Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon - Day 1

Ian and I headed off on Friday morning for two days in the hills at LAMM in the Assynt region in the far north of Scotland. After a five hour journey we arrived at the basecamp at Inchnadamph near Ullapool. Our objective was to finish and not be the slowest finishers.

We pitched camp with Franks rather outdated tent looking out of place amongst the other more modern base camp tents. Excellent meal from Wilfs in the base camp tent and a few drinks at the local hotel, the only hostelry for about 20 miles, whose sole barperson was wondering why it was a bit busy that night!
Having survived Ian's snoring we were woken by the sound of the piper walking up the glen. After a quick breakfast we set of on what proved to be a long hard journey. In spite of recent training Ian wasn't well prepared for the length of the race or the terrain. Our navigation was very good and we made good progress over the first two controls. For the third Ian had decided that he didn't like hills and that he loved paths and we chosed a very long route that went a very long way round a hill and added about 7 km to the journey and probably lost us about an hour. Thereafter the going was very tough in bad weather and rougn ground. We kept going though and arrived on a mountain peak above mid camp around 7 pm. After a final rough descent we finally got to camp at around 8 pm. I shall never forget to look of admonishment that Ian gave me as we crossed t he line after almost ten very tough hours on the hills.

We quickly put up the tent and had a minestrone cup-a-soup that tasted absolutely fabulous. After that it was quickly to sleep.

On our course there was one slower team and nine that failed to complete out of 145 teams.