Tour de Helvellyn
Saturday 20th December 2025
To help distract me from the ‘joys’ of Christmas I decided to enter a race on the last weekend before Christmas. The Tour de Helvellyn (TdH) organised by Nav4 is a self navigated winter mountain ultra where you are given free reign to make you own choices between the 8 specified check points. There are also two aid stations. You visit Side Farm twice, once on the way out and again on the way back.
The race starts and finishes at the Askham community centre with a generous start window from 0700 to 0930. You head over Askham Fell towards Howtown, then on to the checkpoint at Martindale Church. At this point you could turn right and follow the side of the lake round to the next check point, only a handful of people took this option, or join the majority of participants and take the road and track to climb over Boredale Hause and drop down to Side Farm aid station.
Next up was the loop around Helvellyn. From Glenridding you head up the valley before climbing past the old mine and quarries to Sticks Pass. A steep, slippery descent take you down towards Thirlmere. The path then contours round to the Swirls carpark for the second aid station. This was the worst section of the race in my opinion. You couldn’t get into a rhythm and the combination of slippery mud and ankle rolling rocks meant progress was frustratingly slow.
A forest track from the carpark helped pick up the pace, it was good to have some company along this section, having a chat about next years plans and previous race experiences. A climb up Raise Beck saw us pass Santa Claus working his side hustle as a race photographer before finally making it up to Grisedale Tarn. As we started to descend my temporary running companion’s superiority showed as they drifted into the distance and were next spotted relaxing at the finish. The path back to Patterdale had lots of slippery rocks to test your balance and ankle strength before hitting the track in the valley bottom.
A quick stop at Side Farm to fill up my bottles before the final push back up Boredale Hause retracing my steps back to Askham for hot chocolate and party rings.
I fuelled using a mixture of Voom bars (non-caffeine flavours), Precision gels and electrolyte powder in the 2 litres of water I consumed. Carb intake was an average of 105grams / hour for the day.
The weather forecast prior to the event was all over the place with contradictory forecasts predicting bright sunshine or heavy rain. In the end there had been a few dry days allowing the worst of the water to run off and the trails to dry a little. The day itself was in the high single digits with the sun breaking through the clouds occasionally. The cloud base was just above the route high points and it stayed dry throughout. Keeping the feet dry was impossible. However, I had smeared my feet liberally with ‘Trench’ foot cream and didn’t have any issues with my feet.
This was a really enjoyable low-key race, but with full infrastructure. Excellent cakes and soup were available at the finish. I would recommend this race to anyone looking for an end of year event and is happy to look after themselves in the mountains.
I finished 29th overall (19th male and 9th in MV40) in 7h59m24s. I covered just over 59km, with 2,300m of ascent.
The winner was Kris Jones of Swansea Harriers in an amazing time of 4h57m36s. The first female was Alice Willson of Saddleworth Runners Club in 6h52m00s.
Full results are here: https://results.opentracking.co.uk/event/tdh2025
