The Three Peaks Challenge

Time really seems to go by with this blog and I seem to fall behind so fast. However to bring it up to date I need to go back to last Saturday and the 3 peaks challenge of Pen-y-ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough. All together it's a 26 mile circuit in the Yorkshire dales with 3 rather large peaks as a sort of inconvenience along the way! Since this was January there was mud, snow and ice to add more variables to the mix. At points I have to say I did feel outside of my comfort zone and traversing across a verticle snow slope on Ingleborough towards the end of the walk still gives me post-Vietnam type flashbacks... Never-the-less this felt like a great achievement and it was some beautiful walking. Thank you very much to Flora for being Tenzing to my Hillary; Flora doesn't appear in any of the pictures as she shuns the publicity; the cost of fame is high, so maybe she's right, but none-the-less, thanks, and we achieved the walk in 9 hours 33 minutes, which given the conditions was a very good time and I am pretty sure made us the fastest team on the day. Stayed at a really good B&B called the Willows in Horton-in-Ribblesdale absolutely fantastic pack lunches!
Experimented with dextrose sweets on this walk in my eternal quest for the right energy supplement and found them really good. With this sort of extreme exercise I find that my appetite becomes supressed and all I really want is hot tea. However, one still needs the calories and the energy and being hypoglycemic I have to watch this. So a dextrose sweet once an hour a few veggie sausage sandwiches and of course the emergency flapjack (I was carrying 6!) and I was ok!
Got back on Sunday and ran for 45 minutes - felt amazing. Just had to prove to myself that I was still in good condition. Ran or used the gym most days this week apart from Wednesday when I went to see Avatar - amazing!