So day three and 45+ miles into the journey for John. With a John being a little behind schedule and today being planned as a 19 mile day there was a bit of work to do.
It was decided to send Maxine with John to do the first big climb owed from yesterday. The climb to the highest point on the coast to coast route. Kidsty Pike at over 2,500ft. Maxine is better on hills and it would give me a bit of time to recover from the last 2 days and pick up with John later.
I would track in the car and Maxine would get him over the hill and I would take over at Mardale and we could catch up as much as possible.
Well that was the plan but not how it panned out. Maxine was great up the hill and great with the nav but on the way down she blew her knee out. She hurt it at spine challenger but it had healed up fine and she was running on it again well, she had not expected it to be a problem.
She was reduced to a slow hobble on the descent and that really slowed down John and he gave me a call to let me know Maxine was hurt. We decided the plan was to descend and to meet them at Mardale Head rather than Mardale and reduce the amount of time Maxine was with John slowing him down. I got to Mardale Head and jogged out on the trail and met them about half a mile out on the north side. Then walked back to the car with John and got him changed into trainers from his boots and set him off on the road south of the lake back to rejoin the route at Mardale. This caused a problem now as Maxine’s knee was screwed and she can’t drive at that time so I have to switch to a support role and sort Maxine out. This is where the gpx file I loaded onto John’s watch and the Spot tracker we carry becomes invaluable. We can still monitor him from a distance and he can navigate using the watch without a guide with him to do any tricky nav.
I then walked back out to Maxine and back to the car and sorted her out.
John cracked on for the next few hours on his own but it was clear we were not going to get the daily target let alone any back today. It had taken too much time to get off the hill with Maxine and we were running out of daylight.
We stopped at our accommodation, New Ing Lodge at Shap and Maxine went back to her Youth Hostel to rest.
We were now about 19 miles behind schedule. John was still looking strong but we had a fair bit of work to do to catch up the miles on a tight schedule and with Maxine unable to drive any distance we would have to have a rethink on the plan and try to adjust.
Again the weather was glorious and Maxine and John took some great pictures on the top of Kidsty Pike.
Onto day 4……..
