Life in the old dogs yet…
On the 26th – 27th October the 2012 (OMM) Original Mountain Marathon took place in the Howgills of northern England which are situated on the western edge of the Yorkshire dales. The event has been held since 1967 and now sees up to 3000 people compete on varying difficulties of course every year in October. Regarded as the pinnacle of mountain marathon racing in the UK, the OMM 2012 saw a weekend of contrasting weather conditions from cold and clear skies on the first day to mist and rain on the second.
There are a variety of courses some favouring the orienteer, some favouring the fell runner but all require the ability to navigate in bad weather and search out small orienteering flags hidden in the middle of no-where whilst carrying everything you need to survive a wilderness night out. A vital component of the event is that you operate as a pair and team work is an essential element. It is an opportunity to get to know each other better, much better. The tent is a one person tent into which you must not only squeeze two people but every bit of kit you need to survive for the two days.
Starting just outside Sedburgh on Saturday John and I were pleased to see the bright, clear skies that would last throughout the whole day and give us some incredible views of countryside not dissimilar to the Cheviots. It also meant that navigation whilst not easy would be fairly straight forward.
Six hours later we arrived at the overnight camp, set the tent up and looked forward to replenishing the thousands of calories we had used up. Fate then took a hand. John set off to get some water, to add to our dried sludge euphemistically called beef stew. The standpipe being a mere 200 hundred yards away this should have taken about 10 minutes. Over an hour later and about to send out a search party, John arrived back. Try finding a green tent in a field of 1500 and you can see his problem. The only point worth stating is that we had virtually the only blue tent on the whole campsite.
From the cold, crispness of Saturday to a wet and windy Sunday, the change was dramatic. Wearing glasses made our task harder and in my case the inability to see the map except on rare occasions meant a huge reliance on compass navigation. The saving grace of the second day is that it is slightly shorter than the first, so five hours later we crossed the finishing line.
With a total combined age of 130 years we were the oldest pair in our course and were delighted to discover that we had finished 6th in the Vets handicap out of 32 teams.
John FAIRBAIRN and Mike HENRY
