Omitted Summits

A few weeks ago I decided that I needed a new spreadsheet. Thus far the only consolidated record I’ve kept of hilltops I have visited has been via an app on an iGadget. It’s a very good app, but I’d be a bit lost if I was somehow to lose access to the data contained in it, and it struck me that I could make more use of the data (e.g. produce fabulous graphs!) if it was in a spreadsheet.

It was quite an arduous process, purely because I decided to fill in all the missing ‘date climbed’ information whilst I was at it. With much searching of my blog, of my pre-blog write-ups and of my walking stats spreadsheets, I was able to fill in the dates for all but 4 hills. Those 4 (three of which formed a single outing) pre-dated my records* and I can’t find any photos either.

As part of this process there were a few incidents of kicking myself when tops that I previously had ticked (in the belief that I had visited them) had to be unticked as a result of finding statements, written by my own fair fingers, like this:

“Brandreth turned out to be horribly uninspiring. If we ever find ourselves with 213 Wainwrights under our belts, we will have to go back to go to the summit proper, as we couldn’t quite find the enthusiasm in the bleak greyness to detour over to the summit.”

and this:

“By the time we reached the top [of Pavey Ark] there were so many people crammed onto the highest point that we decided not to add our sweaty bodies to the jam, so made do with a bit of ‘oohing’ at the view from a few paces away before heading on over to Harrison Stickle.”

and this:

On our way we discussed whether to detour over to the third top [Loft Crag], but decided to give it a miss.

(I was actually able to re-tick Loft Crag when I read further and found that it did subsequently receive a visit.)

I think it’s quite probable that never again will I get within paces of a summit and made a conscious decision not to visit it!

 

(* Many hills pre-dated my records, but I’m ignoring childhood ascents and only counting ones that I either have recorded or clearly remember.)

Random Witterings

The Permutations of Garmin-Gadget-Failure

On the left side of the following photo is my Garmin Gadget:

Filthy-strapped wrist-watch included for scale.

It’s a Forerunner 305, which is quite an old model now, but it does the job I want it to do, which is to measure how far I walked and the timing. The problem is that, on my bony, skinny wrists, it’s not at all comfortable to wear it. Instead, it lives in the mesh pocket on the lid of my day-pack. That means that I often carry my pack when I don’t need it for any purpose other than as a Garmin Gadget carrier.

The Garmin Gadget (GG) has never (yet!) let me down. I have, however, let myself down in respect to using it. Here are the common failures:

1. Turn on GG before setting out on walk; place by window to obtain satellite signal; forget to pick up before leaving; upon returning from walk, switch it off with nothing recorded.
2. Turn on GG before setting out on walk; obtain satellite signal; put in top pocket of day-pack; forget to press ‘start’; finish walk with nothing recorded.
3. Turn on GG before setting out on walk; remember to pick it up and start it; complete walk but forget to stop it; drive off somewhere, very quickly increasing the recorded mileage and speed.
4. Decide to take day-pack on walk for no reason other than to give a pocket in which to hold the GG; check contents of pack (decide not to take anything out for fear of forgetting to re-instate it later); go out for walk; remember after half an hour that the GG is still sitting, switched off and completely forgotten, in the living room.

I managed number 4 today. On the last trip I managed 2 and 3. On the trip before I managed 1 and 3. Sometimes I do despair of myself.

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Mud Season

Mud Season started late this year, but it is now in full-swing, making some of my local walks thoroughly unpleasant to the extent that I’m just not prepared to tackle them. In previous years I’ve resorted to walking the local lanes. This year I’m generally just being lazier.

That’s how gorgeous the weather was today!

This morning dawned a gorgeous crisp, clear winter’s day and I set out in the hope that the mud would be frozen solid. So it was – and all evidence was that the mud on the route that I took was as bad as I’ve ever seen it.

That set me to thinking: I would not voluntarily choose to go out and take a walk that I know is going to be significantly muddy. However, I don’t let Mud Season put me off going to walk in new places, where the mud might be (and often is) just as bad as on my local paths (such as last week’s jaunt up Black Down which was a mega-mud-fest). Why does mud become acceptable (to me) when not guaranteed to be present, but is totally unacceptable when known to be present?

I suppose it’s the same attitude as is common towards walking in the rain: I will seldom choose to set out for a walk in the rain, but if it rains when I’m out then that it far more acceptable.

I’m not sure what conclusions I draw from that, other than that I am a fair-weather-walker at heart, that I can’t wait for the end of Mud Season, and that I’m hoping for many more crisp winter’s day in the interim.

