LONG-DISTANCE WALKING
Emma Lewis went to Coniston for the Scarpa Great Lakeland 3Day event
‘My friend Sarah caught me at a weak moment. I heard the words “Café course”, “free tea and “cake at the end of the day”, and I found myself saying, “Why not?”, without knowing what I was signing up for. The Scarpa Great Lakeland 3Day event (greatlakeland3day.com) was a year away, during the first May bank holiday weekend of 2023, so I’d have plenty of time to train, whether we’d walk or run it, or do a bit of each…
‘Before I knew it, I was in my spare room, going through the essential kit list one last time and trying to cram no more than 13kg of kit into the regulation 60L dry bag. Tent? Check. Sleeping bag and mat? Check. Spare food? Check… Turning my attention to my daysack, I ticked off items including a survival bag, whistle, spare warm top, snacks and drinking reservoir. I was good to go.
‘The event welcomed 1,000 participants this year, with an array of courses to allow everyone from humble hikers to fell-running experts to take part. To help those not used to using a map and compass to navigate between orienteering-like checkpoints in the hills, there are recommended-route GPX files for the two shortest courses, plus a digital map should you wish to use it.
‘Arriving at the basecamp in Coniston, where the start and finish of the event would be (with a couple of nights to be spent elsewhere), my friend Sophie and I could feel the sense of excitement and anticipation in the air. Having registered, and now armed with a course map, a dibber for the checkpoints and a GPS tracker, it was time to find a spot amongst the sea of tents and try to recall how to put ours up. Sarah came bounding over and the dream team was complete!
‘We’re all the wrong side of 45, and Sophie was not a camper – nor was she as fit as she’d have liked – but she’d been training hard. Sarah, the instigator, had been inspired by super-fit friends of hers who’d run the event in the past, and, just like me, was relying on her decent general fitness level to get her through the 60K of walking over two-and-a-half days (Sophie, from when she signed up, was adamant she’d be walking, so we’d promised not to neglect her). As it happened, I’d been having some arch pain on my left foot in the run-up to the event, so was very glad not to feel the pressure to have to run…
‘We grabbed our pre-ordered grub from the food tent and went to sit in the big marquee to eat it while we pored over the map to work out our first day’s route between checkpoints, in amongst a babble of other people doing exactly the same.
‘The next morning dawned with the sound of light rain on the tent. We hea
