Three mountains. Nineteen hours. One step at a time.

I took on the National Three Peaks Challenge alone on the mountains, with one simple aim: to complete it in the best time I could. Nineteen hours after starting, I stopped the clock exactly on the hour.

My friend Toby drove the long miles between the mountains, while I focused on the next ascent. The challenge began on Ben Nevis at 04:00. I completed it in 3 hours 47 minutes and felt relieved to have the biggest mountain out of the way. There was no celebration. Scafell Pike was already waiting.

Momentum on Scafell Pike

Scafell Pike was where everything came together. I completed it in 2 hours 36 minutes without stopping once. The pace felt strong, the movement was instinctive and I carried that momentum all the way back down.

But a challenge like this does not let you keep any one moment for long. By the time we reached North Wales, the accumulated effort, the hours awake and the miles already climbed had begun to take their toll.

Into the dark

I set off up Yr Wyddfa at 19:20, just as daylight was disappearing. I was absolutely exhausted, and then the weather turned. The hail was so heavy, and continued for so long, that I had to put a hat on beneath my hood because the impact on my head was hurting.

Alone on the mountain, climbing into darkness through that storm, I was frightened. I was worried about lightning. My head torch’s reactive beam kept flashing as it caught the hail driving back at me, turning the darkness ahead into a confusion of white light and movement.

I could not think about the summit or how far I still had to go. I could only keep pushing, one step at a time.

The longest way down

Yr Wyddfa took 3 hours 40 minutes. The walk back down the Miners’ Track seemed to go on forever. There was no energy left for excitement, only the discipline to keep moving over the next piece of ground and then the next.

I completed the National Three Peaks Challenge in exactly 19 hours. Ben Nevis had brought relief. Scafell Pike had brought speed. Yr Wyddfa demanded everything that remained.

What the mountain reduces us to

We often imagine resilience as a dramatic act: a surge of courage or a refusal to quit. In reality, it is usually quieter. Under pressure, the scale of the whole challenge can become paralysing. The useful question is smaller: what does the next step require of me?

That night, I could not control the darkness, the hail, the fatigue or the distance still ahead. I could control the next deliberate movement. Then I could make another. Eventually, those small acts carried me off the mountain and across the finish line.