For people who love to be outdoors and love to be active the ‘stay at home’ guidance of the Coronavirus crisis has been quite a challenge to get through. We have tried to avoid the easy temptations to binge on Netflix, beer and popcorn and have been doing our best to maintain the mountain fitness that is essential to our work and lifestyle as mountain professionals.

Pride Expeditions’ Directors Richard and Nick are active volunteer members of Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team. The rescue team is usually the busiest in the UK and mainly operates on and around the highest mountain in Wales, Mt Snowdon/Yr Wyddfa. The voluntary members pride themselves on their ability to get to people in need quickly with the right equipment to deal with their injuries. Normally in May they would be in the mountains of Snowdonia three or more times a week. Not this year!

In order to maintain our mountain fitness all volunteer members have been set a fitness challenge. Ascend 500m of hillside whilst carrying a 15kg bag. This is quite typical of what we would be doing on an actual mountain rescue.

The 500m of ascent we did was through the Dinorwic Quarries next to our village. The height gain was spread over about 2.5km of distance. On our navigation courses in Snowdonia we teach how to estimate how long you will take to climb a mountain using various formulae.

• You expect to walk between 3 to 5 kilometres per hour. 1km will take 20 minutes at 3km per hour, 15 minutes at 4km per hour and 12 minutes at 5km per hour

• Naismiths Rule - for every 10m you ascend add on 1 minute of time

Using this these formulae you can see that the time to cover the 2.5km should have been 30 minutes at the quickest of 5km per hour. Naismith would have said you would have taken 50 minutes to ascend the 500m. So that gives a total of 1.30. We pride ourselves on being an uber fit team. We were also carrying 15kg to slow us down. So far the quickest it has been done is 38 minutes and the slowest is 52 minutes!

It has been a great motivation to try to maintain our fitness - why not try it? It is probably about 50 ascents of your staircase at home!

If you would like to learn more about measuring time and distance when out walking we run hill walking skills courses and mountain navigation days in Snowdonia. When we are all released we would love to teach you these skills!