UKH

Hi all, I’m overseas (US) but very interested in a Bob Graham Round attempt later this summer. I had the chance to visit the Lake District last summer and recce some of the legs last year, and I hope to recce the rest a couple weeks prior to any attempt (planning a three-week stay in August).

My question—does anyone have any advice on how I might reach out for support for the actual event? My family will be with me in the UK and has gamely agreed to crew and meet at each of the crossings (even Wasdale!) but of course I still need on-route accompaniment. I have tried to request membership multiple times to the Facebook group “Bob Graham Round Attempts 2023 and Beyond” but have not been accepted. I am not sure why, but perhaps it is because I have created a brand new Facebook account for this purpose and the group is set up to auto-reject such accounts? (I had no Facebook presence previously.)

Anyways, any advice would be much appreciated. I do feel hesitant reaching out for support when I have not “paid my dues” like more local runners supporting other BGR attempts, but I guess I might as well start the conversation. If I end up connected to the community, there is always the chance that I can transform some of my planned recce’s into support runs, I figure!

Register with the FRA - Fell Runners Association, they have many forums including BG and are very helpful.

Fell running UK is a big group on FB which will be handy to ask, however you might get some right idiots, a bugger challenge might be how to assess if the people who volunteer to help are capable of helping.

What is your running CV? People are generally happy to help if they think you have a good chance of getting round. Less likely to offer if they think you will drop out at Wasdale, so don’t be shy about shouting about past ultra distance events/routes you have done.

Ask on here, give specific dates and people might come forward.

Are you looking to ‘get round’ or break records? If the latter you have to be asking a very different subset of the community.

Can't help with the on route accompaniment these days but if I can help with logistics at Wasdale I'm only 30 minutes away, depending on the date.

Thank you for the very helpful response!

Great questions. I will just be looking to finish in 24 hours, and even that may be a stretch. I am most definitely open to advice from prospective helpers or really anyone with BGR experience for that matter as to whether or not I should make an attempt.

My trail running has primarily been in the New Hampshire White Mountains over the past 10 years or so, with some occasional forays outside of that area. Some of my past experiences include:

• Pemi Loop (30 mi, 10,000 ft gain) in 9h08m
• Extended Pemi Loop (37 mi, 12,000 ft gain) in 13h27m
• White Mountains Hut Traverse (46 mi, 16,000 ft gain) in 20h16m
• Grand Canyon R2R2R (43 mi, 11,000 ft gain) in 11h57m
• BGR Legs 2 & 3 (32 mi, 13,000 ft gain) in 12h46m

I am hopeful (but very uncertain!) that I am on the edge of capability for the BGR, and have been trying to steadily increase my mileage and elevation gain since the new year in preparation. I am currently doing around 35 mi / 9,500 ft per week and will try to ramp that slowly up into June and early July (especially on the mileage side), with a couple of big trail runs planned for early June and early July to test my readiness.

Feedback is absolutely welcome. I realize that none of my times above extrapolate to obvious or automatic BGR success, and when I look at the impressive backgrounds and pedigrees of runners who even so just completed the round in under 24 hours, I am definitely open to the idea that I might be overly optimistic in my goals.

The specific date I am currently looking at is Tue Aug 20, but I could likely flex to either Mon Aug 19 or Wed Aug 21. I also plan on being up in the area Tue-Wed Aug 6-7 to do some additional recce work and/or support a leg or two of an attempt if there is a need and the timing lines up.

Thank you--I will attempt to register with the FRA. Right now I am getting a message from the forum web page saying "registration has been disabled by the administrator", but I have reached out to the website admin to see if there are any steps I could/should take to get access.

I’m sure others can give better advice, but based on my experience (completed in 2019) I think you need to focus on maximising ascent during your training rather than distance. There’s a lot of up and down and the steep gradients will fatigue you rapidly even if you’re used to doing long distances.

You will need to be much faster than when you did L2 and 3 if you want to make it round in 24 hours so try and work out why you were slow. If you know what your split times were at the summits compare them to some of the schedules online. Were you uniformly slower on all sections, or were there particular places where you lost time? If the former then were you moving efficiently, or were you stopping a lot e.g. to check navigation? Remember that even if you only stop for 1 minute every hour that still adds up to nearly half an hour over 24 hours! If you were only slow on sections then that would suggest either not taking the best route, or that you have weaknesses on certain types of terrain that you could focus on in your training.

