Training Log Archive: Ari-o

Skating lesson! It read -4 in the hollow leading up to Notchview but INVERSION it was … +1 at Notchview. And there was no one there. So we had the trails to ourselves. Mel was plenty warm learning to skate, I had a puffy on and my "arctic split mitts" thank you Toko, I now have gloves good for teaching speed at 0˚. With some pickups. She started to get things by an hour out; we realized we should probably let her ski for an hour, warm up, and then do some suggestion things. Snow nearby would help a lot. Incoming!

Then I skied out and around one of the far fields, then down and up the Bumpus Trail which reminded me of skiing down a chute on a narrow trail and then up a narrow trail, and then around and in. Warmer now, more people.

But I couldn't let such good classic conditions go to waste. So off to classic. I started out not knowing if I needed more kick, got to the first little stride-y section, slipped, poled the back of my ski, and did a full, spread-eagle faceplant. Luckily the snow was powdery. No one even there to see it.

But with some kick, the skiing was great. I stayed mostly on the backcountry trails and the narrow groomed trails. They're fun! Most could probably have a groomer pulled and be ski-o trails, but not that much of a network. Not that that should keep us from it.

At one point on a narrow groomer, I was going up a hill, and passing two shufflers who were in the track. Coming down the hill was a skier at a high rate of speed. I saw her, and stepped off to the left, into the ungroomed. She thanked me, and the shufflers thought they were being thanked and gave a very sincere "you're welcome."

Over Judges, which was good fun, then back around on some narrow trails, back over Judges (also fun) and back. Lots more people out to slalom, though. Parking lot was full.

But I wasn't done.

Home via Dublin only adds about 20 miles and an hour, and the fastest (although not the most direct) route goes by the best falafel this side of Jerusalem.

Since it was in Vermont, I had to go incognito. I put on a false disguise, and fake green plates on my Prius (the car checks out, at least, although I should have disguised it as a Subaru). Lots of other red and white plates on the road. I evaded border patrol to make the pickup, and after the handout shot out of Brattleboro at 100 mph, with several Super Troopers in tow. But at the new bridge on Route 9, I screeched around the corner and onto the bridge just as they got out of their cars. They tried to shoot out my tires, but I evaded the shots and escaped into New Hampshire unscathed. Live free or die!

(Really, though, I wore two masks and had a recent negative test. You're welcome, Vermonters.)

Dublin was nice, and I got there just as everyone was leaving. It's light until after 5 now!

C • Falafel 2

So best laid plans …

The plan was to go out to Notchview, ski, stay in NoHo, then go skin Berkshire East Sunday morning, Mel then back to Boston for science, and I'd go to Dublin on the way home. So two cars were taken.

Out the Pike I get a call that she'd forgotten her AT boots. It was actually not me who did this!

So, it was Notchview. We went striding, her on her old fishscales which are very slow, me on perfect blue wax, so there was lots of out-and-backing ("golden retrievering") and some extra loops. Plus, the fishscales don't do so hot on cold powder, so she was struggling with kick.

"Aha, I said, I have wax!" This was the right solution, except I put it on too much of her kick zone, so she had too much kick (I don't think those skis have any camber, and we should buy her skin skis). So she could run up the hills, but not so much down them.

This was a moderate failure.

I went for a loop on my own to work up a sweat.

Wooo Dublin! Perfect. Full moon, so I barely needed a headlamp. Not warm, though. Skied down to the store (PB groomed but dirty with a couple icy spots) and the Perimeter wasn't groomed, so I just went back up. One 12 minute mile, but looking at that I climbed 100m and crossed a road, so that's okay. Came back through the skied in track through the woods to the north which would be a nice place to groom a maze although someone else owns it.

Jogarooing around while dinner was a-makin'

Run from LivableStreets office to Harvard for a test. Basically didn't break stride through the test center, three minutes to get through it.

AP is having trouble with activity types, thinking this was a trail run. Then some very confused GPS, but mostly on the way out, before I ran through the Harvard station.

Posted as a trail run. Way too much elevation. Bunch of weird blips. Maybe from the snow? Drove out in the snow and it dumped the whole time. No wind, big flakes in the floodlights, beautiful.

