My Walking Log: Lake District - Pooley Bridge

Distance - 20 miles

Ascent - 4759 feet

Time - 7hr 7min

Route - Pooley Bridge - Howtown - Bampton Common - Gatescarth Pass - Kentmere

Map of the route

After spending a few months training around are local are we were covering around 30 miles per week at a good pace so we arranged are 1^st training week end in the Lake District. We decided it would be a good idea to get used to the route as there are two night sections when we do the Lakeland 100. We did most of the last 50 miles of the route over 2 days.

On the first day I met up with Dan at Kentmere where we would be leaving my car and driving around to Pooley Bridge to start the run. With this being are 1^st training weekend together we decided that we would run all the downhill and the flat sections and any hills we would walk up giving us plenty of time to locate the check points and discuss what we had undertaken.

The route was really good and we were enjoying the running making a change from the walking we were used to. We made a few mistake on the first day the 1^st one coming from Dan not zipping his bag up properly only realizing when his scotch egg hit the floor, on inspecting his bag he had lost his water proof luckily it was only 5mins back from where we was.

Even though the sun was shining the ground was really wet, not good when we were only in trainers, and still plenty of mile left to cover. When we stopped for dinner I had to swop my socks and let my trainers dry out for a while to try and prevent any blisters.

The second mistake of the day was only taking one litre of water as we ran out 10 miles from the end, we made the decision to drink from high level streams as we thought this would be better than getting dehydrated which we will do again as it made a great way of traveling as light as possible.

As we was nearing Kentmere on the final decent day Dan started to struggle with some knee pain but managed to finish the day off running back to the car. We was really happy with the total time of 7hrs 7min including dinner stop and checking off the check points we would need to visit on the day of the event.

This is where I had made the biggest mistake of the day by leaving my car keys in Dan’s car at the start. As soon as I saw my car I knew what I had done. A little hard to explain so hope I don’t lose you, my car was parked at the finish in Kentmere and Dan had driven us to the start in his when we left his car I for some strange reason put my car keys in his glove box for safe keeping and now we was 20 miles walk away and 52 miles by car, this took a while for this to sink in at first. Luckily I managed to hitch a ride with 4 different people within minutes I was getting picked up very lucky. The journey only took me 10 minutes longer than it should have.

On the way back to the camp site we got these great pics