Downhill From Here E-Book

Gavin Boyter

• Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Approaching his middle forties, Gavin Boyter wondered what his life was all about. A Scot living in London, single and with no kids, he was living for the job and the dwindling hope of a career in film. He had been a club runner all his life, pretty good but not at the front all that often. He was what he called an ordinary runner and he came to wonder just what an ordinary runner might be capable of. How about John O'Groats to Land's End, the longest linear run in Britain, and how about making a film of it? And how about writing a book? As usual, Gavin was neither the first nor the quickest but Downhill from Here is his real triumph, written in such an engaging and witty voice the reader accompanies him every step of the way.

Leseprobe

Gavin Boyteris an Edinburgh-born writer and film-maker whose first feature filmSparks and Embers

Published in Great Britain by

Sandstone Press Ltd

Dochcarty Road

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9UG

Scotland.

www.sandstonepress.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © Gavin Boyter 2017

The moral right of Gavin Boyter to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

The publisher acknowledges support from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

ISBN: 978-1-910985-62-5

ISBNe: 978-1-910985-63-2

Cover design by Two Associates

Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

To Ian and Kath, my parents,

for their unflagging support and belief in me

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, huge credit must be given to my tireless support drivers / camera people Ian Boyter, Carol Hodge and Sorrell Kerrison, without whom I wouldn’t have made it 1,174 miles without collapse. Thanks to my fellow ultra-runners Dave ‘Stan’ Stanning, Richard Durance and Chris Thrall, who joined me and spurred me on along the way. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Davey Henderson, Lol and the digger crew, the gentlemen at Bellingham and especially Sheila Lumm, who went out of their way to save us from car calamity, exhaustion and misery. For helping me at times of crisis: the forest rangers of Rowardennan, the hunters at Hetherhope and Thomas by Kielder Water. In appreciation of their efficiency, sympathy and diagnostic skills, the staff at the Livingston A&E department. Mum, Fiona and Katy proved staunch supporters with their families (and dogs) and, in Fiona’s case, suggested the wryly fitting title. To the patient hoteliers and bed and breakfast owners who stayed open late, made home-cooked meals and washed my disgusting laundry, I salute you. With gratitude for their generosity and an excellent meal at The Old Bakehouse, Iain and Carol. For listening to early excerpts and helping me believe in what I was writing I must single out Guy Ducker, Sara Lodge and Yiannis Hayiannis (may my travails prove therapeutic). For inadvertently showing me the way through Dartmoor, Tracy D’Cruz. For the excellent coffee, free Wi-Fi and convivial surroundings in which I wrote much of the book, gratitude must be shown to the staff of C’est Ici café at Barons Court. Special thanks to Lygeri Dimitriou and the team at the Middlesex University Sports Science labs for putting me through my paces and dunking me in ice-cold water. For key advice and warnings, too few of which I heeded (sorry) I must thank Monique Palmer, James Cattermole, Lucja Leonard and Andrea Havill. Essential last-minute ultrasound therapy was kindly donated by Geraldine Fergusson at Optimum Physiotherapy. Huge respect is owed to my charities, Whizz-Kidz and Limbpower for providing inspiration by example and a reality check when I was feeling sorry for myself. At Sandstone, I’m hugely grateful to Moira Forsyth for recognising something universal in my very personal journey, to Keara Donnachie for sterling publicity support, the typographers at Iolaire Typography Ltd and Roger Smith for proofreading. Helen Stirling provided excellent maps and David Eldridge at Two Associates Design turned my tatty old trainers into a striking cover design. And last but never least, to those I met along the way (including Kevin, Libby and Jesse), whether walking, running, cycling or driving – you made the arduous journey an unpredictable delight. Here’s hoping this will inspire others to step out onto the trail or the tarmac in search of adventure.

