The 2020 Montane Lakeland 50 & 100 is 8 months away and this year we’re encouraging people to write about their journey. One of our projects for the coming year is to engage primary schools, encourage writing and publish some of their work. But we’re also interested in hearing your stories.

Writing and story telling have long been associated with the mountains and adventure. Everyone has a unique background and a different story to tell with regards to how they found themselves on the start line for 2020. We’re interested in 3 journeys:

1. The journey you’ve taken to reach this point in your life and what brought you to the 2020 event.
2. The journey from here to July 24th 2020, the people you’ll meet at the recce days and the experiences you’ll encounter as you prepare for the event weekend.
3. The event weekend journey from the start at Coniston or Dalemain, to the finish back at Coniston.

It’s pretty common now for people to have blogs and publish race reports which can often be in depth and analytical. We’re not interested in the stats… we’re interested in the stories, the memories, the interactions with other people and the roller coaster of feelings you’ll encounter along the way. We’re not interested in a critique of your training or your checkpoint timings, we’re interested in the things which will make people smile, laugh or cry. We’re interested in anything which will trigger an emotional response. We’re also going to go crazy and make a suggestion that you write using a pen and paper rather than typing a blog post. It might be a bit messy for a few days, but the motor memory will kick in and you’ll remember how to do it.

We’ll be publishing some of our own stories on the Facebook page, there’s so many fond and funny memories we’ve gathered over the last 12 years. We’d also like to read your stories and publish them on our pages, so start getting creative. If you’ve got a great story, we’d really love to hear from you. At the end of this year we’re publishing a book and who knows, you might even appear on the published pages.

It’s important to remember that although is might be over 8 months to the ‘event weekend’… it’s already started. Whatever brought you here started a long time ago. It was always about the journey… never about the destination.

#TheLakelandJourney #WhatsYourStory