Fieldnotes #08
Resetting the Wainwright count, and a goal that's nobody else's business.
A day in the Lakes sorts me out: climbing something, swimming in something, or just being somewhere the humdrum can’t reach. My partner and I have been going since we first got together. The Lakes, (dreaming about) campervans, walking - they’re part of what brought us together. We adore it up there in all its forms. Walking, wild swimming, paddleboarding, the occasional weekend doing something as wonderfully daft as llama trekking.
And then there are the Wainwrights. 214 fells, no deadline, and nobody else’s idea of progress.
I’d completed a decent number before we met. When we got together, we reset the count and started again from zero. The fells mattered less than who I was doing them with.
What I keep coming back to is how deliberate it is. You choose the hard thing. You put yourself in difficult terrain, in weather that may not cooperate, with legs that sometimes don’t either. You have to walk to the reward, slowly. And then you come home.
No sprint planning. No velocity metrics. No one measuring whether you summited efficiently. Nobody has mandated that you do it in person, three days a week, minimum.
Just the mountain, the person next to you, and a few hours where everything else shrinks to the right size.
I’m currently reading Vagabond: A Hiker’s Homage to Rural Spain by Mark Eveleigh - someone walking a different kind of landscape for different reasons, but chasing something recognisable. There’s a longer piece forming in my head about why some people need to climb something to switch off properly.
The fells will wait.