The Wrong Hill

The black arrow is where we parked; the red arrow is the wrong hill; the blue arrow is the right hill.

“How could you possibly have confused two different hills, three miles apart and in opposite directions?” asked Mick when I realised that I was on the verge of leading Mick up the wrong hill in Shropshire last week.

At a glance it was a truly ridiculous mistake to have so nearly made, but I do know how it came about:

I had planned the outing using OS mapping on my laptop (nice big screen, giving a good view of not just the objective, but also the surrounding area), combined with Google Maps for aerial photos and StreetView, which had allowed me to identify a Colin-sized parking area in Kempton. What I recalled from the planning was:

1) we were to park in Kempton;

2) we were to follow the Shropshire Way for much of the walk; and

3) the hill-top in question was marked on the map as a fort and surrounded by woodland.

On the day I was using OS maps on my phone, which gives a rather restricted view. Having found Kempton, I duly followed the Shropshire Way until I found a Fort marked. The hill I found looked about the right distance away and of a suitable height with a suitable amount of prominence, so no alarm bells rang and it didn’t occur to me that I should check to see if there was another (very similar looking!) hill in the opposite direction.

I’m sure that the wrong hill would have been a perfectly good walk (and it would have put a tick on the HuMP list – not that I’m collecting HuMPs), but from a point of view of embarrassing incidents, I’m very glad I had the last minute thought to mark the exact position of the summit on my map before we set out. I did that to avoid a repeat of Monday’s missed-summit-by-60-paces incident; in the event it saved me from missing my intended summit by 3 miles!

2014: Illustrated

It’s becoming a bit of a tradition that I round up each year with some illustrated walking statistics (and, incredibly, some people are waiting with baited breath for this!), so here we go with a review of 2014.

The headlines are:

Total distance walked: 2203 miles*

Number of walks taken: 242 (109 of which were entirely without Mick; 12 more were partially without Mick)

Number of days on which I went out for a walk: 227 (some Marilyn-bagging days have included two distinct walks in a day)

Total ascent: 231,000’

Average ascent per mile: 105’

Number of summits visited: 66 (38 of which were after the middle of October)

Number of nights spent in a backpacking tent: 32

Number of nights spent in Colin the Campervan: 99

The total of 2203 miles (just over twice my original target for the year) makes it my highest mileage year on record and you can see in this pretty graph how 2014 stacked up against previous years:

This is how the miles mounted up on a month-by-month basis:

What stands out is that I (apparently) did precisely nothing in August. The reality was that I spent almost every waking hour of every day renovating a house which involved a huge amount of activity – but with no time for walking. That renovation also took up two weeks of September (which is less obvious due to the mileage I did in 12 days on the Welsh coast making up for the first half of the month), and part of October. The slight drop off in June and July was caused by the resting of a sore foot (I found on my first walk in July that it was no better at all so I may as well have just carried on walking on it!).

Sticking on the subject of ‘activity by month’, I’ve looked at a couple of new statistics for this year, starting with the number of days I walked in each month:

And to save anyone from having to do any sums (because I’m sure it’s the first thing that popped into your minds…) here’s a graph showing the average number of miles I walked per walking-day in each month:

That gave an overall average of 8.9 miles per walking day, but if I take the year as a whole (including those days where I didn’t go out at all) then the average across the year drops to a tiny smidge over 6 miles per day.

Turning my attention away from miles walked to look at ascent, this is how the lumpiness was spread throughout the year:

To be more meaningful, this needs to be looked at in conjunction with the ‘miles per month’ figures to give an average ascent per mile for each month, which results in a different shape of graph:

January’s walks were mainly local circuits started from my own front door, hence the lack of ascent. July was in the Dolomites and Bavarian Alps, hence the high average. September’s figure shows that the Welsh coast features quite some undulations, and late October, November and December saw the start of my Marilyn campaign.

In terms of the quality of the miles walked, of this year’s 242 walks only 78 were in my local area. Whilst I haven’t got comparative figures for previous years, I think that the percentage of repetition was remarkably lower this year (particularly as I discovered some new local paths) resulting in a higher quality of miles.

2014 will stand out in my memory as being a good weather year (although it did rain quite a bit when we were in Europe, whilst the UK basked in a heat wave), and this graph bears that out:

I’m struggling to believe that anyone will have dragged themselves this far down this post, so I’ll save myself the trouble of copying across my ‘shoes worn’ pie chart, but as cakes and baking have fuelled my miles so admirably, I’ll finish with this one:

 

(*On top of the 2203 miles walked, my Fitbit tells me that I covered another 550 or so miles just in general everyday life, but those miles don’t count.)