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Foreword

SECTION ONE: Too Far North

John O’Groats to Tain

Tain to Drumnadrochit

Drumnadrochit to Somewhere Else

Invermoriston to Fort William

Fort William to Rowardennan

SECTION TWO: True Love Ways

Rowardennan to Falkirk

Falkirk to Kirk Yetholm

Kirk Yetholm to Ladyhill

Ladyhill to Thwaite

Thwaite to Blackshaw Head

SECTION THREE: Route: Canals

Blackshaw Head to Edale

Edale to Birmingham

Birmingham to Chipping Campden

Chipping Campden to Bath

Bath to Fenny Bridges

SECTION FOUR: The Last Leg

Fenny Bridges to Moretonhampstead

Moretonhampstead to Tavistock

Tavistock to Mawgan Porth

Mawgan Porth to Portreath

Portreath to Land’s End

Afterword

APPENDIX I: The Fuckity Fuck Song

APPENDIX II: Equipment List for Support Vehicle

APPENDIX III: My Ultra-Running Kit List

List of Illustrations

1. With Dad at John O’Groats

2. Davey Henderson to the rescue, near Helmsdale

3. On the Great Glen Way

4. Lost, somewhere off the Great Glen Way

5. Carol Hodge enjoys a rare moment of respite near Gairlochy

6. With the Three Brethren on the Southern Upland Way

7. Receiving ultrasound therapy for my errant knee

8. My odd shin bulge examined in Livingstone A&E

9. On the Pennine Way with David ‘Stan’ Stanning

10. Helm Wind at Cross Fell

11. On the Pennine Way with Richard Durance

12. Alone on a wild, windy moor

13. The sun breaks through the mist

14. A spider’s web by the roadside near Cowling

15. Blackstone Edge

16. A muddy trail in Somerset

17. Nearing Hebden Bridge

18. Kinder Scout

19. Planning at Edale

20. Sorrell Kerrison lines up a shot on the Yorkshire Dales

21. Dad cycling a towpath near Birmingham

22. A Cotswolds idyll

23. More car trouble and another rescue, this time near South Cerney

24. Georgian splendour in Bath

25. With author and runner Chris Thrall on the Devon–Cornwall border

26. Near Bosigran in Cornwall, on the South-West Coast Path

27. At Land’s End

List of Maps

SECTION 1: Too Far North

SECTION 2: True Love Ways

SECTION 3: Route: Canals

SECTION 4: The Last Leg

Foreword

It’s just after ten o’clock in the morning and I have been running for twenty-two hours. The last three of those hours have been run in torrential rain, the kind that soaks to the skin in minutes and then pounds relentlessly into forehead, arms and legs, numbing them into submission. I’ve long ago lost sight of the ultimate reason I’m still running. Now I’m kept in motion by an arbitrary number: 100. I’ve decided to stop after I’ve run a hundred miles.

I say running, but at this point in the endeavour, I’m really just shuffling, like an extra from The Walking Dead, around the 9.1K circuit mapped out by the organisers of the inaugural Cotswold 24-Hour Challenge here on the Bathurst Estate near Cirencester. I’m barely managing 12-minute miles when my usual long run pace would be nearer eight minutes per mile. My right ankle has swollen badly and a ridge of livid flesh has thickened my shin to twice its normal circumference above my worn, waterlogged running shoes. My knees, always my weakness, have long given up their protestations as if to say ‘He’s not listening . . . but at least we can say he was warned.’ At this point in the day, teetering on the brink of delirium, it doesn’t seem that irrational to attribute conscious thought to my rebellious joints and muscles.

Others shuffle round the well-marked course, zombielike or with cruel vigour, the latter group wearing the coloured wristbands of relay runners who have had breaks of several hours between circuits while awaiting their turn. No such luxury for us few yellow-banded solo runners in this 24-hour event. Where once the cheerful encouragements of the relay runners spurred us on, we’re now digging deep and a badly timed ‘good run, man’ is as likely to break our spirits as lift them.

For those not in the know, let me explain. A 24-hour race, as its name might suggest, is a race run over the course of a whole day. Rather than the conventional system of seeing how quickly you can run a set distance, the 24-hour race takes time as the constant, and distance as the variable. The winner is the runner who completes the most circuits in the shortest time, within a 24-hour cut-off. Why take part in such a race? Why drive the body to such brutal limits for so many hours?

