Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th September 2025
After the success of last year’s expedition, High Peak Jinx, sixteen from the Thursday Woodbourn Road training group signed up for the 2025 edition with four (or five) sessions in two days. Late withdrawals due to injury reduced the group to fourteen with two of those present also not fully fit and unable to complete each session. A difficulty with organising this event is making sure that it doesn’t clash with the Northern 4 and 6 stage road relays and waiting until the dates were finally published meant that a school from Nottingham had got in first and the Friday night was booked up. On the plus side, everyone could therefore do Thursday’s Accelerator on the track. The venue is Mount Cook Adventure Centre, Middleton Top bang on the High Peak Trail. Cost £62.70 per head for full board in shared en-suite dorms for four.
Saturday
Prologue: New for 2025 was the Black Rocks Parkrun just down the trail which had its inaugural run back in January. Coach was pleased to see that the three who added this to their schedule ran at a steady pace rather than doing anything silly.
Session 1 11:30: The Keeley. Gleaned from Athletics Weekly, this is based on one of Keeley Hodgkinson’s most feared sessions. One minute on the (steep) Middleton Incline, jog back recovery then 6 minutes threshold along the trail. This is run out and back so that everyone starts and finishes each rep together. Two minutes recovery then do the whole thing two more times. The idea is that the hill raises the blood lactate so that more time is spent in the correct training zone on the threshold part.
Session 2 15:30: Paarlauf (relay) and other fun things on the Recreation Ground. Except that when we got there a cricket match was in progress which was surprising given the downpour with hailstones we had a couple of hours before. Plan B was back to the trail with a 10x200m shuttle relay for teams of three. The problem was that although coach had measured out the course, the leg two runners had gone too far down the track tuning it into a 270m rep. We all know that, being a relay, things always get competitive once the number goes on so this ended up being run a little too hard.
Ross explains to one of the locals what we were doing. Coach ran a little faster for a short while after one dog walker had called him a jogger.
Session 3 19:00: The Rising Sun. After mountains of spaghetti bolognese, a short walk up the trail found us in the nearest pub. On pump were Bass and Blue Monkey plus a 6% brew which we kept well away from. At this stage Sina made an announcement telling us about the ceremony he attended last week and how is is now a British Citizen. It was suggested that, now that he is British, he needs to improve his beer intake. Indeed, we were surprised that the subject isn’t on the Life In The UK test. After that the karaoke started. “What fresh hell is this?” as Dorothy Parker put it as the steady flow of bottles of white wine across the bar for three of the ladies continued. With blackmail demands remaining unpaid, this is a link IMG_7160 to Sarah-Jane and Annie tearing up at the karaoke. What is surprising is that Annie can manage this after two hard sessions plus running 17:48 for 5k the night before. It sounds even worse when sober.
A bit of a squeeze. Before the karaoke.
Sunday 07:30am: Go As You Please recovery run on the trail, the only constraint being to get back for breakfast at 8:30. Shamefully three of the boys didn’t make the run with others ruing their wine intake. Full English breakfast for those that wanted it considering that there was still one session to go.
Sunday 11:30am: Carsington Water Fartlek. Originally scheduled for 12:30 to let the breakfast go down this was a 7.5 mile effort around the reservoir working hard on the hills, cruising on the flat/downhill with a final 800m blast across the dam wall. Varied degrees of effort on this due to too much beer and or breakfast or simply being too old for three hard sessions in two days. As instructed, no-one came away in a worse condition than they arrived in.
And then there were nine. L-R Emily Green, Peter Brown, Pierre McCarthy, Abbey Pearse, Dan Howarth, Ross Baxter, Annie Chambers, Frances Roberts, Matt Spoor. Sina Pournorri, Sarah-Jane Brown and Kathryn Liddiard managed to miss the photoshoot whilst Yasmine Chaffer and Rob Byers, both carrying niggles, had departed after breakfast.
About twenty miles in total for the two days. A great start to winter conditioning work there was immediate demand for the same again next year, preferably with a return of the three day format.