Sunday 22 March 2009
The View
To think, twelve months ago, that I would be donning a skin-tight pair of running leggings, preparing a carbo/protein/eloctrolyte concoction and ‘Vasing Up’ three hours before actually having to get up for work, would have been, to say the least, absurd. To think that when packing to go on holiday the majority of my suitcase would be filled with running shoes, shorts, t-shirts, socks, energy drinks, recovery drinks and gps systems, would have been outright ridiculous.
These things have, of course, evolved gradually over the past twelve months. Like the change from knee-length shorts to cop-an-eyeful-of-that length shorts, or the once grueling 10k long run to the 20+ mile Sunday expedition. So when I explained to my family that I wouldn’t be traveling straight back home from my visit, but would be stopping over night at a hostel so that I could get an early rise to run up a mountain in the winter snow, quite flippantly I should add, with no real explanation of the years developments, I think it may have come as a bit of a shock.
This didn’t really sink in until I was sat on my bunk with no reception. It was at this moment, as I was holding my phone out of the skylight, that the room to the left of mine erupted into the most hideous typhoon of ear-wrenching noise known to man. Especially one alone in a small hostel bunk room with paper-thin walls. This was the sound of five teenage girls on an outward-bound team-building weekend. And then the sound of five teenage girls on an outward-bound team-building weekend screaming ‘LAMBRINI!’...Oh Joy.
Hate wouldn’t begin to describe, in fact a club covered and dripping with teenage liver mass, eye phlegm and soured fizzing Lambrini wouldn’t even get close to the images engraved on my weary eyes. At some point I slept, and abruptly woke moments before my alarm started. I enjoy waking just before the alarm sounds because somehow it means I’ve won. Slamming the door several times on my way out before the sun had even risen and hearing head-banging hangover moans stirring in the room next door, also, somehow, means I won.
Dawn broke my approach to Storey Arms, and my climb up Pen-Y-Fan was greeted with snowfall, sharp crosswinds and a fine-spun first light. I only have a few ‘snap shot’ memories from when I started the ascent. The finest was entering the snow on the top third of the peak, being the first to leave footprints leading to the summit. Then of course the face-slap of a view combined with whipping wind that completes the last half-mile. I thought that the fight to the summit, the pause for the view and completion of ascent would be the highlight, and at that moment it was, until I started to descend.
Descending a mountainside covered in snow was easier and more fun than initially anticipated. The snow had formed its own path on top of the rugged stony path of the mountain. There was no need for eagle eye alertness, dodging rubble, cracks, potholes or sheep slurry. The hard surface and soft core of the snow layer just meant leaving gravity to its ways and hurtling as fast as possible in a downward direction. This downward hurtling continued for a good ten minutes until I clocked a group of walkers half way up their Saturday morning hike – all stood still, wrapped in Gore-Tex and watching my descent. I slowed down to pass as they parted, slightly concerned, to the paths banks. The leading hiker caught my eye and shouted through the wind “Oi Fella! That was the craziest shit I’ve seen in a long time!” I of course took this as a compliment and gave him a nod on top of which I added a double-thumbs-up.
At the base of the path, back where I’d begun my ascent in the early morning dawn, I paused for water. In doing so I met another runner coming over the stile at the end / beginning of the path. He wanted to know what the weather was like at the top. He explained that the weather changed rapidly on the summit, it could take a matter of minutes for bright blue skies to turn into lowering dark rain clouds. “From spring to winter in seconds”, and that the weather at the base had no reflection on what was to come. In his mid sixties, he looked to me to be a runner that had used this route time and time again, and judging by his kit I was pretty sure he’d ran up some other, larger mountains too, and so I asked “Are you training for anything?”
“Yes, Son” he said, “What for?” I responded, and with a simple, ivory tooth filled smile and pointing to the summit he shouted “The View Son! The Bloody View!!”