I think most casual runners and non-runners might understand the lure of a marathon, with its iconic distance, charity fundraising and cheering crowds. They might even see something worthwhile in the first ultra-race I’d run in May 2015 – the London to Brighton 100K Challenge. Certainly, the changing scenery and obvious end point of such an event fits with most people’s understanding of what a race is, even though running more than two marathons in a day might seem somewhat extreme. In contrast, hobbling around the same, fairly unexciting, 9.1K course anything up to 22 times (in the case of that year’s winner Paul Beechey) seems dangerously monomaniacal.

For me, it was as simple as finding out what I could achieve if pushed to my absolute limits. Although, it has to be said ‘absolute limits’ is a questionable concept amongst the really committed ultra-runner, ever looking for the next milestone to leap over. Ultra-running is more about pushing thresholds back than finding insurmountable limitations. But let’s backtrack a bit.

My serious running began in 2004, when I decided to take the thrice-weekly fitness runs I’d been doing and put them to some use by attempting a marathon. I’d run occasionally at university in the late 1980s and early 1990s, tearing round Edinburgh’s ¾ mile Meadows circuit, just minutes from my student flat, with fellow housemates Rob and Neil. We even got as competitive as recording our times on a wallchart we proudly displayed in the hallway, possibly with the hapless notion that female visitors would be in awe of our prowess. But this running was never with any end point in mind or any concrete goal. It was running for running’s sake. Perhaps this was appropriate; the course we used to run included part of the Sri Chinmoy Mile, although it was much later in life that I read up on this guru of ‘self-transcendence’, meditation and running.

In my thirties, running for fitness took on a more urgent appeal but also begged the new question – ‘What is all this running for?’ Were he still with us, Sri Chinmoy would probably say that this question is essentially meaningless. We are, therefore we run. But for an average struggling Londoner (I moved from one capital to another in 1999), everything has to have a purpose, to contribute to a greater goal. Life is just too demanding for fripperies. By such simplistic logic, long-distance running can have only one aim – to prepare oneself for a race. In my comparatively youthful gung-ho manner, aged thirty-four, I decided that my first race had to be the London race, for how could I aim for anything less ambitious? And so it was that my first ever race (and the first time I’d alongside another person in twelve years) would be the 2005 London Marathon.

I trained pretty hard. Not 120 miles a week hard, like some hardcore marathon runners, but 50–60 miles a week, including short, fast runs and longer weekend slogs. I was not a member of a running club at that point. I don’t think I was really aware that such groups existed or, at least, that they would be open to runners of all abilities. In my naiveté, I ran alone and untutored. I didn’t read any books on marathon running (in any case, the boom in writing about running and racing technique came a decade or more later). I did no speed training, struggled repeatedly up no hills.

My only preparation was the one essential feature of marathon training – going the distance. After about eight weeks of sticking to my spreadsheeted plan, my weekend long runs had crept up to the teens in mileage and my weekly totals were hitting 50-plus miles. I’d identified favourite routes of different lengths and levels of difficulty and was using a basic running watch to record my times over various distances. It was gratifying seeing those times reduce; I felt motivated at the end of each run to put on one final sprint to beat my personal best. I’d done the requisite arithmetic, deciding that my goal would be a sub-3-hour marathon and I knew that this required an average speed of 6 minutes and 52 seconds per mile. Typically, I had no idea how much of a challenge I’d set myself (at London, you’re in the 96th percentile if you run sub-3). But the goal, realistic or not, gave me something to work towards.

I stood at the front of the start line on a chilly April morning in 2005, terrifyingly close to the elite runners, shivering under the traditional pre-run garb of black plastic bin liner with torn-open arm holes. It was more than a little disconcerting to see the lithe, limber Kenyans and Ethiopians lined up, with a few token Europeans and Americans, just a few yards ahead of us. In the London Marathon, the fastest non-elite runners are typically herded into one small ‘three hours and faster’ pen at each of the three starting lines, which gives you an idea of how few people run that speed. I could probably have fitted all the runners in my projected time category into my flat at the time (and it was anything but palatial). Nevertheless, I tried my best to shake off any misgivings. After all, I could honestly say I’d done all I could. What would be, would be.

