“We’re 76th out of 130.”
“What?” I said, although it came out more like “Gwoah?” as I was busy shovelling supernoodles into my mouth like they were going out of fashion.
“We finished in 76th place today, out of 130 who finished so far,” elaborated Blue.
I did some hasty mental arithmetic. “That’s nearly in the top half.”
“Yes, it is.”
“If we pushed it tomorrow, we could get into the top half.”
“Yes, we could.”
“Finishing in the top half would be good.”
“Yes, it would.”
We mused on this some more while boilng up water for our couscous and slurping away at our student feast of noodles.
“But the important thing,” I said, “is that we finish the course.”
“True,” said Blue.
“Place doesn’t matter. We just need to finish.”
“True,” said Blue again.
“But top half…”

No matter how much we tried to ignore it, the strings on the guitar of our competitive nature had been plucked by the mariachi of temptation. If all 130 teams finished (at this point we didn’t know that there were still 9 more to come in) then we need to gain 11 places to get in the top half. On a trip to get some more drinking water from the river next to the camp site, I stole another look at the results that had been posted on the side of the event van. The team currently in 65th place was only 8 minutes ahead of us. It seemed doable. It also distracted us from our primary objective which was to get around the course and finish.

At about 9pm, after washing our legs and gear in the nearby river, having a hearty carbo-centric dinner, we sat in the tent too exhausted to talk. Around us, all the other teams were chatting away as if they were just out for a weekends amble in the hills. We wondered if it would be bad form to climb into our sleeping bags and pass out but at that moment, the heavens opened and the rain came down and gave us good excuse to disappear. I think I was asleep before my head hit my makeshift pillow. We were woken up at about 3am by the sound of someone in a neighbouring tent with a buzzsaw snore. I slept fitfully after that - no matter what side I lay on it felt like rocks were jabbing to my hips. At 6am the bastard with the bagpipes came back to do his bit.

A cup of coffee and a large bowl of muesli later, we packed up our stuff and were ready to go. Surprisingly, we both felt okay - not too much stiffness in the muscles and not too tired either. We weren’t part of the chasing start which included any team that finished within 90 minutes of the class leaders, so had no specific time to set out. The course would be shorter that day and as the weather had clouded over, wouldn’t be as hot or as draining. In fact, the conditions were almost perfect.

The first checkpoint was an easy one to get and only a kilometre from the midcamp and was nearly all track. After that we had to start climbing again but the route was a gradual incline following the contour around a mountain. We found that we were actually moving quite quickly and passing a lot of teams, including some of the chasing teams. At the second checkpoint we started catching up with teams who had left nearly 30 minutes before we did. This was encouraging but I also noted that they were the same teams that came in anything up to 2 hours after we did the day before.

From there we had our biggest climb of the day, and indeed the weekend, to checkpoint 3 which was at about 1050m. I spent most of the climb traversing the slope rather than go straight up it. Lactic acid was already building up even though we hadn’t been out for 2 hours and I was starting to feel hungry already. I had four oat bars and half a pack of jelly babies to last me for the day - not much but a calculated gamble to keep the weight down. I hoped that I wouldn’t have a total energy drain before we got to the finish. I focussed on just going one step at a time, not looking up to see how far we had got left to go and not worrying about anything except putting one foot in front of the other. It worked well and we soon got to the top, passing some more teams on the way up.

After dibbing the 3rd point, the cloud came down. We had flashbacks to the OMM last October - part of the reason for our catastrophic navigation failure was that the visibility was so poor that we couldn’t see a damn thing to work out either where we were or to find something to get a bearing on. We had discussed this over and over, hoping that analysis of the troube we had would help us avoid making the same mistakes again. We examined the map and decided that although the quicker route was to contour around the next mountain, that would also be harder to navigate in little visibility. The best thing would be to take the slower route but more navigable route. First we had to descend from where we were.

Picture the scene: we’re on top of a plateau at about 1050m above sea level. The pass below us is at somewhere around 600m, maybe 550 but the summit where we are is covered in cloud so we can’t see a damned thing unless it’s within about 10m of us. So we’ve got to descend 450-500m. Horizontally, we’ll only be going about 200m. While the drop wasn’t vertical, it was still quite steep. And craggy. And covered in rocks and boulders. QE might well be able to do the maths regarding the angle and the distance we’d actually be covering. It’s geometry or something. Maybe Gia’s husband, the eminent theoretical solid state quantum physicologotisist, rockstar and brain surgeon, Dr Brian “Buckaroo” Cox* could do some science shit at it and work out the inverse proportional ratio of acceleration, velocity and insanity required to hurl a pathetic earthling body into the void. All I know is that it was fucking steep.

Common sense kicks into play at times like this. Common sense points out that there’s a very good path that traverses down the slope, back and forth, making it easy to safely and swiftly descend to the pass below. Common sense is good like that. The rest is boringly predictable. A couple of minutes later, we were at the bottom, looking at the map and working out our path up the next climb in front of us. Half way up it, Blue looked back at where we’d just been. “Hey,” he said, “did you know there was a path coming down from that last mountain?”

Most of the rest of the course required us to contour around mountains rather than go over them. Our climbing had more or less concluded for the day which gave us a chance to concentrate on speed. This almost got us into trouble though. We were tired and had begun to make some basic mistakes, normally with regards to working out where we were on the map or where the next checkpoint was located. At one stage, we started following a group of people as they ascended another slope. Remember how I said before that it wasn’t a good thing to do? Well, it turns out that although the people we were about to follow were in our class, they were retiring for the day and taking a short route back to the base camp. Everybody else was in a different group. Fortunately we hadn’t deviated too much and all in all we were lucky that it didn’t affect us too much.

Blue’s leg felt a lot better and apart from difficulties with boggy terrain, covered in tussocks of grass and slippy mud, we made good progress and we soon found ourselves at the 6th checkpoint. Only one more to go and that was within half a kilometre of the base camp and the finish point and down another steep, heather covered slope. All the classes met up at this point and ran down the hill towards our final destination. There are a lot of people who seem to have more difficulty going down hill at speed but that’s not a problem for either of us so we ran hell for for leather down the last slope, trying hard not to trample anyone who got in our way. In retrospect, maybe we should have packed some tea trays too!

I dibbed the penultimate checkpoint and we ran as hard as we could, gear and fatigue permitting, to the final gate. All in all on day 2, we covered about 20km (12 miles) and did so in 5.5 hours. Only 123 teams finished in our class with the rest missing at least one checkpoint each. We finished in 32nd place for the day and that brought our overall ranking up to 47th for the two days. Not only had we finished the course but we actually managed to squeeze into the top 3rd of the original 151 starting teams. Not bad for one injured and one unfit pair of runners.

On the Sleepmonsters site, there are some pictures for sale of the event. There’s one of us just after the start on the first day, looking bright and breezy. The only other picture of us is at the finish point looking exhausted and relieved to have finished. It’s an amusing juxtaposition. I might have to get one just for posterity of the first Mountain Marathon I finished.

Afterthoughts of the event to follow.

*This isn’t meant to be as patronising and rude as it sounds. Brian was science advisor on the film Sunshine which was pretty good and I haven’t got around to reviewing yet. He works at CERN and is very clever. If you are into that science stuff, you can find out more here. It’s way over my head.