All I can carry is all I can eat

Just back from a very different kind of dining to the usual combination of Waitrose and the Farmers Market - and my feet and legs are still reeling from it.

The annual homage to outdoor exercise in extremis that is the Original Mountain Marathon.

I've being doing this off and on ever since I was 18 and the recipe doesn't really vary: take about 2,000 like-minded people; find some desolate part of Great Britain where sheep outnumber humans by at least 10 to 1; pick the last weekend in October when the weather is always vile and combine. Put the people into teams of two; give them maps with  checkpoints many miles apart and tell them to find them all over two days carrying everything they need on their back. 

Simple but effective.

But while the format's not really changed over the last three decades my ability to handle it certainly has. 

This year the location was the Howgills - the most western part of the Yorkshire Dales. My partner in grime was John. I've known John since I was seven. And now many years later we have the same routine we had then: he does the navigating and thinking; I do the joke-cracking and moaning. 

And this year I was mostly whinging about food. In order to run around the hills for up to seven hours a day for two days, you need to take on a lot of calories. And by a lot I mean thousands. Which means that in addition to tent, sleeping mat, sleeping bag, stove, spare clothes and first-aid kit etc you need to carry quite a bit of food. This is what I carried:

• 2 X 200g bags of jelly babies
• 6 homemade flapjacks (see earlier post)
• 4 SIS energy gels
• 1 beef and potato dehydrated camping meal (bizarrely called Travel Lunch
• 1 'creamy cheese' mugshot
• 2 instant hot chocolates
• 2 instant white coffees
• 300g of trail-mix
• Several packets of powdered energy drink (or gack as we call it)
• 1 experimental porridge pack: 5tbs porridge oats; 2tbs readybrek; 2 tbs powdered milk; 1tbs of hot chocolate powder and 1tbs of sugar

The drill is simple: eat relentlessly. Every hour stuff some sickly sweet something down your gob and swill it down with what is basically kids squash with some kind of science apology on the outside of the packet. And when you get to your overnight campsite pitch your teeny tiny tent, get the stove going and eat some more; boiling up water that is the colour of weak tea

using a stove that is simply a blowtorch with legs and a pot stand. After over 24 kms of stumbling around in the mud, luckily the cooking instructions are simple: add boiling water to it, stir, let stand for 5 minutes, then eat with something called a spork; the lonely orphan of the cutlery drawer.

For someone who prides himself on being a bit of a foodie, the weekend is really nothing short of a culinary disaster. The food of the go is all sugar and the meals at camp all bear a family resemblance to lumpy wall paper paste. 

So you might ask, why?

It's a fair question and one I ask myself quite regularly over the 48 hours.

And I suppose the answer is threefold.

Firstly the scenery is never less than amazing (even if seen fleetingly through mist and rain squalls). This year was no exception.

 Saturday dawned, bright, clear and cold. We could see for miles and because of the sub zero night before the ground was frozen and not too muddy. You could see clear to Carlisle. Sunday was heavy rain and low cloud, but even then the landscape has a weird bleak grandeur.

Secondly, I take some perverse pleasure in jolting myself out of my comfy London existence.
Carrying in excess of 10 kilos up hill and down dale, wading streams, knee deep in mud and over scree and slippery rock can be quite a jolt. Which is no bad thing to my mind.


And finally I do it because of friendship. Over the 36 hours, John and I become kids again: bigger questions like mortgages, pensions and caring for your kids (or parents for that matter) recede. The big problems are things like finding a ruined sheepfold (we didn't) and farting in the tent (we did - a lot). So we focus on those and work as a team to get round the course. And friendships that can stand over 45 kms of running yourself ragged, torrential rain, and sub-zero temperatures are worth holding on to.

it's not always about the food.

From the sublime to the ridiculous

So here we are in october. The rain has been heavy and the wind gale force. What better time to spend a couple of days tearing around the Howgills? Well, aside from a half marathon that's what I'm preparing for. The Original Mountain Marathon 2012 to give it its full name. 36 hours of relentless navigating, running (or walking to be fair) in some of Britain's most beautiful scenery.

Aside from the mental stress of planning a route (we use a piece of string) the other big problem is energy levels. 13 hours of running, then walking, then stumbling over 2 days is pretty energy intensive. And as the rules mean we have to be entirely self-sufficient for the whole 2 days, energy to weight ratio is crucial. There are of course a lot of gels and bars you can buy, but they have two drawbacks: cost and taste. Spending over a quid on something that has the consistency of gritty putty and the flavour of effluent from a Hershey factory seems all wrong.

Hence my baking homemade energy bars on Saturday. I say energy bars, but let's be honest, these are nothing more than flapjacks with a chip on their corners. I borrowed the recipe from a cycling blog and used what I had in the cupboard.

Ingredients
2 handfuls of raisins 

1 handful of dried apricots

1 handful of dates

250g unsalted butter – a whole UK-size pack 

2 pints of oats, roughly measured in a glass
300g of honey or similar syrup (I added some molasses I had spare)
3 heaped tablespoons of brown sugar
2 heaped tablespoons of sunflower seeds
4 crushed digestive biscuits

The recipe is as simple as the ingredients, really.

1. Gently melt the butter in a microwave. This just makes it easier to get all the ingredients stirred together and sticking in one lump.

2. Put all the dry ingredients into a food processor and pulse until they are chopped up a bit. You don't want fine powder, but breaking everything down a bit makes the bars less likely to crumble or break, which is important if you're eating them on the go. 

3. Combine the melted butter, honey/treacle and dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and stir well

4. Take a baking tray, line it with greaseproof paper, and pour in the mix. Cook for 20ish minutes or so at 200 degrees Celsius - you're looking for a deep golden colour.

 5. Remove from oven (don’t worry if it is still a bit soft) and leave to cool on the side. Once it’s at room temperature, throw it in the fridge for a couple of hours. After that you can chop it into bars.

At the same as time as making these dense lumps of congealed calories I was also using some left over egg whites (the joys of an ice-cream maker). I only know of two ways to use these up, and with no ground almonds to hand, it was another meringuatang moment.

But this time I opted for safety - swapping rosewater for chocolate as flavouring.

Adding a combination of cocoa powder and finely grated plain chocolate to a standard meringue mix creates something that is very chocolaty but not too sweet. 

I don't think the meringues will ever make it into my rucsac for a mountain marathon, but the girls liked them.

But as to whether the energy bars work, well I'll let you know in a few weeks time.