Quote Originally Posted by Hank View Post

I do wonder what the FRA’s minimum kit list is designed to do. Anyone immobilised and off route in severe wet and windy weather is not going to survive for very long with only waterproofs, hat and gloves to put on.
I suggest what it will do is:

- ensure you stay dryer and warmer than someone running almost naked, assuming you are intelligent enough to put it on

- and so help you stay rationale in the navigational decisions that you may have to make

- and help you run rather than stumble and shuffle along, cold, shivering and depressed and possibly hypothermic.

The most important aspect of surviving in a fell race in extremis is to stay on the route and to do that you need to be calm and thinking rationally, and that is a lot easier if you are warm and dry. The five classic deaths from hypothermia in fell races in England + Wales were all off-route when found dead. (And so was Chris Smith, the international mountain runner, who died last October in Perthshire).

On the spectrum of fell runner attitudes: at one extreme there are the majority who believe that nothing bad will happen to them because it never has; and then there are those who never quibble about carrying kit because they have experienced having to ponder if this was their last day alive.