🥴Pre-Welsh 15, Part 1: I've Never Walked 50km on the Flat – So Naturally, I Chose Mountains Instead
- bootsandbanter
- Jun 27
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 2
A logical escalation by someone who should not be left unsupervised near a contour map.
I’ve done long hikes. I’ve done steep hikes. I’ve even done hikes where my knees filed formal complaints.
But I’ve never walked 50km on flat terrain.
So obviously… I decided to have a go at hiking 50km with 4,000m of ascent, in under 24 hours, across 15 Welsh summits, starting at 2:50 AM, with strangers, in the dark, in a country famous for sideways rain.
Because that makes sense.
🏔️ Flashback: Y3P, 2022
The most I’ve done in a day is the Yorkshire 3 Peaks — 41 km with around 1,700m of ascent. It took about 11 hours, and I bounced through the finish like a caffeinated sheepdog, fully ready for the pub.
Unfortunately, no one else wanted to go. They just wanted to go home. Rude.
My host told me she’d never met anyone so energetic after the Y3P — and she’s hosted people doing it for years. I think secretly I was hoping she’d offer to go for one pint (😂). Apparently I was a walking anomaly powered by stubbornness and flapjacks.
Since then, I’ve done a lot more hiking. Longer days. Tougher routes. Solo miles. Storms. Heat. Emotional spirals. All the classics.
🥾 April’s Reckoning: A Taste of Chaos, 2025
The biggest day I’ve had this year? 30 km over 11.5 hours with 1,981 metres of ascent — 10 Wainwrights in one go, back in April. Let’s call it what it was: April’s Reckoning.
It was big. It was bold. It was brutal. By the end I felt like I’d earned honorary fell pony status.
But still… that wasn’t 50 km.
Not even on the flat. Especially not with this much elevation.
💡 The Logic (??)
It’s not that I wanted to ‘test myself’ (although there’s a bit of that) .
It’s that I wanted to put myself into a situation so outrageous that I wouldn’t have time to spiral until it was too late.
I don’t ease into things. I just… go big. With snacks. And hope my knees get the memo.
😅 So Here We Are.
I haven’t walked 50km on level ground. But I’m about to attempt walking 50km on everything except level ground.
And I’m not scared. I’m just… pre-traumatised.
Because deep down, I know:
This is going to hurt
I chose it
I will write about it anyway
And I’ll be fuelling it all with tuna pasta pots (post-car à la carte, obviously) and cheese sticks
Flat doesn’t scare me. Flat doesn’t test me. Mountains? They ask better questions.
And I’m ready to find out my answers. Probably somewhere between Peak 10 (the optimist in me) and my third pasta pot (the realist).
💸 The Financial Plot Twist
And the cherry on top? I paid for this.
Yes, actual money. Voluntarily. As if I said, “Please, take my cash and in return give me 24 hours of emotional chaos, unpredictable weather, and enough elevation to make my quads file for divorce.”
I didn’t just sign up for suffering — I invested in it.😵💫
Also the price didn’t just buy me a guided hike. It bought me weeks of spiralling, obsessive gear research, joint paranoia, and midnight toe-taping tutorials.😂
Basically, I paid for an endurance event — and got a personality crisis included. 😅
I'm sharing in the lead-up to the big one. I'm spiralling with humour and headtorches, so stick around.
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