LMC Champagne Challenge

The club’s endurance challenge involves traversing the 15 Welsh 3000-foot peaks in a loop, starting and ending at Fronwydyr. The route covers the Glyders, the Carneddau, and the Snowdon massif, making for an epic day out. The minimum distance is approximately 52km with 4500m elevation gain. The peaks can be visited in any order.

Finishers

Finish Times Over the Years

Upon inspecting all finishes, the average completion times are getting marginally slower. Fitting a linear regression model to the data indicates an increase in the expected finish time by 141 seconds every year. However, this is just a statistical artifact, as the number of participants is quite small and varies significantly, so it largely depends on how many finishers run or hike the challenge.

For example, the founders of the challenge, Angel Vila and Stephen Clark, and early finishers between 1995 and 1990 were very strong hikers, and nobody finished the challenge slower than 18:30 until 2006. The popularity of the challenge increased tremendously between 2006 and 2009, with 17 finishers in 4 years. During this period, Gareth Craft improved the previous course record by 3:22 hours, becoming the first to achieve a sub-15-hour finish (11:57) and claim a bottle of champagne.

Between 2012 and 2019, there was a steady number of 2–5 finishers each year, with average finishing times clearly dropping. There were two more sub-15-hour finishes (Philip Brocklehurst, 14:32; Eoin Brady, 12:27) and the current female record was set by Julia Kelly at 16:29.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, the popularity of the Champagne Challenge increased again. In 2022, Murray Sanders became the fourth person to finish below 15 hours (14:16). The favorable conditions in June 2024 resulted in a record of nine Champagne Challenge finishers, another sub-15-hour finish by Sam Khalid in his third attempt (12:50), and Linus Dietz setting a new course record of 11:30.

Personal Bests

So far, we have only 6 finishes below 15 hours! How fast can you do it?

Which Direction to go?

The Champagne Challenge can be completed in either direction. The anti-clockwise route is appealing because it traverses the most technical ridges of Crib Goch (Grade 1 Scramble) first. However, it seems that, overall, the clockwise direction is 24 minutes faster than the anti-clockwise direction.