LAMM 2010

I am still slightly comatosed after this weekend.

Elsie and I decided to opt out of running the B course at the Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon, in favour of the A course. It was very easy to change on the LAMM website. The resultant increase in course distance and climb was less easily swallowed.

B course
Day 1 = 25 km, 1700 m climb. Day 2 = 23 km, 950 m climb
A course
Day 1 = 30km, 2100m climb. Day 2 = 27 km, 1340m climb

To put these climbs in perspective, the top of Snowdon from sea level is 1085 m and from Pen-y-Pas to the summit there is 730 m of elevation gain. Needless to say I didn’t really consider these numbers when scaling up our weekend adventure. I don’t think Elsie, my LAMM partner, considered this either.

On Thursday, the LAMM’s location was given as Glen Fyne, south west of Tyndrum, in Southern Scotland. We arrived there at about 11pm on Friday, just after all the midges had gone to sleep. We settled down for the night before being awoken at 5.15 am by a lone bagpiper who was insistent that we should not sleep any longer, despite our journey to the start not beginning until 9 am.

The bus journey to the start wasn’t long enough and soon enough we began the day 1 course. Thirty-four teams started the A course, including Richard and Dennis (Dennis had come all the way from NZ to run the LAMM … and attend a few weddings). We must admit that we were the only female team, but there were also 6 mixed teams on the course.

As you can see from the map, the first 4 controls provided us with some pretty steep climbs! Thankfully, Elsie knew this area quite well from previous fell runs and mountain days. Our navigation and route choice were pretty good and we made steady progress. Leg 4 was a particularly hard leg. It involved a 300 m climb up a hill, which we then had to descend, following which was another, 550 m climb up Ben Vorlich. This was viciously steep and took about 50 minutes. We agreed that the planner probably would be getting hate mail about that this one! We found the terrain pretty tough going at times. The ground was either rocky, slippy, marshy or tussock-covered and generally made progress slower than usual. This was especially so as the day wore on and we became tired. I wasn’t feeling quite my usual energetic self (I blame jetlag), which meant that I got dragged around by Elsie most of the day. The last three legs felt really quite long. By this time it was late in the afternoon and knowing that we still had 7 k or so to go, was really hard. After some time we could see the campsite and very slowly those small tents got bigger and bigger until eventually we arrived. 9 hours and 10 seconds after starting. We set up camp and made dinner. When I say “We”, that includes the help of Dennis with putting the tent up and the help of Richard with lighting the stove, neither of which Elsie and I had the mental capacity to cope with. As soon as possible I went to sleep and had the best night’s MM sleep ever!

But that pesky bagpiper was ever so awake on Sunday morning. So were the midges! After dowsing ourselves in 100% deet we advanced out of the tent and began thinking about day 2. I was nicely surprised that I didn’t ache too much and I felt much, much better after the deep sleep.

The start of day 2 was quite nice. The terrain was runnable, route choice and route finding were good and we made good progress. We then crossed to the south of Glen Fyne and the terrain returned to that similar of the day before. Once we’d crossed the valley we had a long 470 m climb up, followed by some traversing and then into Coire Buidhe, an area in which we found the navigation to require extreme concentration (for me anyway). We advanced on, out of this area by traversing around a large rocky peak, and we felt like we were really on the way home. That was until we realised what lay ahead in the final 3 legs of the course. For these three legs, the planner was almost certainly trying to test our limits of endurance. After what was probably 14 hours of running in one weekend, he diverted us almost to the top of a hill (Newton Hill) and then straight back down to the col where we had just been, before making us climb 320 m to the top of an extremely steep rocky, cold, windy, slippy mountain, which then required a slow, careful descent. We weren’t particularly pleased, but our thoughts were on food and hence we descended as rapidly as possible, found the penultimate control after a small amount of faff and continued to the finish. This last stretch was a perfect tribute to the entire race – a very steep path, that had been worn by many a competitor and now had perfectly downhill-aligned flattened bracken, that was incredibly slippy. Add to that the ravine that required climbing/caving techniques to cross!

Needless to say, we made it. Another 8.5 hours on the hill. It was a long day.

Overall we were rather pleased with our result. We were obviously first female team, but we came 17th overall, which sounds fairly low down, however I like to think that the A course consists of the cream of runners. Plus we were only beaten by one mixed team. Further, only 2 other mixed teams finished. It was a hard race and the fall out rate of 30% didn’t surprise me.

Richard and Dennis were in first place overnight, but unfortunately lost a couple of places during day 2, leading to a final 4th placing. This is still a fine effort, especially taking into account the fact that Richard and Dennis had never met before and that Richard was really not that well throughout the weekend. I’ll spare you the details!

I’m happy to say that I don’t ache if I walk on the flat :-), I ache a little when walking up stairs, but my feet are not very happy at all. New shoes for me I think.

A great weekend. Three weeks to recover and then we’ll do it all again.