The team comprised just Ady and me, since Rich was in Birmingham and Joel was in Suffolk. Nick Cave accompanied us in his capacity as the support crew for the evening.
We set off in high spirits from Horton-in-Ribblesdale at 7:45pm
The team reach Beckermonds in reasonably good time and spent five minutes refueling and enjoying the full moon.
Support Crew were freezing...
Shortly afterwards we met another Trailtrekker team, doing the same route but going much faster!
We moved on down Langstrothdale to Buckden and then Kettlewell at about 4am. The route out of Kettlewell proved quite tricky to find and Ady and I went wrong several times trying to stay on the Dales Way!
During the slow ascent up onto the Crags, it became apparent that my knee, which had been troubling me since the Lake District walk the previous weekend, was going to start getting very uncomfortable. I had naively thought that I'd just bashed it whilst going over Striding Edge. The unthinkable soon became openly discussed as we talked about abandoning the walk at Conistone (after only 20 miles). We were attacked by some rather angry looking birds as we crossed over the tops of the Crags by Conistone which caused some light-heartedness, but it also became apparent that I had got quite bad blisters once again.
I probably could have made Skipton (it would have been touch-and-go!) but we agreed that it would be folly so close to the big day.
We finally abandoned the walk at Kilnsey 6:30am
I have since bought a very cheap knee-strap from e-bay (this one) which seems to be helping quite a bit. This, my lighter rucksack and appropriate painkillers should give me a fighting chance...
Just to be on the safe side, I'll be leaving the final training preparataions to the rest of the team :-)
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