Given you don’t live in the UK then you’re not going to be able to recce everything as much as you might like, so knowing the route might be an issue. If you find experienced supporters that will help, but a GPS watch with a preloaded track could save you from having to stop to check your navigation.

 Do check out the different options for getting on to Scafell and choose the one that’s safest/fastest for your abilities, bearing in mind that you will be tired by this point. Having someone with a rope set up on Broad Stand is ideal. It’s also worth checking out the options for descending off Blencathra. I was never able to do Halls Fell ridge quickly and was faster down Doddick Fell.

 Good luck if you do decide to go for it!

Sent you over an email, happy to support on running one of the legs

Tom

some of those times are in the right ball park for Bob Graham splits, some of them are not.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nMUlsKn_C_WVdDYlK9dIRbuc-4rDQeo-mMD...

I took the liberty of calculating the Naismiths rule for those races/events, and then dividing your time by the Naismiths time to get a Naismith Ratio.  The BGR has a Naismith ratio of 0.71, you can see that you beat that on Pemi Loop and R2R2R, but you were a way off it on some of the others.

I think that unless you can find some steep terrain to train on you will find it very hard to get round the BGR in under 24 hours based on those previous performances.  That said, I'd come out to help if I was around, but I'm away on those dates.

The best advice I can give is to go metric.  

You don't have to go clockwise, although most potential pacers will be more competent in the 'traditional' direction. Going the other way means a pleasant roadrun to get to Robinson, descents of Kirkfell and Steel Fell, ascent of Hall's Fell and best of all, it's downhill from Skiddaw to the finish. It worked for us (in 1990!) and there should be no shame attached - it was a much more popular choice in the old days, before Steel Fell became a staircase...

Have you joined the Bob Graham 24-hour club on Facebook.  It's probably the most active forum for this sort of request.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/400297433323294

When I said Kirkfell, I meant Yewbarrow of course. Sorry for the confusion.

If you're not certain you'll be going sub 24hrs, then think about whether you need pacers at all. Just completing the round in any time is a great day out even if it's not 'within the time'. If you've got valley support then it's all quite do-able on your own, especially with all the GPS knick-knacks keeping you on route.

I really want to do this, although I was thinking of taking it a step further (as in easier).

Plan was to have a family holiday for a week in the area, and I would disappear for five hours a day and do one leg per day back to back, aiming to do it all under 24 hours.

I really don't have a feel for how much training I would need to do for this.

I currently do 20km long run every week with a about 420m of elevation gain. So I would have to do four time the elevation gain of my usual run, but limiting it to a little over double the time. And do five back to back.

I might see if I can design a route near me that has similar distance and elevation gain to one leg and see what it does to me. And do it the day after my usual long run.

First of all, thank you to everyone for the guidance, advice, and offers of support! I'll reach out individually to those who have mentioned they might be interested/available. 

I agree--I historically have not especially focused on accumulating elevation gain in training. Looking back at my running history prior to the L2 and L3 run in June 2023, I was at most doing 2000-3000 feet of elevation gain per week. I've tried to address that deficiency starting in January of this year. In the winter and early spring, I have been putting in significant time on the stair master and inclined treadmill, and with the weather improving, I have been transitioning as much as possible to outdoor trails since then.  For 2024, I'm averaging 8,000+ feet of gain per week, with an eye to being consistently at or above 10,000 by June/July.

So I actually had Schedule A (from the BGR website) in hand when I went out and tried Legs 2 and 3 last year. Leg 2 went beautifully, and I was 30 min ahead of schedule by Dunmail Raise. But Leg 3 was much more challenging, for several reasons I think: (1) the navigation became much more difficult despite my GPX track, (2) I was hitting mid-day, the weather was quite hot (high of 81 degF, 27 degC), and I ran low on water, and (3) most importantly, as mentioned previously, I didn't have a sizable training base. Will addressing those deficiencies give me a chance at completing the round? I don't know, but hope springs eternal! =)

I did have a GPX route on my watch, but still was surprised by the navigation challenge on Leg 3. I was incorrectly assuming the typical trail markers, signs, etc. that we see more typically in our New England forests and mountains where I live, and spent more time than I should have figuring out the route. In hindsight, this should not have been a surprise, because there is much discussion online about the navigational aspect of the BGR.

