The Expedition Journals

" I have never run more than 23 kilometres before… " is my response, when stood in the fading light at The Needles a fellow 'Challenge the Wight' participant asks if I can " run like you bike ". On hearing my reply, he looks at me with a slight wince " Ah, right… well. Good luck."… As the sunset casts an orange haze on the English Channel, and a warm westerly wind blows in over the cliffs of Alum Bay, I slightly nervously await the start of my first marathon… off-road, through the fast approaching darkness. 21:00 — The gun sounds, and amidst a cheer of support from friends and family, we are off. Up the lane to the coastguard cottages and the old rocket launch site; from where we will then turn eastwards, and traverse the downlands backbone of the Isle of Wight all the way to the finish at Culver Down — 26 miles (42 km) and 2900 feet (890 m) of climbing. This could be a long night. Up over Tennyson Down; down to Freshwater Bay; then up agai...

'Running' perhaps isn't the only adjective that should be used to describe taking on last weekend's OMM in the Galloway Mountains, Scotland. You should also add 'Climbing', 'Scrambling', 'Hiking', and most definitely 'Bog Bashing' to the list; it is a running orienteering event of pretty extreme proportions... Friday saw us drive from Portsmouth to the Galloway peninsula in South West Scotland—a casual 15 hour journey by minibus, picking up my running partner Ben in Penrith. Welcomed at midnight by the cheery OMM team, we settled down for a few hours sleep not sure what to anticipate from the next day's race. The OMM is a run orienteering event series, with events in the U.K, France and even Japan. The events all hold the same format: on the start line teams are given a list of checkpoints out in the mountain wilderness—each one is worth a different number of 'points'. The teams of two then have to visit as many of those...