Moar Worlds! Very different to do an interval start on slow snow in falling natural snow. My skis were running pretty well, they're too cold but the flex is right for this kind of snow. I started maybe 30s behind Heiner (I think) and caught him along the way, got passed by John but I'm not sure which lap he was on. Had a lot of trouble getting enough air through the buff and may have dropped it when not near people just to not choke on it as it got wet. Ick. But other than that, yay, snow! Up to a 0.8 mi = 1.3 km loop, hopefully their next trick once it is cold again on Friday is to go blow in Mount Weston because it would be the first time we'd be up and down Mount Weston since 2019.

Probably not quite enough snow to groom the rest of the course, or Great Brook. But a start. And should be great for Green's/Dublin/Notchview/Thunderbolt.

C • Wet buff 3

Cool down ski. I was only going to do a lap or two but the skiing was beautiful and fun and nice and the driving probably terrible, so I did four. Nice and easy. Natural snow is a good thing.

Not sure why this loaded as a trail run, but anyway … just out for a jogaroo, in shorts, but it was kind of chilly for that. GPS went way off along the way, maybe that's the thing.

So I was running down the pier by the sidewalk catching up on and slowly passing another runner, probably about 1 min/mi pace faster. I give him clear berth to the side but as I pass, he accelerates, matching my pace. Which is annoying, obviously. So I dial up the pace, just a little, and he matches that, then drops off, and says "you're not supposed to pass grandpa."

At this point I was pretty mad, and just went into a dead sprint for about 100m to get away from him.

A few comments:

1. I guess he was trying to be funny. It's one thing to get passed by someone and say what he did. It's another to do the "try to keep up" annoying thing and then say it.

2. When people are basically dressed in a burqa, how do I know how old they are?

3. Oh, also, PANDEMIC. So maybe don't run right next to me, guy?

Usually, the people who try to keep up with someone passing them are young, not-that-in-shape men getting passed by women. Melissa and I used to do this to guys along the Esplanade (she'd run past someone, they'd try to keep up, she'd accelerate and drop him, it was hilarious). But this seemed completely unnecessary.

I hope when I am an M6 or whatever I'm not that much of a dink.

Striding out with Jesse at Notchview. Windy, but not bad in the woods. Skied most of the trails, excellent conditions, including the Shaw road out to the snowmobile trail. It would be nice if they would groom that a bit further and make connect it back south, to make a bit more of a skate loop. Berkshire out to Bates loop, or something? Nice to stride on cold powder with Rode Blue because it's always Rode Blue weather.

Then we went out for some skating which became 10k of skating. Great coverage, used good skis, got a bit bonky near the end.

Couple of days off being busy, but that set me up for a good weekend of skiing. First stop: Greens! It was wonderful. Out the connector, around Trout Pond, stopped to talk to Sarah H (Sarah #1) and then out around Mudgetts whee. I could have turned back but, nope, loop around Cummins, one bare spot, and then around the rest of Trout Pond. Other than a bit of the Carriage loop area and some of the Dorchester trails, I skied everything. Was nice and bonky at the end and my R toe hurt on the way home from being pinched and cold but while skiing I was warm enough. Saw Sarah B (Sarah #2) as well.

Two weeks later, a jogaroo around the state house, a nice, quiet night (a little cold/windy).

Oooh legs tired. Slightly shorter track this week. Mostly fast, some manmade. Need some cold air!

Felt a lot less tired for the race part of the program.

Started with the mask bunched up on my nose so I could pull it down as the race went on. Gasping at the end.

A bit of cool down.

Melanie can't leave Massachusetts, but Notchview was reporting good snow and didn't disappoint. Nothing until we started going up Route 9, but a foot on the ground there and light flurries. Windy on the fields, but the woods were nice. Not sure I've ever skied here outside of coaching the state meet, in fact!

Trails are interesting. The skating trails are relatively benign, on old roads, but the classic trails are quite fun through the woods. At 3000 acres, the trails are quite sparsely laid out, so it seems like there are more trails than there are. I skied most, DPing some classic trails, and generally enjoying myself, although we agreed the skating was hard, less because it was soft and more the variable conditions.

MLK up to Dublin, which was fine, but not as excellent as advertised. The manmade loop was soft and sugary, which was sort of expected. Everything else was covered, but thin. Icy and fast, too, although a little slower as it snowed.

