Challenge Stu

If you just want to see the hills and schedule, scroll down to the bottom! For my ramblings, get a cup of brown water and a Vimto bar and read on.... The Peak District Round Over the years lots of us have wondered whether there should be a 24 hour round in the Peak District, or at least why there isn't one. I've had a couple of goes at finding one: The first became a 28-hour death march and ended with imaginary green bunnies ( here  for more details). The second was an attempt to combine the classic Dark Peak 15 trigs with the lesser-known 11 trigs in the White Peak. Pete Simpson combined the two in 1991, but made a mistake and added Flask Edge too (hopefully winning him the Pertex Trophy?!). I hoped to retain Pete's folly and add another trig, but on the day only managed to add Ox Stones (words about this one here ). This took 23:42 and was slightly over 100 miles, giving us a viable 27 trig "Peak BG", but the White Peak 11 don't make for a nice route - th...

I hope everybody had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. I was lucky enough to spend it on the West coast of Scotland with Lorna and my Mum and Dad. We were in a place called Tayvallich, a little village on an inlet of Loch Sween. A mile's walk takes you to the other side of the peninsula, where from the even littler village of Carsaig you have a direct view across to Jura. It's a stunning place. Tayvallich Bay. After a monster 10 hour drive north (though a stop at Mungrisdale was well worth an extra hour or so), we arrived and set about preparing ourselves for a weekend of adventure. The first step was to inflate my funny old blow-up kayak. I bought it originally to practice for using inflatables at WARC 2013 in Costa Rica, but it has far outlasted my predictions and has been great. There are numerous patches, the non-return valves have died, and it's short fat shape means it waddles around the sea rather than carving swiftly through the waves as a fibreglass boat migh...

Some people say you should be careful what you wish for, and it occurred to me a couple of times on Wednesday that I might've got a bit carried away with my birthday wish for "a long day's run around the hills"... I was attempting to run around the highest 29 hills in the Peak District, on my 29th birthday. The idea of running a hill for each year of your age is an old one, I think it's even how the Bob Graham Round originally came about. I decided a while ago I'd try to plan something similar in the Peaks, and found a list of the highest hills. It's an interesting list, there are a few hills on there I hadn't even heard of (nevermind been up!), and some you would imagine might be there are missing... I set about plotting them on a map (and some bits of paper where the map didn't quite reach), and to my surprise and delight did not end up with a random splattering of hills everywhere, it almost looked like a route... So that was that then! A...