Me and Mark 'peawet' Sammon reccied the full route yesturday.
It was fairly ok weather in the village but as soon as we left the track to tack the diagonal line through the bracken up the weatherlam the weather turned pretty bad.
It took us ages getting across all the rocks and nasty sections up to the summit, and we set off to Swirl How straigh away because it was so cold on the top.
Down to the prison band it was quite sheltered so it was a nice break from the battering wind and allowed my hands to regain circulation again.
Mark navigated us around Great Carrs is it called? perfectly and we headed off down to the three shires stone.
We went a little too far going down but we just took our own line down to the road which turned out to be perfect.
At the three shires stone i have to admit that i hit a real low point and all i wanted to do was call it a day and go and get warm and dry becaue we'd been out in the terrible weather for 2:15 minutes soaking wet and freezing cold.
But on we plodded up the blisco, i cant remember much of this climb as it didnt seem to be quite as steep as i expected.
We found the perfect path leading off blisco and didnt do too badly finding the path that leads you though the nasty rocky bracken down the blea tarn.
Why is that bridge compulsary????
This climb up to lingmoor fell is a proper sting in the tail....we where both pretty knackered and i tried to run up it but my legs where really dying.
The decent back to the finish was pretty fantastic, although i feel on race day i might be too knackered to attack it.
First time ive ever done a run with 4000' of climbing.
I think come race day, for the climb up Weatherlam...i'll follow the track all the way to the the point where you are in-line with the ruin and take the obvious path upwards and then start the diagonal accent across the roacks to the top - that may be the most common way of doing it but i didnt have a couple of hundred people to follow so i dont know.![]()