I ran a disappointing race. At least, in terms of overshooting my goal by a full sixteen minutes, it disappointed me. It was of course a thrill to have completed a marathon at all, not to have resorted to walking at any point (this seemed vitally important to me in a way it simply doesn’t now) and to have crossed that line with arms aloft and something approaching a sprint finish. However, I had failed to achieve the target I’d set myself and a pedantic little voice in my head kept telling me that 3 hours 16 minutes and 14 seconds was simply not good enough. The other voice in my head, the more animalistic cry of ‘never again’ as I hid, experiencing all-over pain and fatigue, in one of the Portaloos, was replaced by a background hum of ‘you can do better’ and so the cycle of ambition began all over again.

I did do better. The following year, my second London Marathon was completed in 3 hours 11 minutes and 43 seconds. Which was good . . . except that it was by far my worst-judged performance strategically. Fired up with newfound zeal (this time I had something to prove) I’d blazed through the first half in a little over eighty-two minutes then died horribly over the last thirteen miles, losing an average of two minutes per mile by the end. To put it another way, that 82 minutes is still the fastest I’ve run a half-marathon distance by over three minutes.

Yet that 2006 result remained my best marathon time. My third attempt at the distance in 2008 produced my worst time (at that point) – 3 hours 17 minutes and 44 seconds. I’d paced myself, having learned the lessons of 2006, and it did me no good whatsoever. Subsequent marathons, albeit now in my late thirties and early forties, and run in hot conditions over different courses (Brighton and Edinburgh) added another twenty minutes to those London times. A sub-3-hour marathon became a distant fantasy. Perhaps the marathon wasn’t my best distance after all. Half-hearted attempts to enter marathons subsequently always seemed to end with my forgetting to send off my application in time, failing to secure a charity sponsor (despite having run for Cancer Research and Shelter in previous years) or simply forgetting the deadline for entry. It appeared my heart was no longer in it.

I kept running through the late ‘noughties’ and beyond. I was a keen member of the Ealing, Southall and Middlesex AC from 2006 until 2012 when I moved away from the area. I found I had something of a talent as a middling cross-country runner and I enjoyed the mud, the chaos and the extremity of the sport, as well as the fact that it was impossible to measure myself against previous efforts since every course was different and every year brought new weather-related challenges – hard-packed soil, wet leaves, vicious hills and endless, relentless rain. Because I could only measure myself against fellow ESM runners at my approximate level of ability, and I could offer the catch-all excuse of having had ‘a bad day’, my running ambitions atrophied a little. Then I discovered ultra-running.

I think my first awareness of this discipline was when I was marathon training and doing my long runs up and down the Grand Union Canal between Brentford and Hayes. On one particularly long Sunday run, heading north out of London, dodging puddles and grumpy swans, I passed various runners wearing racing numbers and heading the other way. They seemed oddly unhurried, were largely in their forties or older and were sometimes running in chatting pairs. There were huge distances between the competitors. What sort of race was this? The front-runners hardly seemed to be breaking a sweat and were jogging along at a lackadaisical 8 or 9-minute mile pace.

I took a closer look at one of their bibs and the piece of paper pinned upon it read ‘Town to Tring’. I’d never heard of Tring, although I assumed that ‘town’ meant Brentford, the southern extent of the Union Canal as it enters London. I’d previously run as far as ten miles up that stretch of canal with no whisper of a place called Tring, so it had to be a decent length race, not a 5K ‘fun run’. That said, if it was Brentford to Tring, surely they were running the wrong way? When I reached the next road bridge over the canal I met a couple of high-vis clad marshals and asked them about the race. ‘Oh, it’s a 40-mile race from London to Tring. Some of the keen ones run back the next day,’ came the blithe reply. Clearly I’d been passing those few participants who were running ‘the double’ – eighty miles – more in two days than I’d ever run in a week, by a considerable margin.

