Author’s note:
Don’t consider the language in this entry obscene. Consider it expressive. Especially you, Mum.
This is a long blog entry. I have tried to make reading it worth your while.
I have a medal. It’s bronze.
The Three Peaks Challenge, or, rather more properly, the ‘British Fire Service Sub-24hr Three Peaks Challenge’ wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.
Well, in terms of having to climb three fuck-off big mountains in a limited space of time it was exactly what I was expecting, but what in my imagination I had pictured it as and what it in fact turned out to be were very different.
All Really Slow Engineers
As a relatively inexperienced team, we should have been started on Ben Nevis in the late afternoon, at around 5pm, so we could climb and descend before dark. For some reason, and I think maybe someone in our group told a couple of ego-massaging fibs about their experience, we were started off at 7pm, giving us three and a half hours to climb and get off the tallest mountain in the British Isles before darkness fell.
We began to worry when we noticed that the only teams still hanging around with us when we were getting ready were firemen built-like-brick-shithouses with legs like barrels. Even bloody fell-running teams started before us. God knows what must have gone through the minds of the Marshals as we lined up at the starting line. Perhaps they thought we had a secret weapon. Jet-packs in the rucksacks, maybe.
Half-way up Ben Nevis it was clear that things were not as they should be with one of our five-strong team. He was lagging behind, taking impromptu solo breaks and generally having a hard time of it. With an extremely tight deadline to meet in terms of not wanting to be stuck on the mountain at night, and all of the firemen teams streaming past us at a rate of knots, we had to make a decision. At the half-way point, we waited until one of the earlier teams came past going down, and sent him with them. They just happened to be a team of female student nurses, and his whole demeanour changed the second they rounded the bend. Strange.
Our speed-anchor was gone and we had some time to make up. Now it became obvious that I was the new slowest member of the group. Fair enough, I thought. Put the four fastest men on earth together and one of them is going to be the slowest, right? I tried to be upbeat about it. I sang to myself to try and keep a rhythm for the climbing, to try and find ‘the zone’. No luck. I kept having to take breaks, but I tried to keep them short.
After an hour from the half-way point, we were in blindingly white clouds. Visibility was, as they say at the Met Office, zero: that point when you look down and can only just make out your feet. I have a question for our distinguished meteorological colleagues:
What do you get if you start with ‘zero visibility’, and then it goes dark?
We kept on. I kept pushing, pushing, pushing, trying to find the zone, but the mountain just kept going. It was massive. It was demoralising. It was a fucking nightmare.
Then I found the zone.
At the top.
I stood on the round stone dais, leant against the Trig point, ate a Mars bar whilst being the highest person in the British Isles, yelled ‘I’m the King of The World!’, and felt much better. We ran almost all the way down, navigating by dropped banana skins and patches of snow.
We were the last team off the mountain, finishing our first climb at midnight.
That was one down. Two to go.
Summary of the rest of the 24hrs:
o Six hour drive to Scafell Pike in the Lake District. Dozed a little. (I wasn’t driving)
o Sunny dawn when started, climbed Scafell Pike in shorts only to find more cloud and wind chill factor taking temperature down to –5 degrees at the top. Wasn’t in the mood for being King of The World. Left knee froze up. (In a cartilage-y way, not a cryogenic-kinda way)
o Came down Scafell Pike really slowly, trying to use only right knee. ¾ of way down left knee recovers. Right knee now fucked.
o Five hour drive to Snowdon. Slept all the way with knees above head.
o Fifth team member rejoins group. Everyone else now knackered, No.5 now sets the pace. Overtaken twice by same group of Gurkhas-in-training as they do laps with 100lb packs. Very demoralising.
o Reached the peak of Snowdon 22hrs 50 minutes after starting out on Ben Nevis the day before. Recieve bronze medal. No clouds at the top of Snowdon. High winds, the view, the pointy nature of the peak and the fatigue were all enough to make me have to grip trig point in gut-wrenching fear of falling off.
o Yell ‘I’m the King of the Fucking World, Alright?’. Feel a bit better.
o Miss last train down mountain, have to walk three miles to nearest town.
I can confidently say that it was the most physically demanding twenty-four hours I have had in my life...apart from that time with the two Russian girls from Arthur Vick...but enough about that.
We raised an as-yet-indeterminately large sum of money for the London Air Ambulance. You had to complete the challenge in under 22hrs to get a silver medal, and under 20hrs to get a gold medal.
We did feel a bit disappointed.
We felt we could have done it in under 22hrs if it hadn’t been for the darkness on Ben Nevis and one of the guys dropping out at the start, and who knows how fast we’d have been if we hadn’t been out on the piss until 3am the night before we started?
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