My toxic trait is that I’m easy to excite but equally quick to bore. When it comes to organised athletic endeavours, I’m mercurial; a borderline iconoclast. I want to do what other people are doing – just not how they’re doing it. ‘The road less traveled’, and all that jazz.

Case in point: for as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to tackle the Three Peaks Challenge: climbing the three tallest mountains in Scotland, England and Wales, back-to-back, in one uninterrupted sitting. I’d thought about planning the outing on several occasions, but it just never really gripped me. I needed something to make it a little more exciting. I needed a hook.

So, when Jaguar challenged us to put one of their new fully electric vehicles – and the current charging infrastructure – to the test, I heard the mountains calling.

The Three Peaks Challenge (Electric Edition)

I know what you’re thinking. What exactly makes driving between Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Mount Snowdon in a brand new, luxury vehicle a ‘challenge’? Fuel. Electric cars have come a long way, but they still can’t necessarily go a long way. At least not without regular stops. The total driving distance between the three mountains is around 460 miles; the Jaguar I-Pace has an optimistic range of around 290 miles between charges.

For reference, the F-Pace, a similarly sized, fossil-fuelled Jag, can cover 450 miles on a full tank. Neither would make the journey without a pitstop; few cars could. The main difference – and the source of my anxiety – was the fact that a pitstop in an electric car isn’t as easy as plugging in a nozzle for a few minutes and heading back out. Depending on the voltage of the charger you’re able to access, you could be looking at hours just to juice up for a hundred more miles – and that’s if you can find one en route.

On the surface all of this would be fine, it takes as long as it takes. But my brothers and I had committed to completing the endeavour in under 24 hours. As far under as possible. This time cap is standard for confident runners and hikers, but I’ve never spoken to anyone who’s also had to factor in charging an electric vehicle.

I was confident that we could summit all three peaks in under 12 hours. I was confident that, traffic willing, we could cover the driving distance in a similar time. But I was acutely aware that every minute we were sat twiddling our thumbs, plugged into a charge point, was a minute we were going to have to make up in the mountains. On tired legs. In the dead of the night.

This was exactly the type of hook I was looking for.

Going Nowhere, Fast

I learned something about myself on the nearly 500-mile drive from Essex to the Highlands of Scotland. I’m a very efficient service station customer: in, facilities, food, fuel, out. That’s just six minutes of the 40-minute charge stop the I-Pace’s in-built navigation had programmed for us, the first of three. That 34-minute wait was fine on the way up, but tomorrow – on the way back down – we were going to have to learn to relax on these elongated pitstops. Anxiously pacing between climbs was not going to be a smart strategy.

We pitched a tent in the car park at the foot of Nevis, and at around midnight, with the silhouette of the mountain inked hazily against the luminescence of the night sky, we finally bedded down.

Move the Big Rocks First

At 4,143ft, Ben Nevis is the tallest mountain in Great Britain and the most challenging of the three peaks. The route we were going to be running, the popular Mountain Track, is a 17km round trip. Nevis, by some margin, is the biggest individual challenge of the three peaks. Unless you live in Scotland and want to finish here, it makes sense to tackle the big rock first.

The sun was already up when we started our ascent at 05:01. This was my first time up Nevis and I was immediately struck by how visually different the landscape is compared to the other British ranges I’d spent time in. We set off at an enthusiastic but reserved clip, passing a few stragglers who had rather optimistically set off for a sunrise summit. Nevis is a mountain of two halves. After a scenic and green shallow rise with easy-to-follow tracks, we rounded the valley and the mountain transformed into a vertiginous, zigzagging climb of loose scree and ankle-twisting rocks. Each turn led to a shorter, steeper climb, and as the temperature dropped our view of the valley below became shrouded by clouds.

Eventually, we hit a steep, snow-capped climb that slowed us considerably, but served as a dramatic (albeit slow) run-up to the summit. We reached the top of the final cairn, tagging the ordnance survey trig which denotes the official summit, a little over two hours after we had set off. I began making some video for the obligatory Instagram reel before my brother, clad only in a vest and shorts, demanded that I stop ‘fucking around’ as it was ‘fucking freezing’. We began what would be our fastest descent of the trip.

I always joke that the trick to descending a mountain quickly is falling forward but moving your feet fast enough that you don’t actually fall down. It’s not really a joke though. When I looked back at the data on my Garmin, on some stretches we were moving considerably faster than my best 5km pace. This isn’t sustainable, but it is fun. Getting to the summit is the point, insert your own inspirational quotes about ‘the climb’ here, but that being said: for me, coming down is the best part. We were back in the car park before 9am, a steady sub-four-hour round trip.

Searching For Superchargers

As I plugged our next destination, the Lake District, into the sat nav, my stomach turned. What should be a five-and-a-half-hour journey was coming in at an estimated eight hours with the recommended charging stops. We’d been fast on Nevis, but not that fast As we set off, my brothers began scouring different apps and websites for fast-charging options. We also began doing some mathematical gymnastics on just how low we could run the battery and still make it to another stop, after the next climb. It’s not that I didn’t trust the I-Pace’s guidance, it’s just that these figures almost certainly meant failure, and we had nothing to lose by winging a different route.

