Given that Mark has recovered from an exhausting nail-biting Wembley Final and Lee is fighting fit after his 34km stroll on Sunday, it seems right to plan our next training walk for this Saturday.
Martin and Julian are unavailable this Saturday and Simon who has masochistically joined us as an honorary Red Harrow - 'has something on' (or at least thats what he said after he saw the proposed route....)
In trying to gradually increase our walk length by about 10% each time, we find ourselves looking for a 20km walk. To try and keep with the ups and downs of Trailwalker we need to accommodate some elevational changes of about 200m and would expect about 500m in total over this distance.
This means we're looking for another 'double-peak', so in search of some variation, we've decided to venture a little further afield into the nearby Peak District.
After a bit of discussion and plotting we've come up with this route, a 20km hike giving us an estimated total 600m of elevation change which will be our toughest test to date.
The route takes us from a car park (coincidentally near a pub) in the village of Rushton Spencer towards and up Golden Hill, a long ascent of about 220m before dropping down a little before ascending Croker Hill standing at 402m above sea level and proudly sporting a transmission mast. From the top of Croker Hill, we descend to Bosley reservoir, a steep descent of 230m and then skirt the edge of the reservoir before making our way to The Cloud which has featured in several of our training walks so far and another 230m ascent this time using a permissive footpath up the steep face. From here we'll descend back towards Rushton Spencer and sample some of the landlord's finest after (hopefully) 5 hours.
We'll be trialling the MapMyHike app for the iPhone on this walk. The idea is that at the start of the walk, it should Tweet a link using our @TheRedHarrows Twitter address to a website where we can be tracked live by anyone who follows us. This obviously depends on mobile signal, battery and GPS accuracy as to how well this will work, but we're hoping it will mean our supporters can track our progress live when we're doing Trailwalker.
We'll report back with our findings later in the weekend.
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