I skied down to the store, then back up and around the perimeter loop. Which would have been real fun with more snow, and was real adventure skiing: glad I was confident in my snowplow. Then did another race course loop and then went and got a cookie and sandwich.

Jogaroo

Got out for a run in the evening, but felt good. 40 again, dry (not for long …) and went out along the river. After a couple of miles I figured I'd go for a faster split for mile 3, which took me from the Longfellow to about the 130 Smoot mark. 6:37. Slowed down for mile 4, then fast again for mile 5. I thought I was into the wind this time, but 6:40. Felt quite good.

Fast bits

Interesting archaeological information about the Blue Hills. I'll have to look for these!

Ran to the start of the 2019 traverse. Missed a turn, so I wound up doing some orienteering, and then the path along 128 is flooded so I clung to a fence while I got across the sort-of-frozen swampy area on logs people have shoved there.

God I hate that 128 tore through the middle of the Blue Hills and Fells.

Didn't have time to run the whole 2019 Traverse which, with running to and from the end points, would have been a 3+ hour ordeal, but ran the first half, which was something. I figured it would be fun to run this one again because a) the map is reasonably up-to-date and b) most of what I remember from it was that it was absolutely pouring down rain. At some point I'll take a morning and run the second half, and then put the splits in as a rerun.

With no one to follow, I ran to 1 pretty well, and then found 2 as well using terrain and features. 3 was an obvious hill and 4 was basically "here's a rock, there's a cliff, so, probably?" 5 looks like a dot hill on the map but is actually a rock pile, glad I checked the clue sheet ("It's not a clue sheet! It's a control description!") I made a slight parallel error to 6 but corrected pretty quickly, and 7 was a bit of an adventure. Great running along a stream, which I then left to climb it's bank. Only problem: unmapped greenbriar thicket at the top, right on the line. I bashed through that, sort of, and got to 7. For 8, I left the trail too soon and was high on the bench and up in the oak slash, but corrected down to it, and then found a nice runnable-ish path down the hill to the trail, 9 was easy, and then 10, which was impossible to find in 2019 (vegetation mapping is off, and the dot hill is unclear) so I went to where it probably is (no control), said beep, and ran to 11 at a trail junction. Maybe should have attacked from the south. It's the kind of thing where if you are going to put a control there, at least make the map correct (the depression you should be able to use from the north to attack is mapped as white and has visibility of maybe 15 feet).

Times (2019, 2021)

2:48—3:08
6:27—7:35
12:11—10:14
16:34—13:08
24:33—19:37
31:54—26:23
40:42—35:01
49:42—42:50
61:03—55:11
69:51—64:07
72:11—65:58

So, I lost about 5 minutes over the first five or six controls, where I was doing some following in '19, and was then pretty close, making fewer mistakes and choosing better routes. Greenbriar to 7 probably cost me some time, and I'd chalk a bit up to "being in the circle where I'd usually see a control and having to check the map to make sure."

Anyway, it's not skiing, but it's good O weather. Maybe Friday? Then pray for snow.

Interesting, sometimes AP finds vert at Weston, sometimes it doesn't. It found it in the Worlds and post track, but no this one.

Weston is in pretty good shape, considering it hasn't been below 24˚ since Christmas (since Dec 19!). Quite the stretch, actually: the 15 days of the month in which it will stay between 24 and 42 will be the fourth-longest such stretch ever in Boston, and the only one in January (usually there is 40˚ of temperature differential during that time, yes I found these data).

Anyway, the loop is now exactly 1 km, so I took a bunch of spins around, and went to pee by the river behind Mount Weston. Nice Weston grooming, icy sections, boilerplate sections, newer manmade sections, groomer, ruts, etc. Just what I expect! The pinny system works very well; it's easy to glance behind you for racers. A lot more room helps, too.

And Worlds! Worlds are very different as an interval start. The course is much better this week with the offset start lane and wider track. But Worlds were also, in the past, go out hard to break the pack, then some pack skiing where you could sort of relax, but then an attack at some point, and maybe you held on and maybe got dropped.

Now it's a time trial, go hard, then go harder. Which I did, laying down the hammer on the last lap, getting that sort of blurry vision thing, and definitely tasting some lactic acid after the finish. Almost caught the guy in front of me. No results yet, but I ran the 5k course in 15 minutes, and it was always a risk to take the rutted-but-icy track and risk falling or the slower newer snow track. I didn't fall, but I almost did!

