Fieldnotes #11
On mountains, resets, and the relief of a goal that belongs to nobody else.
Like a breath of fresh air.
That’s the honest answer to how it feels to spend a day in the Lakes — climbing something, swimming in something, or just existing somewhere the humdrum can’t reach. My partner and I have been going since we first got together. The Lakes, 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. No one else’s definition of progress.
I’d completed a decent number before we met. When we got together, we reset the count and started again from zero. That decision says more than it might appear to. It wasn’t about the fells. It was about who I was doing them with.
There’s something in the deliberateness of it that I keep coming back to. You choose the hard thing. You put yourself in difficult terrain, in weather that may not cooperate, with legs that sometimes don’t either. The reward isn’t handed to you — you arrive at it, slowly, on foot. 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 properly switch off, and what that says about how we’re wired.
For now though: get outside. Reset the count if you need to. The fells will wait.