Forty miles – with some of them running another forty miles on the Sunday? I adjusted the parameters of my somewhat patronising assumptions about the runners I had passed. This race was as ‘hardcore’ as they come. Or so I naïvely thought.

Thus began my research into the then near-secret world of ultra-running. I found out about such events as the West Highland Way race (95 miles over terrain with a total ascent of 14,760 feet) and the South Downs Way 100 (one hundred miles, the record for the route being a little over fourteen hours). I ventured into the Piccadilly Waterstones’ Sports section for the first time in my life (I’m not a big sports fan) and devoured books by US ultra legends Dean Karnazes, Scott Jurek and Rich Roll. It dawned on me that I was in the middle of something of a boom-time for this ludicrous sport of running until you drop (or cross the finish line, although the two can be skilfully combined for effect). It was adventurous, extreme and exciting, as all the YouTube race reports from the Badwater Ultra, Marathon des Sables, Spartathlon or Ultramarathon du Mont Blanc made clear. I became something of a theoretical ultra-running junkie.

Except I hadn’t run one. Not yet.

If I was going to throw myself (is there any other way?) into this new world of extraordinary running, I needed a goal. And not just any goal – one in keeping with the superlative nature of the sport. What would be the ultimate UK-based ultramarathon?

All of it. Of course. There was already an established British tradition of John O’Groats to Land’s End travel, generally by bicycle or by walking. So many people had in fact done this route that two miniature theme parks had sprung up at Land’s End and John O’Groats, the somewhat arbitrary ‘most Northern and Southern’ outposts of the UK.1 There is even a website devoted to the hiking and cycling ‘End to Enders’ co-created by commercial enterprises Natural Retreats and Heritage Great Britain.2 Had anyone run it?

Of course they had. A quick bit of web surfing revealed that the record was a staggering 9 days and 2 hours. That’s right – an average of over ninety miles a day. Several ultra-runners I’ve talked to have doubted the veracity of this achievement but the Guinness Book of Records, no slouch in terms of verifying outlandish claims, is adamant that Andrew Rivett managed it in the above extraordinary time.

Clearly, my run wouldn’t be about breaking any records. Instead, what I would set out to do is to cover the entirety of the UK by foot, taking in as many off-road trails as possible, running 1,100 miles in total in under a month. How naïve that last clause feels now.

I wanted to get to know the country I’d lived in my whole life in an entirely new way, to see how its landscapes, peoples and climate changed as I proceeded south. And of course I wanted to test my mettle. But really, this was more than just something I wanted to do; it was something I needed to do. Let me explain.

It’s not that I specifically had to run the length of the country. Nobody needs to run 1,100 miles in a month. It’s more that I needed to do something grandiose and extraordinary because, if I’m honest, I felt like my life was rapidly going off the rails.

After almost twelve years in a dead-end administration job in the NHS, earning very little money, with no chance of promotion, no opportunity to innovate or use my creativity, I knew my office-based days were numbered. The work was boring and the atmosphere in the office often crackled with employees’ frustration and sense of being pawns in a political game as a further round of restructuring and redundancies was mooted, greenlit and then dangled above us for over two years while Unison and NHS England battled it out. By the time voluntary redundancies were finally offered to those staff who wanted out, around half took up the offer, myself included. Having worked for over ten years as a permanent NHS employee, I was entitled to a generous payout and I decided to take the money and run. As it happened, literally.

My immediate problem was that, bar writing and film-making, I had nothing tangible with which to replace office work, in terms of a viable career. Eighteen years after leaving film school, I’d finally managed to complete a feature film, Sparks and Embers, which was due out in December, but I had a suspicion it would receive a rather limited release and I’d probably seen all the income I would from it.3 Although I had another film in development, the psychological thriller Nitrate,4 that was probably a year or more away from shooting. How would I earn a crust in the meantime? I had absolutely no idea.

