Challenge Stu

Last week I was in Montgenevre with Lorna and the family for a ski holiday. It was a brilliant week, I also managed to get in some running and my most successful attempts at ski touring yet... maybe even Ski mountaineering! Some Alps from the plane From the plane we had a great view of the mountains as we flew into Turin, the weather was sunny with blue skies and stayed like that all week. On Sunday I did a few hours of skimo - first a long gentle climb from 2100m, then a long steep ridge up to the Crete du Chalvet which I climbed with skis off. There was a cornice along the top of the ridge and I nearly didn't go for it it, but I stayed over to the right on the way up and the view from the top was amazing! I'm glad I decided to go for it, there were no other footprints up there so I must've been the first person for a while. The ski down was quite steep on very variable snow but no problem really, I descended all the way down to Claviere village and then skinned alon...

Last weekend I was at my friend Wil's stag do, firstly in Manchester and then in Keswick. We had a great weekend, starting with something I've never done before... indoor skydiving! We went to Airkix in Manchester, and after an hour or so of preparing and getting our suits, helmets and googles on we were in the chamber... This was exciting for me (and Wil) for two reasons: Skydiving of course, but also being suspended over a massive high-powered fan (it's about 2.4MW I think). You don't get long in the tunnel, something like 3 minutes for your £40 or so, but it's a lot cheaper than traditional skydiving. It was really cool. Next we headed to Keswick, via the fantastic Tebay services where we sampled their fine selection of pies and cake. It was great to be there with guys who eat as much as I do! On to the lakes, we quickly checked into Denton House hostel and headed out to the pub... After a long and relatively eventful night we planned an early mornin...

OK, so the High Peak Marathon is not a marathon. It's actually a 42 mile-ish race across the Peak District for teams of four, and it starts in the middle of the night. It's a bit of a classic though and a favourite race of Sir Ranulph Fiennes! This year I was racing with a Dark Peak Fell Runners team comprising me, Simon Patton, Dave Taylor and John Hunt. My preparations this year didn't feel very good. I was training reasonably well up till a couple of weeks ago, just before the Skimo races I talked about in my last post. As I wrote, the races were unfortunately both cancelled so I ended up not doing much in the way of training or running that weekend. This made me feel like I needed to train harder last week, so particularly my Monday run was at relatively high intensity. Over the last week or so my legs have been feeling pretty sore and heavy, but I put this down to the regular training and assumed that with a day or three of recovery before the HPM they would be OK...