Getting in a Jam

Most mornings take myself off for a walk. It’s surprising how many different routes I’ve got which start from the front door, but, when walking every day, there is still a lot of repetition, hence they don’t usually get mentioned on these pages.

Yesterday, however, was mildly noteworthy, when I took it into my mind to follow a ‘Permissive Path’ waymark which, having passed it far more than several-dozen times over the years, I have never before investigated.

It turned out to be a lovely! An apparently little used route, it took me variously through old woodland, newer National Forest patches of woodland, and across lovely meadows.

The point of this post isn’t really about that path, but the fact that on my way along it I came across quite a few wild roses, dropping their petals. I have long fancied making some rose petal jelly, so I resolved to return with suitable collecting materials.

On I continued through my circuit and, after some sheep and some tall-grass-wading, into another bit of National Forest woodland I headed. I often pass through this particular plantation these days, having only discovered its paths back in January. (Incredibly, I lived directly opposite that bit of wood for 6 years, until mid-2012, without knowing that there was a network of paths through it*!)

Yesterday it became apparent that I’ve stopped paying enough attention to my surroundings on these walks, as it wasn’t until I had wild roses on my mind that I noticed that there are also plenty in this area too – and far closer to home.

So, at 6.30 this morning, off I set, armed with plastic tubs. Through an overgrown field I waded to get there and with the discomfort of clothing sopping to the waist (a result of the early hour and the dew in the overgrown field), I set about harvesting rose petals. It’s not a quick process, and I visited every single bush I could see so as not to take too many from any one plant.

I duly boiled them up in a jam-making sort of way:

The result of my efforts? Of an hour spent picking petals and the time spent in the jam-making itself? One paltry jar!

Worse, early indications suggest that it tastes of sugar syrup without the gorgeous wild-rose aroma I was hoping to capture. I actually a little concerned that it might set to the consistency of toffee, but I won’t know until it’s fully cold.

What a disappointment! On the more positive side, at least I’ve satisfied my curiosity as to rose petal jelly. I shall now look forward to the blackberry, elderberry and crab apple harvest. I’ve found lots more sources of both the former and latter over the last few months.

One of last year’s (far more pleasing) batches of apple, elderberry and blackberry jam :-)

 

(*Now there’s a subject for a separate post.)

Anatomy of a 26.3-mile Day

One of the fun things about the Fitbit (which is essentially a pedometer with bells and whistles) is that it provides a graph showing how many steps have been taken in each 15-minute segment of the day. I thought that the graph that resulted from yesterday’s 26-miler was moderately interesting, so I’ve annotated it with seven numbered boxes which relate to the seven observations below:

1) I didn’t leap out of bed and immediately start walking as this suggests. The Fitbit isn’t good at capturing bursts of movement comprising fewer than five steps, and Colin’s size (particularly with the bed still in situ) is such that it’s not possible to take five steps in one go. However, you can clearly see where I set out just a few moments before 6.30 (the red bar, denoting 65 steps is the segment 0615-0630).

2) Look at all those green bars between 0630 and 1130! I clearly didn’t take any significant breaks during that period, I just kept striding along. As a result, I covered 15.7 miles before 1130 (which was A Good Thing – I find it demotivating if I have too many miles left to walk after lunch).

3) The only break I took during the morning was between 0845 and 0900, and must have only been a few minutes, as I still managed 1000 steps in this segment. I stopped at a bench, gave my socks a shake to de-sand them, and shoved a banana in my mouth. I did pause on another bench some time  later to inhale some fig rolls, but that was such a short break that it doesn’t stand out.

4) A good long (early) lunch break, feet up, doing nothing!

5) It looks like I wasn’t feeling as energised as I had been in the morning, as the less active segments are coming far more frequently. In the morning I had managed 2 hours or more between less active segments. In the afternoon the most I managed was 45 minutes.

6) Afternoon tea! A much longer break than I would usually take in the afternoon, and one I wouldn’t have taken to such an extent if Mick and Colin hadn’t been there.

7) The two amber lines are me slogging up the final hill of the (hot) day, at a visibly slower pace than I’d achieve on earlier hills. Then, apparently, at 1645 I sat down and didn’t stand up again. That’s not quite a true representation of reality - see point 1 above.