The Frog Graham Round
A few years ago, I heard about a new Lake District based challenge that involved not only running over lots of hills but swimming across lots of lakes too. The Frog Graham Round is a 65ish km route over most of the northwestern fells with swims across Bassenthwaite, Crummock Water, Buttemere and Derwent Water thrown in to break it all up. At this point, I’d never heard of Swimrun events and had very little experience with open water swimming so my immediate thought was – I wonder if anyone’s ever done it in winter? After some real Lake District open water swimming practice, this idea was ice-axed pretty quickly and instead, my personal swim coach (Victoria) and I opted to just go when the weather looked warmest. Surprisingly, all the kit fit in the tow floats! Leg 1: Keswick to Beck Wythop (14.6 km run / 973 m climb / 1km swim) The 31st July 2020 looked to be a reasonably hot day so we spontaneously booked the time off work. A 04:30 AM start from Keswick’s Moot Hall meant we were...