I was living alone in a studio flat in west London, jobless and without a clear career plan and I knew I had a difficult choice – either use the redundancy money to fund a film project, or use it to live. If I had a wife or girlfriend, I’m sure she would have had a great deal to say about sinking this windfall into a film without any guarantee of distribution. I had no such partner, a fact that was making me increasingly unhappy. Recently, I’d found women I’d dated were not particularly impressed by me. London is an insanely expensive city to live in and I was barely scraping by, which made me feel inadequate when sitting across the table from successful female entrepreneurs, lawyers or executives. In all the aspects of life in which a man measures his worth (for right or wrong), I felt I was failing and this was making me more and more gloomy with each passing week.

I’d been down in the depths of depression before and had almost not made it back.5 I couldn’t afford to go there again. I had to do something desperate – something to make me feel powerful, to make me believe again that the best of life still lay ahead of me.

No job, no immediate career prospects, no partner, no kids. A pessimist could look at that set of circumstances and spiral into despair. I decided that, if I was going to save myself from what I used to call ‘the black cloud’, I had to be an optimist. I had to see this as an opportunity. I would combine my love of running with my desire to make films and finance an adventure with my redundancy money (topped up with some crowdfunding). I found that adventure in the notion of running the length of the UK and filming every step.

As soon as I had that exciting idea I was beset by doubts. How could I make the huge leap from occasional marathon runner to daily ultra-runner? I thought it likely that I’d be able to ‘go ultra’ if I slowed down and ran smarter but would I be able to do it for twenty-eight days straight, running all the daylight hours I could?

Making the film properly cinematic would also prove a challenge. As a film-maker, I had enjoyed the various short film clips and YouTube diaries about ultra-running, including interviews with Scott Jurek,6 self-shot race reports by Michael Arnstein,7 the self-styled ‘fruitarian’ and more aesthetically pleasing mini documentaries by Ethan Newberry,8 ‘the ginger runner’. But even the best of these seemed quite cursory and, at times, not particularly well made. I did not manage to find any filmed content about a John O’Groats to Land’s End Run (until I heard about Sean Conway’s Discovery Channel series,9 by which time my documentary was long underway).

The production of Sparks and Embers had been troubled in terms of securing the finance and greenlighting the various stages of shooting and post-production, and at times it had felt like my film career was doomed to be an endless series of false starts and disappointments. I wanted my second film to be something entirely within my control. A documentary on ultra-running, and on JOGLE in particular, seemed ideal. I thought I’d probably only need to spend half of the redundancy cash; then I calculated the necessary budget and realised how unrealistic this estimate was. In the end, the film would eat up almost everything I had.

The second issue, how to film it, was partly a budgetary consideration and partly a creative choice. Given how much money I had at my disposal, I had to strip things down to the basics while trying to keep a variety of camera sources and cover as much of the preparation stages as well as the run itself as I could. I decided I couldn’t afford a proper cinematographer but I could co-opt my support driver, whomever that would be, to leapfrog me and film shots of me running as well as general views and details of the environments through which I’d be passing. I bought the best ‘compact systems’ camera I could find, the new Panasonic G7 and muddled through most of its lengthy manual. I ordered two GoPro Hero 4 action cameras online (GoPro, like anyone else I contacted, had declined to sponsor me, so I paid full price) plus a number of accessories including head mounts and vehicle clamps.

My boldest purchase was a DJI Phantom 3 Pro quadcopter. My intention was to use this to capture the occasional ‘God’s eye view’ of a landscape, with me as an inconsequential speck crawling along it. My support driver would also have to get to grips with this, of course. It became apparent that the tripartite role of support driver/cameraperson/production assistant would be a hugely challenging one. I began soliciting CVs and sifting through a lot of keen, experienced candidates. This would be a paid role, albeit at industry minimum, because I wanted a professional approach, given that I might literally be putting my health and well-being in their hands as well as delegating much of the most scenic cinematography to this individual.

Eventually the support role became something of a relay event, with my father, Ian, working the first week then handing over to Carol (whom I chose from the pile of CVs after a telephone interview) for two weeks and then to her experienced film-maker friend, Sorrell, for a further ten days, who handed back to my dad for a while and so on. This flexibility of approach allowed my one-person crew to work around the other commitments in their lives.

