10 Tips for Mountain Marathon Success

Mountain Marathon season and the classic LAMM are now almost up on us. With this in mind we have a few top tips and product suggestions to help get you through the race.

If you have any other top tips, stories or pictures we would love to hear from you. If you are at the LAMM this June then look out for Matt, Terra Nova’s Head of Sales, who will be suffering round the A class and will be decked out with our latest products and also testing out some new ones. He is aiming for a pack weight of just 3kg so you can see how light you can go!

Matt’s Top Ten Tips for Mountain Marathons

1. Saving weight on your big items such as your tent, pack and sleeping bag can help you travel further and faster. For low weight and great value check out the Zephyros tent range or for the more extreme customers you can invest in a Laser Ultra or Laser Photon tent.
2. Camp late and tired and then fighting to get your tent pitched or finding you have forgotten your pegs. Terra Nova Equipment offer a repair service for our Terra Nova and Wild Country brand tents in the event of any damage, plus we have a selection of lightweight replacement pegs, guy-lines and so on if required.
3. Pitch your tent well in advance of the event to ensure that you’re fully confident how to do it and that it’s in a good state of repair with no missing or broken parts. There’s nothing worse than getting to Mid
4. Practice running with your loaded pack before the event to ensure it’s comfortable and well balanced.
5. Leave behind any stuff sacks for your kit, you don’t need them and they might get lost. Just use a single waterproof stuff sack to compress all of your kit in one go.
6. Don’t go for a hydration system as they can weigh up to an extra 2kg filled with water, you never know how much you have left and they are slow to refill. Just take a cycle type bottle and keep topping up as you go.
7. Jelly Babies and peanut M&Ms are great snacks to keep you going during the day and don’t skimp on the food for Mid Camp as this is the fuel for the second day, you’ll need it.
8. At the end of a long, dirty first day, sitting in a cold river at Mid Camp will give your muscles a chance to recover better for the following day.
9. Get the balance between comfort and low weight right, if you push it too far you can suffer at the Mid Camp, a few extra grams where you need it will make all the difference. Also the weather in the mountains can be a lot worse than you expect, snow in June up in the Highlands is not unheard of.
10. You need to take a survival bag so why not take a superlight bivi bag like the Terra Nova Moonlite Bivi, at only 180g its as light as most survival bags and as it’s really breathable you can use it with your sleeping bag to sleep a little bit warmer.
11. For a good nights sleep take ear plugs, if you’re at the LAMM though, the bagpipes at 5am will still wake you up!

Terra Nova Equipment Ltd make a wide range of tents, sleeping bags, packs, bivi bags (survival bags), hats, gloves and gaiters that are extremely suited to mountain marathons.