WHAT DID I DO?
The idea of 40 summits came to me in January, but with a trip to Indonesia scheduled for late January and most of February, I knew I'd not have much time if I wanted to complete the task before April. I got just one mountain under my belt before I went abroad - Black Mountain - which meant I'd need to do six or seven per week every week through the end of February and all of March. That would mean one to three tips out to the mountains each week. As it happened I got into a routine of going out twice each week and doing three summits from the list each time, though there were a few occasions when I had hoped to do more and simply couldn't (because of adverse weather or simply tiredness) or even when three proved to be too many.
The day would start with a 7am departure from home, breakfast of one or two energy bars in the car & constant drinking to get my hydration levels up, followed by some pretty intense map-reading challenges on the mountain roads! I'd usually be out on my first mountain between 8am and 9am, which is why I rarely saw another human being.
INSPIRATION
This was one of numerous ways in which myself and other members of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team worldwide wanted to mark the 40th anniversary of our founder, Sri Chinmoy, coming to the western world from India in 1964. In our club, we like to mark significant anniversaries in significant ways, for example I know team members who run their age in miles on their birthdays - I did this myself on my 30th and 32nd, though sadly injury curtailed such long road-runs for me before I could do my 33rd. At first I was really inspired by the mountain idea, but there were times when I asked myself why I was doing it - with work, family commitments and the huge amount of work needed on my new house (I'd moved to Wales on Feb 25th) all piling up, here I was taking myself off to the middle of nowhere for a day or two every week on some project that could be seen as - well, of no consequence. I suppose such second thoughts are natural, but if you believe yourself in what you're doing, theres always an underlying inspiration that motivates you and makes you carry on. I had some wonderful experiences, and some really difficult ones when I had to "dig deep" for some endurance and perseverance, so all in all I feel it was very worthwhile and something I'll treasure in my memory for some time.
WHERE DID YOU DO IT?
The 40 peaks were chosen from the TACIT tables by taking all the "Marylins" of the South Wales area (about thirty) then adding the highest from the list of "Hewitts" to make up the numbers. If these terms mean nothing to you, take a look at the TACIT tables online and you'll see an explanation. If you come from outside the UK, you probably think that my calling these hills "Mountains" is a bit of a stretch of the imagination - but here in Wales we use the term "Mountain" for any upland, theres no minimum height requirement. The average height was around 2100 feet above sea level.
HOW TOUGH WAS IT?
Some mountains were really easy. Some were very tough. My background fitness was not up to much at the start - I could really only exercise intensely for an hour at a time during 2003, as knee problems had prevented me from maintaining a decent level of training. I was doing just a few miles a week, building up to 15 per week around Christmas and into January. To suddenly be running mountains for three hours at a time was a huge leap. The biggest difficulties, however, did not come from the climbing. The toughest aspects were the weather and the terrain. Running a flat course over the roughest tussock and bog in a storm force wind is infinitely harder than running up a steep hill on an easy path.