Cooled down with the pinny, mine for the year along with my chip, in my pants since it was cold and that part was cooling down faster. Getting ready to blow a little more snow.

Getting back into the swing of things

Weekly plan:

Tuesday: INTERVAL WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS
Wednesday: Morning 2019 Traverse rerun
Thursday: Dublin or Gunstock (TBD)
Friday: ??
Weekend: Skiing somewhere, weather-dependent.

Not moving and packing means a lot more time to do fun things.

Off to deliver my bicycle to Melrose. I realized this afternoon that I could have just stored all my stuff at the LivableStreets office and given them a nice donation, but, alas, to the basement they went. Amazing to ride a real bike, even without pedal clips, after months on bluebikes. 25 minutes to my sister's house, really not bad, although it requires some pretty high-stress biking.

And then I ran back for a meeting. Nice, easy run, cool but not cold, gloves were off after a while. Gray day, but I got some good ideas for work, so worthwhile.

Orienteering-ish!

Melanie wanted to try orienteering (verdict: likes the trail parts more than the woods parts, seems pretty good at navigating, should go find somewhere with nice open not-rocky woods and fewer trails to run). After a couple of ideas, I said we should run the 2015 traverse course 6->1, but we were cold, so we ran to the triangle and then ran back. We found the controls; mostly I let her plan the route and I helped on the circle and with the compass. It was the long-leg-split-apart-the-field portion of the race, so lots of trails, and she avoided some good route choices because "I don't want to run through that" which I can understand.

Also her knee feels good. Beautiful day in the woods! At some point this week I am going to head down there at sunrise and rerun 2019. Perfect O weather. Too bad not ski weather.

Turns out moving is hard and takes time, but I successfully spent all of yesterday carrying things up and down (mostly down) stairs. My phone said I climbed 43 flights of stairs! It took all day and I was le tired. So not great for training, but at least it's the year of not really training for anything. Didn't go to skitter around at Jxn, or Wville, or Dublin.

Also, if anyone wants a Franconia Notch poster I'm running a special: $5 shipping and it's yours. Venmo me the money and I'll get it out. Or if you're local: next to the recycling bins at 8 Lawrence St until Thursday.

Weird, track is offset by quite a bit today (20m or so).

Destress run. Ran around State House.

Weston. There's not much there, but what is there is not too bad. Didn't get charged (how many DCR staff does it take to change a lightbulb? IDK, but it takes two to not charge people money) and took some easy laps on the pink skis.

They were slow. But then I changed to the hard track Salomons. They were fast!

Attackpoint not finding any climb tonight?

World Championships are less fun as an interval start, but still fun to go out fast and hard. Conditions were fine, I had forgotten my triacs so I had soft poles and big baskets which were weird on the corners, but the skis were pretty speedy. This works pretty well. Course tonight was 5 laps, and really a sprint (about 2km) and I still almost lost count; had to check my distance on the last one to make sure. Some more snow would be nice.

Cool down, a bit faster.

Off to Blue Hills, as the storm fizzled. I almost went up to Jackson (35k groomed, apparently) but that seemed like way too much driving. So I went on a nice trail run instead. Out in the woods, on trails I can run 9 minute miles easily on. The Blue Hills are nice. BHE was completely uncrowded, saw fewer than a dozen people. Ran with a map, too, and if it doesn't snow I guess I'll just have to buzz down there and run old Traverse courses.

I kind of drew a Strava art fish.

C • fish 3

Year (decade?) in review!

It comes that time where I can look back at a non-arbitrary period of time (one year) on an arbitrary date (in the middle of ski season) and, uh, see what happened.

It is also, as pointed out recently, a time when I have reached 10 years of tracking all of my training miles (if not hours) as well as non-training miles, and see what happened there, too. And to post some images somewhere so that I can source them in a (long) Attackpoint thread.

So, here it is.

2020 began like most other years. There was snow and skiing, then it was 70, then there was more snow, some races, some short runs between calls and meetings; a normal year. I was keeping my running miles decently up, getting ready for a race in April, and the Birkie happened and it was beyond glorious (all of the post-race podcasts are up now if you want to be transported to a time when people were coughing in crowded bars and we should have known better). I even bought the fancy new Nike shoes for Boston. They are still in the box.

