Preparing for a day in the mountains
How I decide where to go, what to take, which snacks to eat and when to bail
There was a time when I thought that the Thames Path was a pretty gnarly trail. I wrote a blog back in 2013 (the year I started running with any regularity) about ‘christening’ some new trainers during my ‘first foray into trail running’ as I distinctly remember calling it. I spent too much time attempting to hack into various old email accounts yesterday to uncover that blog so I could show you the picture I’d posted. No luck, sadly, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you that the amount of mud on those shoes could best be counted by the speck. I would have been horrified by the amount of knee-deep bogs I find myself plunging into on a weekly basis these days.
As I suppose is always the case, I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. And it turned out there was a lot I didn’t know when it came to trail running. I had been out walking in the hills before - my dad had taken me to Snowdonia as a kid and I’d recently spent a night in the Lake District on the way to a job interview in Newcastle (to be a graduate fashion buyer which feels hilarious now as somebody who only wears clothes-that-aren’t-running-kit approximately once a fortnight). I was even in the midst of fundraising for a university-run trip to Everest Base Camp. I wouldn’t have even known where to start if you’d asked me to plan a day out in the mountains by myself though, one that didn’t just involve following somebody else. I also don’t think it ever occurred to me that people went running on this terrains.
Of course, the number one thing I’ve learned since then is that when you say you’re going for a ‘run’ in the mountains (if you’re me, anyway) there’s often not a lot of actual running going on. I do sometimes question when a run stops being a run but my basic criteria for one is this: I wear my running kit, I don’t take a flask of tea, I run across the carpark at either end and I move as quickly as I can the rest of the time.