Hello everyone,

We just thought we would give you a flavour of what we did to achieve completion of the Three Peaks Challenge in 22hrs 24mins 19secs.

We started at 4.30pm at the foot of Ben Nevis (1344m) at the Visitor Centre having stayed over in Glasgow the night before and began with Kyle setting a blistering pace. Soon we were up in the cloud line but followed the cairns (small piles of rocks marking the path) up the following zig-zag path to the summit. The wind on the upper reaches was ferocious, ripping the map out of Josh’s hands, but we summit ed before we had expected and began to descend. We jogged the downward section coming out of the cloud and came back well before our prediction to the car.

Arriving at Scafell Pike (Lake District, 978m) at 1am, we donned our head torches and headed up into the dark. The first section of the path was relatively straightforward and we made the crucial right turn with little difficulty. During the climb up Brown Tongue the mist came down and the rain started hammering and we could barely see each other 4 feet away, let alone the path. Leaving one of us at our last navigationally confident point and sending out two as scouts with compass bearings to try and find the path too proved fruitless and close to dawn we still had made little more than 100m headway. On returning to the point we were certain of – the fork between two paths – we made the decision that to try and find the path originally planned to take would take too long and risk failure, so elected to take the path up Mickeldore which we knew described as ‘too eroded – do not attempt on a Three Peak Challenge’. The climb was tough, slipping at almost every foothold, but fortunately the gamble paid off as we emerged on a ridge dotted with cairns leading us to the summit.

We finally returned to the car at 7.30am and were convinced that we were in serious danger of running out of time. During a stellar drive from Nat to Snowdon (1085m) with Sam falling asleep repeatedly with the map, we all questioned individually whether we had enough left for the last. Smearing our legs in ibuprofen gel, we decided to just try and absolutely nail it up and down the Miner’s track, which would give us the opportunity to run the last kilometre if necessary. As we ascended, the cloud cleared and the summit came into view. We didn’t stop until returning to the car park after glorious views of the range and went up and down in less than three hours, bringing us to our total time of 22 hours and 24 minutes.