A Blustry Night With Pennine

Another Thursday night another Pennine run. There were quite a few of us tonight, probably about 20. Little bit of drizzle in the carpark but not a bad night. The quick guys were around (DaveW, StevieK, Stefan, etc) so I though there is a change for a "quick one" tonight. My progress as a fell runner has been slow enough, plain and simply, when on my own, I do not push myself enough (or at all). Thursday night hanging onto the coat tails of the quick lads gives me an opportunity to inflict some pain on myself!

They decided on the "round the res" clockwise route, which is a route well know to us, despite the fact that I went wrong, when navigating it, last week. The route is on the map below, took a bit of work to get that map. I use Strava on my phone and from the Strava website I exported to GPX file and imported it into "My Routes" on Bing Maps. Bing Maps is great as it uses the OS 50,000 and 25,000 maps.

This route starts with the 1.5 Km climb up the Snake Path to the Shooting Cabin. The benine conditions in the car park were quickly blown away as we faced strong head winds and driving rain the whole way up. I am doing a lot of running these days as I try to get the weight down as part of the "Overweight to Race Weigh" thread on the FRA Forums. As part of this (and compition on Strava) on Monday night I done a 20 mile run on the Middlewood way to Macclesfield and back. I was a bit tired, as most of tonight I was in the bottom half of the group when usually I would be further up. It was Ok, the group kept together, as the fast lads kept stopping to allow the stragglers to catch up. We were rewarded for the hard climb into the head wind  when we crossed the bridge below Mermaids Pool. This bridge is followed by a climb and we never went up it as fast as we were literally blown up by the wind, great way of climbing! When I got to the gate below Kinder Low End, the lads were waiting to regroup before the decent down through Tunstead Fields. I saw some head torches continuing towards Swines Back as one of the lads shouted "go on Pat you know you want to!" So off I went trying to chase down the fastest runners in the club. When they got to Swines Back they saw me coming  behind them so waited and asked if they wanted me to wait for them I said no as I assumed they were just going to head down the bridle way and back. But no they turned left and headed over to Dimpus Clough, bloddy 'ell this is going to be hard they are going to head up to South Head. I kept them in sight by running my heart out and kept the gap down to about 50 metres. Crossed Dimpus and "now where are they going?" they kept low rather than the expected climb crossed a stream then started climbing. It went on forever and they were slowly drawing away from me. I had no idea where I was and this climb kept getting steeper . With the mist closing in I lost sight of them. Eventually I hit a trod and and I had no idea where I was. I choose to turn left and head down hill and quickly I hit a wide bridleway and still unsure of where I was but I could see street lights to my right so that had to be the way. Very quickly I hit a gate and knew exactly where I was. We had actually went directly from Dimpus Clough to Mountain Famine and I had hit the trod just below the summit. The other lads had turned right on the trod to go back via Mountain Famine and the Dragon's Back while I turned left to hit the Trans Pennine Bridleway and headed straight down that to get back. I had a great run down the bridle way and arrived in the car park where Stevie was just changing so they were not that far in front of me. Stevie was glad to see me as they did not like abandoning somebody in those conditions. He reckoned I picked a better route back as the Dragons Back was very difficult in the conditions.

Glad I done it as I pushed myself hard and got in a good 13 Km run.