Saunders Mountain Marathon: the Other Story

Mountain marathons require organisation, fitness, good map reading skills, and intelligent decision making. For me to win a mountain marathon requires a lot of luck as well!

The Saunders Lakeland Mountain Marathon is probably an easier introduction to the sport than most–the courses are shorter than other races, the Lake District terrain is friendlier and more familiar, and there’s beer and milk at the halfway camp, but it always fills up months in advance. There are seven different classes ranging from walking, to the Klets class, which is the only solo class in any of the British races. This year, as Rachel was running with Elsie, I arranged to run the Scafell class (the hardest team class) with my friend Matt.

As often seems to be the case when I don’t run with Rachel, Matt dropped out due to injury, and was replaced by Jason. Then two weeks before the event Jason also dropped out due to injury, but fortunately Alex Morgan stepped in at the last moment. Alex is a friend from orienteering who beats me in every race (as well as in the occasional fell race) so I was pretty confident he’d be a challenge to keep up with, and so it proved.

As Rach has already blogged, we started at Coniston and quickly headed North to a control between Pike O’Blisco and Blake Rigg. On the way there we gambled on route choice from Black Sails Pass, dropping into the head of Greenburn Beck and then climbing back out again to Wrynose Pass, and then on the next leg choosing to stay low in the valley rather than go over the top of Cold Pike to a control on a very unlikely looking knoll, high on the steep eastern slopes of Scafell. The rest of day one was fairly straightforward apart from blundering around in Bracken on the edge of Eskdale for a while, looking for a control on one of an apparently infinite number of knolls.

Day 1 saw us at the lovely campsite near Seathwaite with a lead of a minute and a half on the second place team, but with another team just five minutes back.

After a not particularly restful night in a rather small tent, Day 2 started with a nasty shower of rain and a quick dash to get to the start line in time, knowing those two teams would be trying to catch up quickly.

We hared off to the first two controls, but soon realised that we’d made a bad route choice and been caught and passed by the third place team. The third leg saw us going from Hardknott Pass to a control high on the side of the ridge south of Crincle Crags, and we ran down the road and up Mosedale rather than traversing–a little more climb, but we knew Mosedale was gentle enough to run up. The result was that we got to the third control only seconds behind the other team. A good job too as we almost ran past it in thick cloud and rain, but were saved by seeing them at the control.

The next leg was another tricky one, to a control almost on the summit of Weatherlam. We chose a risky route, traversing high above the Wrynose Pass road before dropping down shortly before the pass, then up and over the shoulder of Swirl How, down into Greenburn Beck again and then a big climb up the peak. As we got to the ridge above Wrynose we looked at one another and said “we’ve stuffed this”, both thinking we should have gone for the straight route up and over Swirl How, but as it turns out, our route was almost ten minutes quicker than the other team, so we had our lead back, although we didn’t know it at the time.

The next control was on Low Water, followed by one on the opposite side of Coniston Old Man. We chose to climb part way up the Old Man, and saw the other team get to the control about five minutes behind us. They chose a different, faster route, and by the penultimate control were right on our tails, despite the fact that one of them only had one shoe left!

The last control was on a gate across a road, and by the time we got close, the other team had passed us again. We stopped at the first gate to check we weren’t running past the control while the other team went on. No control. We thought we’d lost, and although we were still running, we were slower down the road to the next, correct gate, punched the control, and then had a moment of hesitation between going through the gate and down the road, or through another gate and into the fields. Fortunately, we chose the road, and a few seconds later Alex shouted that the other team were behind us again–they had mistakenly gone into the field and then had to come back. A frantic sprint to the finish ensued, but in the end we prevailed by a mere 15 seconds over a team that were clearly quicker on the day.

Series - SLMM

1. Saunders Lakeland Mountain Marathon
2. Soggy Saunders
3. Saunders Mountain Marathon 2009
4. Saunders Mountain Marathon: the Other Story
5. Saunders Lakeland Mountain Marathon:
   PUB CAT PEN BAD WIN
6. SLMM 2011 – a practical guide!