Challenge Stu

After our winter in the Trois Vallees ski area, Lorna and I are now spending the summer in Chatel, in the Portes du Soleil area. It’s a great ski area, but more importantly at the moment a fantastic summer area. We’ve settled in to our little apartment (read bedsit), which for seasonnaire accommodation is actually pretty huge. As soon as we arrived I started to dream of running around the stunning mountains and ridges surrounding Chatel, and after about two weeks of living here I even found a race to enter! The first of many I hope, and even better it was supported by Scott, so it must be good! Here’s a quick blog about it… “Trail des cretes du Chablais” translates as “Trail of the ridges of the Chablais region”. There were three races on offer, an 18km (1200m ascent), 42km (2900m ascent), and the monster “Le Contrabandier” race, with 5600m ascent over 76km. I don’t think I’ve ever actually entered a race with more ascent. The route would take us from Chatel south toward...

After returning from the Alps in April, Lorna and I have spent the month of May in the UK. We had a fantastic weekend up in Scotland with my family to begin with, and since then we've been generously hosted by my Sister-in-law, her partner and our new baby neice, in Herefordshire. It's been a great month of chilling out, drinking beer with excellent people, barbeques, gardening and fence building, learning about babies, and a decent amount of running and bike riding. Tayvallich However, while in the UK I also had some serious business to attend to. In 1991 a man called Pete Simpson set out to run a route joining the Dark Peak 15 trigs (the 15 trig points included on the original KIMM map from 1985(I think)) with the 11 trigs from the subsequent White Peak map, into a continuous route similar, in theory, to the Bob Graham round. Though the 15 trigs is reasonably well known and is completed by a fair few people each year, Pete's 23:49 completion of the 26 remains the o...