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| Looking into Ennerdale valley from the top of Pillar, about 10 miles in |
Dean's last run! This was supposed to be a last long run before the St Bega Ultra. Dean had been training for a while and gradually upping his mileage. The plan was an easy paced run along the valley bottom then to climb up Black Sail Pass and come back along the fell tops on the southern side of the lake.
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| Pillar summit |
Soon after we set off, Dean was talking of how he was changing his foot position as he felt like he was getting blisters. I felt pretty tired considering we were going along the relatively flat valley. We carried on, thinking we just needed to warm up. Just before starting the climb, we had a quick look around the Black Sail Hostel. This has been fitted out brilliantly, lots of cool pictures and history of the valley.
We climbed steadily up to Pillar. At this point, Dean was feeling sore in his knees and his response when I asked if he still wanted to do a planned minor extension of the route to Steeple and back told me that he just wanted to get back. We carried on along the route. This is a pretty good route for bad weather, low cloud etc, take a compass bearing off Pillar and then from Scoat Fell you can pretty much follow the wall all the way to the climb up Crag Fell. We had pretty good conditions, I noticed I was still feeling tired and kept tripping up. By the time we got to the climb up to Crag Fell, Dean was really struggling and had to walk the last descent.
The next day, I woke up with a stinking cold. This explained my tiredness and clumsiness.
Dean initially felt like his knees just needed a rest but as I write this (mid October) he's still not running more than a few miles.
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| cloudy crags |
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| Dean pretending to be happy on the wall summit of Scoat Crag |
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| Rocky Haycock summit |
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