Training and recce run - Coniston - Seathwaite - Boot - Seathwaite - Coniston

~28 miles, 6,400 feet of ascent

Yesterday John and I did the first two legs of the UTLD course - Coniston to Seathwaite, then Boot - and then back again.
This is probably the last long run (over ~15 miles) that I'll do before the event itself, and we had 2 objectives:

1. Nail the route, so that we know exactly what's coming, where to go, and what's coming up next
2. Crucially - what pace to take at the start. 

Later in the event, pacing is just whatever speed you're capable of, at the start it's important not to go too fast and burn yourself out. It's an ultra-marathon, not a marathon! So practicing race-speed on the terrain was really good.

The day was uneventful - see the Garmin trace for the route back below - but a couple of things stood out for me.
Firstly, the ground is really dry - and long may it continue. Especially where the route follows  Grassguards Gill beside Harter Fell, the last time we were here the whole route was absolutely bogging, I was even thinking of bringing a couple of carrier bags to put over my shoes....yesterday it was fine and a completely different animal as regards the progress we made.
Talking of progress, we made pretty good pace at 1:45 or so into Checkpoint 1 (CP1) at Seathwaite, and a bit quicker into CP2 at Boot. The fast boys & girls will be doing 1:15 and 1:05 or so....
Still that's a good pace, and it felt steady enough to keep going for the duration. Even the downhills felt fine, all that training running down Skiddaw has paid off!

Secondly I had a minor cock-up with the Garmin, which I'm glad happened yesterday and not on the event.. .
I'd set it to UltraTrac mode, which switches off the heart-rate monitor and drops the GPS position-sampling down to once a minute, although this is alterable. (This is to minimise power use, and is the only way to get the battery to last through the event. Garmin claim 50 hours run-time, which is plenty)
In the morning, having charged the watch up overnight (USB lead to the laptop), it was frozen at 01:25, so after googling around to find out how to hard-reset it (long press on the 'light' button), I got it working again.
Once we started off, it would run for 2 minutes (+/- one second, exactly) then freeze - although when I shifted screen to give time-of-day and then back to elapsed time, the elapsed time was still updating in the background. It was almost like doing an auto-lap every 2 minutes, and freezing having displayed the lap time.
This continued after a second hard-reset, and then when we got to Boot I re-started it in 'run' mode - ie no UltraTrac, and all worked fine - see trace below:

When I got home I found the problem...when I'd put it into UltraTrac, there's a screen that allows you to change the GPS sampling rate.....and I'd inadvertently set it to take a sample every 80:01:00 or 80 hrs + 1 minute.......I must have prodded the 'down button' twice,  and not noticed because a 0 and an 8 look very similar on a small screen...doh!
Whew, it's not going back to Cotswold Outdoor after all!