The 40th Kentmere Horseshoe - 19th July 2015
The time had come, it was the day of my first Lakeland fell race & I'd decided on racing the Kentmere Horseshoe. I'd had my eye on it all season, as it was on our club fell championship fixture list, but, at the beginning of the year I didn't really anticipate that my fitness, strength and speed would improve so much that I would feel ready and would be happy to attempt to race it, after all, the Lake District is where the big boys - both mountains and runners, come out to play!!! I was up to 46 races for this season before Sunday, so I was easily race fit, but this was to be my longest fell race and also included an amount of ascending that I hadn't experienced before. I have recently (about 6-8 weeks ago) started to hit a minimum of 5,000 feet per week for my ascending, which seemed a decent amount without putting my legs out of action on a daily basis, but, saying that, Kentmere is around 3,300 feet on it's own so it was always going to be testing....