Thank you!

I think if you can do one leg at the required pace then it’s not impossible that you’ll be able to do the whole thing, but it will take quite a bit of training so August might be a bit soon! I started thinking about it seriously after I did L3,4&5 in 16.5 hours one summer. Started training properly in about October, and was successful in July.

 Since you’re likely to be close to the time limit you need to be 100% efficient with your navigation. If you found L3 tricky even with a GPS track then realistically you’re going to be reliant on having pacers who know the route themselves as I don’t think you’ve got time to recce properly to be familiar with everything. Note that the fastest lines don’t always follow the most obvious paths, there are quite a few “short cuts”, although these usually have some track on the ground now. There’s some good detailed route descriptions on the web.

Don’t underestimate how fatiguing it is to run steeply downhill, this is something it’s worth including in your training. There’s a reason people give up when faced with the ascent of Yewbarrow straight after coming down off Scafell.

Personally I’d use your time in August to explore the route properly, maybe e.g trying to do the whole thing over two days at close to the required pace. If you can do that you’ll know whether you’re feeling inspired enough to come back over next year and have a proper crack at at!

 The BGR has a Naismith ratio of 0.71, 

Interesting, I've not seen the timings explained like that before but could tell us the miles, height gain and completion time used to get 0.71?

Probably me, being somewhat of a mathematical dim wit, but if I use 66 miles, 27k ft and 24 hours I get a ratio of 0.676

Ta!  )

I love all the discussion on the Naismith ratio. In the New Hampshire White Mountains, there is a similar rule of thumb called "book time", by which I often gauge my performance. Book time assumes 30 minutes per mile plus 30 minutes per 1000 feet of elevation gain for a typical hiker. Looks like Naismith assumes 20 minutes per mile plus 30 minutes per 1000 feet. I expect the difference between the two is just because we Americans are a bit slower. =)

There is a lot of interesting additional discussion on Naismith and other derivative rules on Wikipedia if anyone is interested in a deeper dive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naismith%27s_rule

Doghouse, to answer your question, ablackett used 64 miles, 25k feet and 24 hours to get the ratio of 0.71.

I work in a lab, so I have a bit of a split personality when it comes to units of measurement. If I am thinking about bench-scale scientific experiments or commercial manufacturing, my mind only works in liters, grams, centimeters, and degrees Celsius. But out-of-doors and on the trail and dealing with weather and personal fitness, I can't help but think in miles, feet, pounds, and degrees Fahrenheit. But I do always feel guilty about it, knowing that there is a better way.

But I do need to mischievously ask, can folks in the UK really complain about non-metric systems of measurement? Don't you still use stone as a unit of weight? =)

That sounds about right, I used 64 miles + 25000 ft, it all depends how you measure it.  There is no 'right' answer for the amount of ascent.  64 miles = 21.33 hours, 25000ft = 12.5 hours, 33.83hours.

24/33.83 = 0.71

I agree that this is a good path forward, and I'll keep it as a strong option that could be triggered for a variety of reasons: (1) my fitness and performance in a few key test runs leading up to August don't show enough improvement/readiness, (2) I am not able to find pacers, (3) I do find pacers, but as we prepare and discuss they give me similar advice, (4) my additional recce in early August persuades me that I am not ready either for fitness or navigational reasons. Your recommendation dovetails really nicely with Jim Lancs' suggestion as well. Thanks.

I think it’s fair to say we are entirely inconsistent depending on what is being measured, what it is being measured for, and potentially the age of the person measuring it.

in my experience, I nearly always see altitude in mountaineering discussed by Brits in metres, probably because so much of our mountaineering is done in the alps.

But if someone gives me a distance in kilometres I will mentally convert it to miles for familiarity. Except for swimming, athletics and the like…

Yeah, we're pretty messed up too!

That’s brilliant. I could add in a few more branches.

Are you old? Yes - Is it really hot? Yes - Fahrenheit.

are you a maths teacher? Yes - everything metric and just accept blank looks when you tell folk the mass of your baby.

In weight (of humans) it's order of preference based on the number of units

”What do you weigh?”

1st choice: 11 stone

2nd choice: Just under 70kg

3rd choice, said quietly: one hundred and fifty four pounds

686.7N