Snowdonia multisport weekend (Running)

Wednesday 17 September 2008 10:01AM

In 1997, I spent the whole summer training hard to try and get in the English junior team for the world mountain running trophy. At the end of August I was totally gutted to finish 5th in a trial race for 4 places, and in an attempt to salvage something from my fitness and summer, I decided to run the welsh 3000 foot peaks. As you might imagine from a 17 year old, I didn’t have very much sense when it came to pacing long runs, and all my training had been geared to short races. Subsequently my memories of the run were having a great time all the way to Tryfan (about halfway, timewise), then suffering, and walking, a lot for the rest of the way. I finished in 6 hours 15min.

Since then I’ve always wanted to go back and run it again, and although I haven’t been doing much running recently, I thought this would be a good way to kick start my fitness. Jon Morgan was, as ever, pretty psyched for anything involving mountains and suffering, and early saturday morning found us jogging up Snowdon to the start of the run (it is timed from first to last summit). It was a fantastic day for it, with the mountains coming in and out of cloud all day. I’d forgotten what a classic route it is – I remembered it as being technical running around Crib Goch and then mostly easier, but in fact a lot of the running is very technical, rocky and spectacular. There was no major blow up like last time, and we finished the run in a shade over 6 hours, with very sore legs and a new found respect for my 17 year old self.

Jonny is perhaps the most psyched person I know, and the next day he was keen to go climbing. While all I wanted to do was lie down in the sun, he somehow summoned the energy to climb Warpath (E5 6a) at Roscolyn before I dragged myself up The Sun (E2 5c). We did two other routes and then ate constantly for the whole drive home. It’s now Wednesday and my legs still hurt!

Photos here.