Freesteel Blog » 2014 » October

Wednesday, October 1st, 2014 at 12:28 pm - - Weekends 1 Comment »

I’ve always hated fell walking. It’s character building, good for a family trip out, and uses lots of time. It’s boring. As a kid you’d rather spend the day on the beach building sand castles or learning to windsurf.

Yes, there are so-called wonderful views. But they’re not the point. If they were, then how come the walk doesn’t get cancelled when the hills are in fog? We don’t try to windsurf when there’s no wind.

Admit it, you’re doing it because of tradition and for the pointless exercise. It’s a particularly painful exercise because you’re only using the lower half of your body, pounding it for hour after hour with hardly an interval of rest. At least when you go cycling there are those downhill bits where you cover the ground and your muscles have time to recover.

scafellfog

The idea of the Lakeland 3000 is to walk all 4 peaks in the Lake District that are over 3000 feet in altitude in 24 hours. This is a stupid idea, but that doesn’t stop people from getting hooked on it, and then inviting Becka and me into the plan. It was the caving conference weekend. The caving conference is always the same each year. One thing lead to another, and I found myself walking towards Keswick town square at 10:30pm on a Friday night after an extremely grumpy day due to a headache and no sleep the night before.
(more…)