Beacons :o)

That's a Motley crew (Me, Nige, Khalid, Sean)

Wow! That best sums up today. Well, maybe ouch needs to be in there too.  18k in the Beacons in a gale, 1000m of climbing (ish) and a pretty large sprawling fall.  


Sean floated the idea earlier in the week of a longer run in the Beacons for this weekend.  The Brecon Beacons are what passes for a mountain range in South Wales, and whilst they top out at 890m so they're only small in the scale of things they're still pretty beautiful.


So it was that Sean, Khalid, Nige and I found ourselves there this morning in some rather horrible weather. I figured that I needed to get a reality check on myself if I'm to have any chance of doing the 30 miler in 3 weeks time.  I'm running off road a lot at the minute but not in conditions that are particularly harsh. 


And a reality check was got I got pretty much straight off, a 350m climb in 2 miles right from the get go.  Ouch! Sean, Khalid and Nige set off at a run but I know from experience now that I need to walk for a little just to ease into things if I want my knee to survive. Turns out that wasn't such a bad plan today,  Nige saw the error of his ways soon enough and in reality walking wasn't all that slower than running.


At the top the weather really closed in and visibility was down to about 20 metre.  What didn't close in was Sean and Khalid as they absolutely roasted us along traversing ridge line. Admittedly it wasn't helped by me going arse over tit as we like to say around here. Ouch again, and a nice bleeding knee and banged up hand for the rest of the run, bugger. The rest of the ridge line was absolutely fantastic and must be spectacular on a good day, not today though.  Precarious and scary was the order of the day.

It certainly was next, straight down an escarpment, losing 200 odd metres in about quarter of a mile.  Again, Nige and I struggled and may (just may) have been a little out of our depth.


The gap pass was next, a famous old road (as in a thousand years old) linking the towns of Merthyr and Brecon.  This is a famous Mountain Bike climb which I must have done over a dozen times, it was pure relief to be honest after the technical challenges of the last three miles and it was also nice not to have my butt beaten by the saddle like normally happens on the rough track.


At this point, Khalid pulled his disappearing trick on us.  Khalid is super fit but I'd had it in my head up until now that his endurance is not always fantastic and I may yet get a chance at a small measure of revenge.  No such luck now though as he made off skirting the lower flanks of the hills, in his defence this was probably because he hadn't budgeted time for me and Nige's pace.


So over the three big peaks it was.  The wind was absolutely howling, to the point where I got a headache from the noise and perhaps a little bit of dehydration.  On a few occasions the wind caused proper stumbles which was a little hairy with a few hundred meter drop on our right.  Nige was suffering by now and is face was a picture when he foud out at the top of Cribyn that the big climb was still to come.  Worse though was mother nature playing tricks with us coming off Cribyn when it blew all the clouds and mist away for ten seconds and allowed the path straight up Pen y Fan to show itself.  I wasn't happy and I thought Nige was going to cry.


I was going to cry coming down the other side though, my knee was grumbling quite a bit and I was slooooow.  Nothing I could do seemed to make much difference and it was really frustrating.  Certainly gave me a lot to think about with the thirty miler so close.  Finally though we were out of the clouds for the last time, to our North the flatlands towards Hereford opened up and it was just a really enjoyable couple of miles of peaty bog back to the Storey Arms.

All in all it was a fantastic way to spend a morning and as I often think, i'm really lucky to have such landscapes so close to home.  More thoughts on the the thirty miler tomorrow I think.