick-off time arrived and we were off.
I did not feel good early on and felt worse later on!

(Excuses time)…

I had bought a new racevest in the sales, basically a close fitting rucksack with a multitude of pockets to hide/lose all your food, junk and clobber.
As I am stuck in last century where/when folk used to stuff everything into a bumbag (fanny pack for any American readers!) I have still not got used to using racevests yet. As I had spent all my pre-race getting ready time, not getting ready, I had stashed away my food badly in the racevest, this was further compounded by my Raynaud’s Syndrome problem (which is a major ballache this winter! Plus, I had no handwarmer teabags).
On top of this, what I call in my head “training” had been pretty inconsistent all of January and in a nutshell, the course found me out. After 10 miles, I was blowing out of my backside.

I got really cold, couldn’t really get to my food with frozen Raynaud’s hands and fumbled, tumbled and bumbled my way round the second half, but ultimately finishing. Mid-table obscurity.

P!ss poor preparation generally equals p!ss poor performance!

My main motivation in the latter stages was the box in my boot with a veritable banquet of tasty army ration packs (which I got a bit obsessed with buying a few years back, resulting in a huge stockpile of pouches in my shed).

Pulling into a layby just outside a nameless village on the way home, I was saddened to then remember that I had been to the tip earlier in the week and emptied the boot So, it was a long, hungry drive home and a very late lunch at 5pm!

***Photo courtesy of the legend that is Dave Woodhead***

Next stop is the Haworth Hobble, which is 11 miles further than the Beast! What could go wrong? All good training for the Old County Tops (my main race of the year) and my accidental entry into the Lakeland 50 in July.

A week after the Hobble, it is on to Beater Clough fell race, which I am very excited about. A new race for me, it is a P&B Championship race and Lina is running too. It is however just one short week after the Haworth Hobble and I will be hobbling, then we are off up to the Lakes for the first time in AGES for Muncaster Luck fell race.
March is busy!

I will talk about a ridiculous Pennine Way thing I am doing in May next time.

* Looking at the map after the race, I noticed that I had marked up part of the route wrong in 2002. Dave, if by chance you are reading, I apologise, it was my mistake!

The Synges!

Most people have heard of the Wainwrights. 214 Lakeland fells climbed and beautifully drawn by Alfred Wainwright in his 7 guidebooks.

AW was a Lancastrian, who loved the hills.
Runners have done “the round” in under a week, which is an eye-popping 325 miles/525km with 36,000m of climbing (a number too big to convert into feet). Personally, I never set out to “do” the Wainwrights, but I counted up that I have 31 left, which would entail 31 separate outings.
They are not laid out in any logical order, there is no set route, they were just tops that AW liked the look of!

Most people are happy to do them all within a lifetime.

Enter “The Synges”,
Tim Synge wrote this book, which contains 647 summits!
Just in case you needed a target after you have done the Wainwrights 🙂

My good mate and Old County Tops partner, John, has been making videos for a good while now. My videos are shaky, induce motion sickness and are patched together. John’s videos are proper videos, another level of professionalism and are great viewing.
Check this out: