LAMM 2011: two days running in the Scottish Highlands; 46km; 2,240m ascent; no footpaths; carrying all equipment. And we did the easy course.

My legs are currently recovering from a trip north to this year’s Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon (LAMM). I’d been building up to this for a while, and the location was revealed on Thursday as Beinn Dearg, just south-east of Ullapool.  I picked Ben and Greg up from the station on Friday morning, and we collected Chris at Penrith on the way.

The drive up was lengthy and generally uneventful, apart from a diversion over the most disconcerting rickety wooden bridge ever, complete with sign saying “Private bridge: use at your own risk“, and a stop at the amazing House of Bruer food hall. As we arrived and pitched tents at main camp on Friday evening the sun was setting over Loch Broom. A few rain showers passed through, but registration and finding of team-mates went without a hitch.

Saturday morning was suprisingly calm, with Ben and I developing a decidedly blasé attitude to the whole thing at the start line. Nevertheless, the competitive spirit kicked in shortly after, and we got a decent pace on climbing to the first and second controls (click for whole area map).

The descent from Meall Gorm was very fast and lots of fun – probably to make up for the next leg. It was at this point that Ben introduced me to the concept of “Type I fun” and “Type II fun”. Type I is immediate fun, great at the time but with possible consequences / pain afterwards; think of being drunk but then getting a hangover. Type II fun is the other way around – horrible at the time but enjoyable in retrospect.

If the previous leg was Type I fun, then the run out to Control 4 was definitely Type II fun. It was a long way away, with a very steep climb, and proved the longest leg of the day for us. We pulled a blinder with the navigation, taking the planner’s best route and making up time on the majority of teams who took an alternative route. From there we pulled over our only Munro of the weekend, Seana Bhraigh, before descending 600m to mid-camp.

Mid-camp was a lot more amenable than last year, being much flatter and with loads more room, so it felt quite luxurious. We arrived at 14:00, and managed to get the tent up before the rain arrived mid-afternoon. Our time for the 24km was 5h 43m, unexpectedly placing us 19th out of 112 starters. Chris had a similarly surprising but welcome result with his partner Francis, bagging 3rd place in the Elite category!

Greg and Joe had a tough day in B class, bagging two Munros over the day. Team Williams-Jeffreys, meanwhile, missed out on the chasing start for day two by less than a minute and a half, but this meant we could plan for an early start rather than waiting around. Ben prepared by crawling into his sleeping bag at 16:00 and staying there almost constantly until 05:00 the following day, spending most of that time asleep.

Despite rain overnight, day two dawned sunny and bright, although without the traditional bagpipes as apparently no-one could be convinced to make the trek to mid-camp! We only had 21km to cover, with 850m of ascent, but the route certainly didn’t feel like it was much easier than Saturday.

In the morning I was chomping at the bit to climb faster, but Ben was suffering with pain in his calves. By halfway around he’d found a second wind and was descending very quickly, but by that point my feet had begun to self-destruct. We made the mistake of following the pack at one point, and so the navigational error of one person at the front caused a lot of teams to lose time wandering around. Although we realised pretty quickly, and didn’t suffer as much as many people, it still lost us time. A horrific steep descent followed by a horrific steep ascent took me firmly into the realms of “not fun” (that’s beyond Type II fun, even). We eventually reached the penultimate control, which Ben had been waiting for all day as he reckoned it was the most fun part of the day – descent all the way back to the final control and main camp. Desperately hobbling down the hillside, I was less-than convinced by his now jovial attitude. After much swearing and muttering under my breath, we reached some forestry and I somehow managed to pick up the pace down to the final control. Some kamikaze descending on the way saw us passing lots of teams from D class, and as we dibbed the final control we knew there was just 1.3km to the finish. Ben suggested we walk to begin with, but I foolishly got carried away and said we could run. The longest 1,300m of my life saw me pretty much done-in as we crossed the camping field and finally finished.

Sunday did indeed turn out to be slower, and we placed 33rd for the day. That gave us an overall result of 22nd, just one second behind the pair in 21st! I was exhausted for the first few minutes after we finished, and so wasn’t really in a fit state to congratulate Chris and Francis on holding onto 3rd in Elite. Greg and Joe came in shortly after, feeling the pain of B class but still pulling in a very respectable result. I’m very pleased with our result – top 20% is always pleasing, particularly in something that I’ve been doing a lot of training for and really didn’t want to do badly in. Big thanks to Ben for proving a willing partner and remaining polite at all times, despite me going too fast uphill and too slow downhill! As for next year, we’ll see. We had good weather again this year, which helps, and I was thinking how rubbish it would be in the rain or low cloud – but already the pain’s fading and it’s starting to sound like a good idea…