Highlander Mountain Marathon 2010

This years Highlander Mountain Marathon was revealed as Gairloch, a beautiful location in the NorthWest of Scotland, a real gem. The weather for the weekend was to be great if a little hot for our taste.
I was running with my brother-in-law Tim whom I started running mountain marathons with in 2007, our first one being the LAMM, so I knew we had a good chance of doing well especially as we had won the B course last year. The A course however has a lot of stiff competition. The Friday night was spent at the Great Sands campsite, a nice place to go with the kids, having a few beers and chilling before the weekends epic efforts.
Saturday morning came in the blink of an eye and before we knew it we had collected our map and checkpoints and told that we could hit them in any order.... first challenge of the day, pick a good route. So a good ten minutes were spent marking up maps and choosing routes between them all. Time to go, under a blue sky we set off into the wilderness that surrounds gairloch. The views were awesome and everywhere we looked was blue sky and blue lochans. Navigation was going well and we were hitting the points with no trouble, the only problem seemed to be Tim's shoes which had no grips left on the sole and he was a slippin and a slidin all over the place. The first day went well until about 2/3rds of the way round I was struck by cramp caused by the 19 degrees and lack of salts. Tim gave me some electrolyte powder and I recovered enough to bash on to the finsh in just over 6 hrs 24. A quick look at the results revealed that Tim Higginbottom nad Chris Near had trotted round in less than 5 hrs, astonishing.
Day 2 dawned after a poor nights sleep feeling slightly queasy. Must have been the heat. Navigation was a lot harder today but we coped admirably and managed to hit the points without too much fuss, after a little blunder at the very first one. At least we read the instructions unlike some of the teams in front of us and realised that the controls must be hit in the order stated. A hard day saw us back in 5.5 hrs and very tired. The leaders again had put nearly 2 hrs into our time, super human.
We finished 5th overall and were happy with that considering the level of competition. This event is brilliant and very well organised, one to do for sure.