Then March happened. March 10 was D-Day, I ran 16 miles on a Tuesday morning, New Bedford was canceled that afternoon, and a week later I was flying, sight-unseen, to California, for three months. Where I ran a lot, attempted to surf, and didn't get covid. Then back to New England, Maine mostly, for the summer, running and mountains and some rollerskiing, still didn't get covid, and then back to/towards Boston for some skiing this winter. Not a lot of intensity, but a lot of hours. It turned out that my training wound up being pretty good 100 mile training, so I did that, pretty successfully.

Some statistics:

Races: Jan: 7. Feb: 6. Mar: 2. Rest of year: 1.
Hours by month (* highest of any month):

39, 32*, 37, 40*, 35*, 48, 50*, 49, 47, 60*, 46*, 50*

I guess now it's chart time, isn't it!

Here are hours:


Previous years have mostly been parallel, despite different life experiences (work, grad school, etc). 2016 lagged for a while because I lost two weeks of training, but otherwise they were well-clustered and seemed to converge at the end. 2020 followed suit at first, but then accelerated in mid-March, and especially starting in June. Pretty easy to find the 100 miler, and other big days (two Pemis, a Presi, and 36 for 36). And also the "all the snow melted and I'm sitting at 532 hours" in the last week of December. A normal trip to MSA would have had me close to 550!

Hours per day (28 day average)



There's some rhythm to my hours per day training, with relatively high numbers during ski season, lower during mud season/marathon tapering, averaging around an hour per day except some summers where I take training trips. Notable low in 2016 when I had half a month of zero, and 2019 spring, when grad school hit. Relatively low numbers training for road races, since the miles don't require as many hours and, uh, I don't do enough cross training (rollerskiing in the fall). 2020 differs in that I was at 2h/day for the second half of the year.

I can do the same thing with total meters ascended



In 2018, I made a concerted push for 100km, and made it during the final days at MSA. I got ahead of the line in 2020, but like most years fell off during the spring, which is a combination of marathon training and wet trails. I've generally been quite clustered for the first half of the year, in fact, although big trail running trips stand out: 2019 in the Alps, 2016 and 2017 in Colorado, and it's pretty easy to find big days in the Whites. 2020's slope never got steep over a long period of time, but I just found more time in the mountains.



This is even more apparent over a four-week period (I've added in the logged part of 2013 here). 2019 in Cham stands out, as many mountains were run up. Then is 2013 at Lakes. In fact, most of 2020 wasn't the highest period on record, but from June to November I stayed at 400m per day (or so), more than the 273 I needed to average. I had an extra day, too, although I crossed 100km with a month to spare.

Some notable low periods: Marathon tapers, Summer in Chicago (2016 and 2017 especially). It's flat there.



In 2018, I tracked how many m I'd need, per day, to reach 100km. After a flat summer, I had to average well more than the mean, but made it. In 2019, I was near the mean, but marathon training slowed it down. No such problem in 2020! I was in the vicinity of 2019 until September, but mountains in the fall made quick work of that.

So that's the training log overall. But what about specific activities? What about non-training travel? I'll move over to my 10-year Google Doc for that one! A little background: after a kind-of-crazy trip to ski the Double Birkie while TSAstatus (RIP) was going viral, I decided I should keep track of my miles, by day and by mode. That was 10 years ago, and I've been entering mileage, rounded to the nearest half mile, since. The 2011 data is a bit janky as my methodology has changed (mostly as to what counts as transport versus exercise/pleasure; most anything in the log is in the latter category) but it's mostly been the same since. And yes, SGB does something similar.

So let's get started with something easy: running miles! Well, foot training, so running, O, hiking, trail running, etc.



Before this year, I'd never (*, which I'll address momentarily) run more than 1400 miles in a year. This year, I had covered 1400 miles by September 1. I hewed close to previous years until April 1, but then instead of tapering for a marathon, I just kept going. By June, 2000 seemed reasonable, and by September I was tracking how many miles per day I'd need to hit 2000. Which I eventually attained. One note: by my online tracker, rounding to the nearest 0.5, I got 2029.5, and by Attackpoint, I got 2039.5. Close enough.



This is even easier to see on the 30 day moving average. During March, I paralleled other Boston training years quite well, but instead of going into a taper, I just kept going. I peaked at almost 9 miles per day in April, kept above any previous year until August, and then had another, even higher peak in the fall. Gee I wonder why.

