Our first Mountain Marathon – the 2011 Rab MM

After months of not very serious training, but very serious complaints due to aches and pains, the weekend of the Rab MM finally dawned. It was wet! But the forecast was set to improve, so we planned for a later start to try and avoid the worst of the rain.

After getting to the school in Bethesda we signed in, collected our dibbers, and met up with Rachel and Richard.

We had no idea what to expect, so our levels of trepidation were high! We had never used a dibber; didn’t know what a control looked like; how far we might be able to travel in the allowed 6 hours on day 1 and 5 hours on day 2; how tricky the navigation might be; or how our bodies would cope with two days of fell running back-to-back.

When we dibbed-in at the start that was first time we’d ever used the SPORTident dibbers and I think the guy administering the machine was a little surprised when I asked him what to do. We were off! 😯 After 20, or maybe 30 minutes, studying the map we’d decided upon our route – just five and half hours to go… A little later, at our first mark, we learnt what controls looked like (approx. 30cm square white and orange flags) and dibbed for our first score – a lowly 5 points.

Later we, along with another 40 or so people, wasted 20 minutes searching for control 121. Clearly all of our combined navigation skills couldn’t be that bad, it simply wasn’t there. We reported that at the over night camp and luckily we, along with the other teams, were credited with 20 points. Phew! Those 20 minutes hadn’t been wasted.

We managed to cover 24km on day 1 and scored 190 points.

We learnt two things, we needed to focus more on higher scoring controls rather than the number of controls found. And that 24km was just about as far as our bodies could go on this terrain – despite having 20 minutes to spare from the allowed 6 hours, our knees were trashed! The killer was the descending – we reckon we made approx. 2000m of ascent during the day and all that had to be lost too.

The overnight camp was in a lovely setting and the weather had turned from wet and windy in the morning to calm and sunny (almost like summer), we laid recovering with cheese, biscuits, and several cups of tea in the sunshine. 😛

Eventually we managed to find Rachel and Richard, it wasn’t easy with over 300 tents spread out around the camp area, and shared stories of our respective day’s adventure. Just before bed I brought out the 150ml bottle of Drambuie I had carried to the camp to relax our tired muscles before bedtime. Unfortunately the bottle is a reused shampoo bottle, and although it has been in use as our camping salt-shaker for many years it still gave the Drambuie an interesting flavour – essence d’shampoo! 😆

Straight out of camp at 8.30am we headed up the “infinite-hill”, over 400m of ascent in just under a 1km – steep! However, the real destroyer was the first descent… My right knee immediately reminded me of yesterday afternoon’s punishment and hurt like hell!!! Things were not looking good for our planned route which included going right over Carnedd Llywelln (1064m) and picking up the high scoring (40 point) control on Yr Elen. But Laetitia encouraged us on and I kept hobbling along – in fact sometimes literally hoping on my good left leg on the down hill sections. 😮

On day 2 we covered 20km and scored 160 points. A better score considering we had an hour less and had very tired legs – we’d learnt the lesson of going for higher scoring controls.

Here’s a link to the Rab 2011 Mountain Marathon results…

Clearly everyone had been suffering from fatigue on day 2 as we managed to advance 38 places in the score table. I reckon just the single day of experience gained on Saturday helped us improve our strategy for Sunday and, despite the ruined knees, pull out a slightly improved result.

Altogether a brilliant event (did I say/write that?) …