Thousands of teenagers prepare for one of the toughest weekends of their lives - the Ten Tors challenge.

There's a howling wind, the terrain is tricky, this is Dartmoor. A group of youngsters from Teign School near Newton Abbott are on the last leg of their final training session. Today was a short stroll of twelve miles. Around the corner is Ten Tors toughest challenge, fifty five miles.

One pupil, Lydia Foley, says: "I do it for the challenge of it and like to prove to yourself than you can do it and to other people that you can can do it."

The Teign School team are Ten Tors veterans. They've done the thirty five and forty five mile routes.

But Lydia says doing the first one was a real struggle.

"It was sort of getting into it for the first time and it was really sort of challenging for the first time."

Now they're reaching for the pinnacle - the fifty five mile route. The youngsters have been training for six months.

"The training is the thing that prepares you for the event and the event's sort of rewarding," says another pupil, Tom Cook, "So if you don't do the training then there's no point in doing the event because you just don't have a clue."

The training is being supervised by Peter Harper. He's been preparing teams for Ten Tors for nineteen years.

"The training is in three phases really. You start off with fitness and basic navigation. Then you move on to more fitness and camp craft. After that, you then move out into long distance walking, good navigation and camp craft because they'll be spending several nights on the Moor."

"The Moors can be a very hostile terrain because they don't realise especially with a day like today you can have a wind chill factor which will make them a lot colder than they feel they really are."

They also have to carry everything they need to spend two nights on the moor. Their rucksacks weigh up to thirty five pounds.

Peter Harper says: "The fifty fives will be walking from seven o clock on Saturday morning when Ten Tors starts continuously,except for topping at their check points until five o clock on Sunday and their bodies will tell them that they don't want to play any longer and that's when the mind has to kick in and say you are going to do it."

And soon they'll know if they can do it.