About that *: This is not the greatest number of miles run in any year for me! I have data from 2006, when I hiked the Appalachian Trail. So I can overlay that, too. Even with just trail miles, I was at 2200, and averaged 18 miles per day most of that.



We don't have to stop with running. How about skiing? It's worth adding skiing and rollerskiing together, right? And not breaking the season in January, but rather the ceremonial beginning of the season, May 1. This year, I got ahead of the game rollerskiing in the summer, but slacked off in the fall. I don't expect a big winter mile season, what with poor snow so far, no MSA, and Weston restrictions. But we'll see.



What about days off? I keep track of those too. Well, I keep track of days with zero miles, so I can keep track of rest days #restdaybrags:



Only once before 2020, in 2013, did I go a month without a rest day. In 2020 I had a two-month run streak, and another month-long training streak in July. Somehow, I came away uninjured. Biggest #restdaybrags? Post 2016 marathon, 2015 December when I sprained my ankle, and 2019 when I was writing a thesis.

Now, how about non-training transportation? I have that, too! Here's walking:





You can see the refined methodology over time. In 2011, I defined hiking in and out of the huts (Aug-Oct) as transportation; in 2013, it was defined as exercise (loggable) so instead of particularly high it was quite low. I'm not about to go back and recategorize things; it would be a lot of guesswork. Not only did I not have a log, I didn't even have a Strava! I was entering distances based on the White Mountain Guide.

It's interesting how seemingly unlike years cluster. 2014, 2015, 2018 and 2020 were all different life situations, with similar amounts of walking for transport. 2019 was quite high, and 2020 was shaping up to parallel 2019 until covid. Getting a bike in San Diego and living in Maine did not make for a lot of walking for transport.

Now, biking (note: I don't do enough bike training for fun charts).





Like walking, the 2020 lifestyle did not lend itself to a lot of biking. Why were 2015 and 2016 high? My commute got longer, and I made it most days by bike. (Still not very long!) The grad school years were shorter. We'll see how 2021 shapes up. Still, I would guess there were years in the Twin Cities when I biked a good deal more than this with a longer bike commute and at least one month I cracked 300 miles for work trips alone.

Motorized transport? Yes, we have that too. Let's start with all transit use, and then breaking it down by bus and train:







Here there's a bit of a split. Some years most of the travel comes from a few trips. Other years, it comes from commuting, especially summers in Chicago when I had a longer, mostly transit commute.

How about driving and riding in cars? Got that, too, and split by driving alone (SOV) or with someone else (HOV). I think SGB keeps track of how many people were in the vehicle! Pretty much anything which was a 15-passenger van or less was a car, and anything bigger would be in transit. School buses for races are still transit, by this count.







Driving and HOV include several long road trips, in 2016, 2017 and 2019; it's easy to pick those out. I haven't done a 1000-mile solo road trip though, so SOV has more seasonal rhythm to it and has a four-week chart, note how driving is high in winter (ski season), low during mud season, high during summer and fall, low during stick season, and high again when ski season rolls around.



Other notes: 2013 I had a job which required a lot of driving. It's also easy to pick out flat periods: time in the huts in 2013, summers in Chicago (2016 to 2018), 2019 in Europe, and 2020 in covid. 2020 was way behind until I came back to the East Coast.

What have we left out? Air travel!



My highest year driving was 2013, the only year over 20,000 miles. But my highest travel year? Good ol' 2019, at nearly 60,000! To the skies we go! This includes all travel but air trips are pretty easy to pick out. Two patterns stand out. Late February has the Birkie trips. Non-status years stand out: 2013 to 2016. And I am master of the last-minute mileage run! Whether it was SFO and PHX on DL in 2011, ANC on DL in 2012, or the last three years of ski-trip-mileage-runs (BZN, DEN, RNO on UA), I've taken to the skies in early December to find some snow, and some miles. But not so much in 2020. The higher y-axis here flattens out time in SAN quite a bit, and without any need (but certainly with desire) to get on an aircraft, 2020 winds up as the lowest year in quite some time.

Hopefully I'll be able to take to the skies, safely, in 2021.

Pushing the nephew in the stroller. This worked very well!

Decided not to drive 3h to ski on manmade, so went to the Fells for an hour.