Meanwhile, I was training. I had no idea how to approach preparing physically for a challenge which would involve me running up to 280 miles per week. I couldn’t risk that level of activity in training and nor was there time to put in anything like the hours necessary to experience what daily epic running would feel like. The closest I came was running two or three 20-mile-plus days in a row, which left me feeling drained and a little worried. I also started adding some big one-off practice runs, such as the thirty-five miles between Berkhampsted and Brentford along the Union Canal. Although a pretty level route, I found that this distance really challenged my energy reserves, no matter how many glucose gels I quaffed. How would I cope with making that a daily ordeal?

Ultramarathons were an important part of my preparation, as much about learning how to form mental coping strategies as anything physiological. I could have begun with one of the many 50K races around but that would only add eight kilometres to distances I’d run before and that didn’t feel a significant enough step up. I could try for a 50-miler but those seemed a little thin on the ground and the timings of the few I found didn’t suit my schedule. Instead, my first proper ultra was the London to Brighton 100K Challenge, which took place in May 2015. Hell, all I was doing was flipping the digits around on a standard marathon – sixty-two miles instead of twenty-six. How bad could that be?

The race could be walked, run as a relay or run solo. A surprising number of participants opted to go it alone. I was attracted by the organiser’s positive, inclusive message on their website – that this, although undeniably challenging, was still a distance any able-bodied person could cover, were they sufficiently prepared and motivated. I hoped I was both. I brought along a GoPro and filmed some head-mounted POV footage of the race, although I didn’t show my own face on camera much just yet. I found it by turns surprising (the friendliness of other competitors and comparatively slow pace), excruciating (I fell into a well of fatigue around 56k and suffered epic quad pains from all the hill-climbing and unexpected amount of tarmac-pounding the route required) and exhilarating (unexpected surge of power in my legs after the last two checkpoints). With something of a sprint finish at Brighton Racetrack, I crossed the line in 47th place in a time of 12 hours, 53 minutes and 7 seconds, which I thought was pretty good for a beginner. To put this into perspective, the winner’s time was 09:32:00.10

An agonising (but effective) sports massage and ten days’ rest later, I returned to training proper and then in July ran the aforementioned 24-hour event near Cirencester. My final practice race, an endlessly undulating 50-miler, took place just two weeks before the start of my challenge (perhaps unwisely close, in retrospect) around the small Scottish town of Strathaven. Again, this was an event with relay teams and solo runners (plus, unusually, many cyclists) and I was astonished to finish ninth in a time of 8 hours and 35 minutes. My satisfaction was only diminished a little when I found out later that there were only eighteen solo finishers (three other runners were timed out, which means they did not complete within an allowed cut-off).

When I limped through to Edinburgh and my parents’ house to recuperate, taper off my training and make final logistical arrangements, I felt I was as ready as I’d ever be for the adventure to come. I had few concrete expectations, except to finish within the allotted time (how naïve that little assumption seems now) and still be able to walk. I was well-trained, mentally prepared, packed and eager to begin the adventure. I had decided to call the challenge and film The Long Run; the simplicity of this title pleased me.

What could possibly go wrong?

1 - The actual most northern and southern points on the UK mainland are, respectively, Dunnet Head and Lizard Point but, really, who’s counting?

2 - www.endtoenders.com

3 - Sparks and Embers was released in the UK in one cinema on the very same day as Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Do I need to say any more? Well, perhaps a little. It was simultaneously released on various VOD platforms and on the 1st February 2016 was available on DVD. In the long run, it will probably do okay.

4 - With producer Christine Hartland and co-writer/co-director Guy Ducker.

5 - I may tell the full story later in this book. I’m not quite ready yet.

6 - Try this for instance: https://youtu.be/cpfacDbAltw

7 - www.thefruitarian.com

8 - http://gingerrunner.com/

9 - Sean’s website: http://www.seanconway.com/

10 - Russell Tapping, whose 2015 London Marathon time was an impressive 2:42:07.

SECTION ONE

Too Far North