Hillwalking challenges in Ireland can be split into the following two categories:
As part of our preparations for the 2024 Sport Hillwalking season, we spent a long time investigating ways to factor unnecessary safety risks out of Fastest Known Time (FKT) attempts for these types of challenges. Our primary focus during these investigations was on the All-Ireland and provincial hill list challenges and the obvious risks associated with them (i.e. the temptation to exceed speed limits on Irish roads, driver fatigue, and navigating under pressure on the hills in darkness).
In the interest of personal and public safety, we have decided not to encourage, publicise or acknowledge Fastest Known Time (FKT) attempts. Every time a new FKT is set, it increases the safety risks for future attempts. In particular, promoting FKTs for All-Ireland and provincial challenges which involve motorised transport without having measures in place to verify speed on public roads is highly irresponsible.
The team behind the third-party Fastest Known Times website have given themselves the task of maintaining an up-to-date record of FKTs across a wide variety of activity types. With this task comes the responsibility of deploying a robust verification process and promoting personal and public safety during FKT attempts. The sections below include the local information and challenge-specific safety advice we will be providing to the Fastest Known Times website team to help them approach Irish upland challenge FKT attempts more responsibly. From the current Irish FKTs listed on their website, it is obvious that they are unfamiliar with the details of Irish challenges and do not currently take legal speed limits on Irish roads into consideration when verifying All-Ireland and provincial hill list challenges. We will update this page in the future when they introduce their new rules and evidence requirements.
- Local single-day challenges which can each be undertaken in its entirety as a continuous route in one day;
- All-Ireland and provincial hill list challenges which generally require the use of motorised transport between trail sections.
As part of our preparations for the 2024 Sport Hillwalking season, we spent a long time investigating ways to factor unnecessary safety risks out of Fastest Known Time (FKT) attempts for these types of challenges. Our primary focus during these investigations was on the All-Ireland and provincial hill list challenges and the obvious risks associated with them (i.e. the temptation to exceed speed limits on Irish roads, driver fatigue, and navigating under pressure on the hills in darkness).
In the interest of personal and public safety, we have decided not to encourage, publicise or acknowledge Fastest Known Time (FKT) attempts. Every time a new FKT is set, it increases the safety risks for future attempts. In particular, promoting FKTs for All-Ireland and provincial challenges which involve motorised transport without having measures in place to verify speed on public roads is highly irresponsible.
The team behind the third-party Fastest Known Times website have given themselves the task of maintaining an up-to-date record of FKTs across a wide variety of activity types. With this task comes the responsibility of deploying a robust verification process and promoting personal and public safety during FKT attempts. The sections below include the local information and challenge-specific safety advice we will be providing to the Fastest Known Times website team to help them approach Irish upland challenge FKT attempts more responsibly. From the current Irish FKTs listed on their website, it is obvious that they are unfamiliar with the details of Irish challenges and do not currently take legal speed limits on Irish roads into consideration when verifying All-Ireland and provincial hill list challenges. We will update this page in the future when they introduce their new rules and evidence requirements.
Local Single-Day Challenge FKTs
A growing selection of local single-day challenges are promoted on The Ireland Walking Guide website. These flexible range-specific initiatives include mountain challenges and 700s challenges. In the interest of participants' personal safety, we have decided not to promote FKTs for these challenges. We are happy for the team behind the third-party Fastest Known Times website to take full responsibility for verifying new attempts. Their verification process is robust enough to deal with local single-day challenges as these do not involve the use of motorised transport. However, we strongly encourage them to familiarise themselves with the various Irish challenges on offer so they are in a better position to advise FKT challengers of exactly what is involved. Details of Irish local single-day challenges can be found on The Ireland Walking Guide via the following links:
All-Ireland & Provincial Hill List Challenge FKTs
Ireland's most comprehensive and impartial online hill listing platform is hosted on The Ireland Walking Guide website. There you will find an unrivalled selection of All-Ireland and provincial hill list challenges grouped under various category headings.
Due to the spread of locations in each of these challenges, the use of motorised transport is generally required to complete them. It is this inter-trail component which presents the greatest risk to the safety of FKT challengers, their support crew and the general public. While undertaking a FKT attempt using a format which factors motorised inter-trail sections into the overall challenge time, some may find the temptation to break the legal speed limits hard to resist. Under no circumstances should speeding be tolerated by a responsible and safety-minded FKT verifying body. We realise that monitoring a challenger's speed over hundreds of kilometres across several days can be a time-consuming process. This is made even more difficult by the fact that speed limits vary across Ireland from 120km per hour on motorways (70 miles per hour in Northern Ireland) to 30km per hour in urban areas (20 miles per hour in Northern Ireland). One quick way to work out if a challenger should be disqualified is by checking their fastest speed as displayed on their challenge statistics. If a challenger records a speed higher than 120km per hour at any time during their FKT attempt, they should be disqualified instantly. This equates to a pace of less than 30 seconds per kilometre. We are aware of at least one All-Ireland hill list challenge FKT listed on the Fastest Known Times website where the evidence provided by the record holder shows that 120km per hour was exceeded several times throughout their attempt. In our opinion, that should never have been listed as a FKT.
Hillwalking and hill running in darkness presents an additional layer of risk to challengers' personal safety in All-Ireland and provincial hill list challenge FKT attempts. It makes navigation more difficult, and the pressure during a FKT attempt increases the risk of missing a location that needs to be visited. We are aware of at least one All-Ireland hill list challenge FKT listed on the Fastest Known Times website, which has since been beaten, where the evidence provided by the record holder shows that they missed a location during the hours of darkness. In our opinion, that should never have been listed as a FKT.
In the interest of safety, we strongly recommend that the motorised inter-trail sections be excluded from All-Ireland and provincial hill list challenge FKT attempts. In addition, we recommend removing the need to walk / run in darkness and to facilitate inter-trail rest periods by assigning a minumum number of days to undertake each specific challenge. Each challenge should also require a minimum number of locations to be logged on each individual day of the attempt to ensure it can be confirmed as non-stop and continuous. For example, we would suggest at least 2 full days (and at least 1 location per day) for the Province High Points, and at least 5 full days (and at least 3 locations per day) for the County High Points. This responsible and safety-conscious approach would take the pressure off the FKT support driver(s) by removing the temptation to exceed legal speed limits while keeping the challenger safer on the hills.
Due to the high levels of risk to the safety of FKT challengers, their support crew and the general public, we have decided not to promote FKTs for All-Ireland and provincial hill list challenges. We are happy for the team behind the third-party Fastest Known Times website to take full responsibility for verifying new attempts. However, their verification process is currently not robust enough to deal with these particular challenges which involve the use of motorised transport for hundreds of kilometres along public roads. Their verification process completely ignores vehicle speeds in relation to local legal speed limits. Continuing to ignore this would be highly irresponsible and could ultimately lead to fatalities on Irish roads. The most straightforward solution is to exclude motorised section times.
Details of All-Ireland and provincial hill lists can be found on the Ireland Walking Guide website via the following links:
We will update this page in the future when Fastest Known Times introduce their new rules and evidence requirements on their website.