We tracked down a bank of high-powered ‘superchargers’ that were slightly off route, but could, in theory, juice us up faster. We peeled off of the M6, plugged the car in and took a seat in the adjacent McDonald’s. I set a timer on my phone for the car’s recommended charge time and tried to enjoy my burger and ice cream, ignoring the nagging voice in the back of my head reminding me that every minute sat here was an extra minute in the dark on that final climb.

One Big Staircase

At 3,209ft, Scafell Pike is considerably smaller than Ben Nevis, but the climb is steeper. Picture ascending a tube station escalator. For two solid hours. We set off on the path just before 4 pm, putting us behind the best-scenario-pace I’d envisioned.

Somewhere on the route I began to notice the effects of a lack of sleep and fatigue in the legs. The last push of Scafell is steep and a bit of a scramble, but it’s the fun sort of scramble that actually makes you feel like you’re climbing a mountain. We tagged the summit cairn, took the obligatory photos, and turned back downhill.

I’ve been up and down Scafell many times; unfortunately, this confidence led to a lapse in attention, and at some point I took us down the wrong path, costing us 30 minutes. We reached the I-Pace, stripped off our kit, and were back on the road almost exactly three hours after we had arrived.

This is where I will say that being in a markedly better vehicle than the transit van or old Mini Cooper we’d usually use for these adventures did confer some advantages. Adaptive cruise control allows you to give those tired legs some much-needed movement, while heated and cooled seats make you feel more like you’re in some sort of spa facility rather than shuffling down the M6.

Before long, we were pulling over for another long charge stop. I took a picture of the sun setting over the motorway from the bridge that crosses from WHSmiths to KFC. It felt incredibly romantic to me at the time; in hindsight, I think I was mildly delirious. We loaded up on carbs, compared the areas of our bodies that were most in need of some Sudocrem, and set off again a little before 10.30pm. With nearly three hours still left to drive, the onset of darkness served as a visceral reminder that the 24-hour mark was creeping closer.

Lost and Found

It took me a minute to get out of the car once we’d parked at the foot of Snowdon. I’ve taken on a lot of 24-hour-plus fitness challenges and whenever I’m asked for advice on prepping for one, I say the same thing: nothing can prepare you for the fact that at multiple points, you will very sincerely think ‘fuck this’, and you’ll absolutely mean it. The trick is in knowing that it’s coming, so that when it does arrive you’re expecting it. You can say ‘fuck this’ all the way up the mountain if you like, just so long as you keep putting one foot in front of the other as you do.

Just before 1am, we started our ascent via the Pyg Track, the shortest route to the 3,560ft summit of Yr Wyddfa, as Snowdon is known in Wales. The route is classed as ‘strenuous’, but I’d done this before, many times, and in the dark, so despite my fatigue, I felt confident. Just like last time, right..?

The 11km route is not as steep as Scafell, but it is slightly more technical with large rocks and jagged staircases to traverse. This is not a problem in the daylight, in fact it’s fun. In the dark, after more than 20 hours awake, it’s a different story. It felt like a mentally taxing slog. We were in good spirits though, and even when someone expressed that they weren’t— that quickly became the punchline of the next joke. It’s an odd dynamic, but it works.

Somewhere around three-quarters of the way up, the Pyg Track should make a sharp turn into a steep climb to join the other paths on the final straight to the summit. Something felt off. There’s a long gabion wall near the final stretch, and I knew we should have reached it by now. By this point, the rain was driving pretty hard and our head torches provided just enough visibility to see 6ft in front of our faces, At some point, we had stepped off the track.

Looking back at the data from my watch later, I learned we had walked around in tight circles for a good 20 minutes before finally finding the wall… that had been 20ft away the entire time. It’s pretty comical in hindsight, but there was a moment when – for the first time in recent memory – I felt a pang of fear.

The temperature dropped swiftly as we rejoined the track and covered the final push. The summit marker for Snowdon is by far my favourite of the three. Usually, there’s a queue of people stood shaking on the stone spiral staircase that winds up to the final cairn, but tonight: just a few cold climbers sat sheltering from the wind.

At 02.44am we took a blurry team selfie at the highest point in Wales, 21 hours and 43 minutes after setting off from the foot of Ben Nevis. We were shared a traditionally reserved ‘nice one lads’ at the top of the third and final peak before someone, I forget who, suggested that we should ‘get ourselves back home then’.

Peak Voltage

Is it possible to complete the National Three Peaks challenge in under 24 hours, in an electric vehicle? Evidently. But it’s also possible to complete it in whatever car you own right now; it’s also possible to complete it via public transport; it’s also possible to spread all three peaks out over a weekend, a month, or even a year. For me at least, the goal of things like this isn’t to successfully complete an adventure, it’s simply to have an adventure. The rest is just icing on the cake.

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