Finlay Wild stood on the summit of Sgùrr nan Gillean, the northern culmination of the Black Cuillin of Skye. The scree fountain of Glamaig across the deep trough of Glen Sligachan gleamed in dazzling sunlight; islands punctuated the glittering glass of the Inner Sound; away in the east, Ben Nevis stared impassively. The transcendent world of the so-called Isle of Mist was at harmony. The runner was not. He looked back along the ridge he had just negotiated – an eight-mile scythe of alpine pinnacles and splintered crags, flanked by plunging gullies. There is no greater examination in British mountaineering; it is, as Sir Walter Scott noted, unrivalled in its ‘desolate sublimity’. Finlay – a twenty-nine-year-old GP from Fort William, unknown outside the clique of hill running – had beaten the ‘unbeatable’, becoming the fastest to traverse the ridge, but something did not feel right. Doubt crowded his mind.
Starting from where it had all begun on Gars-bheinn, he traced the twisting blade of the ridge, silently counting mountains. His eyes lingered on Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich, the fourth of the eleven Munro summits. A surge of uncertainty. Finlay pulled out a flip book of summit diagrams, leafing through the pages until he located Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich. He looked hard at the drawing, then raised his eyes to gaze again at the mountain. A very simple question burst from his subconscious: had he touched the pile of stones on the 948-metre highest point? He had certainly climbed the peak; the spine of the central ridge made that unavoidable. The cairn though? Had he put his hand on it?
As Finlay descended, first to a road, then along a glen, the ridge now over his left shoulder, his mind dwelt on that airy crest. While he was unable to convince himself that he had touched the cairn, nor could he be sure he had not. His parents and a group of friends were waiting at Glenbrittle, ready to congratulate him. ‘I wasn’t, “yeah, I’ve done it”,’ Finlay remembered. ‘I said that I’ve kind of done it, but I need to check something. Basically, I got away from there as soon as I could and walked back up to the summit. That gave me time to think: what will I do if I haven’t touched it?’
Finlay clambered into the glaciated bowl of Coire Làgan, where vast chutes of scree cascade from a cirque of astonishing mountains. To the right was Sgùrr Alasdair, the acme of Skye; to the left, the shark’s fin of the Inaccessible Pinnacle; between them was the steep sliver of Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich, its west face forming the gigantic headwall of Coire Làgan. Scrambling up West Buttress, he made directly for the summit. Once on the ridge, the vista opened: mountains were everywhere; Rum reared immaculate from the sea. It was the sort of day when you may have been able to glimpse the dark dots of the St Kilda archipelago, pitched some 100 miles to the west, jostled by the Atlantic swell.
Finlay was only looking to a summit of slabby rocks. Concreted to the cairn on Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich is a sixty-year-old plaque dedicated to climber Lewis Macdonald. Before it was shattered by lightning, a couplet read: ‘To one whose hands these rocks has grasped, the joys of climbing unsurpassed.’ Finlay knew before he got there. Unlike Macdonald, he had not grasped these rocks.
Desperately searching for a reason, Finlay began to piece together what had happened, why it had happened. He had approached the summit on a marginally different line to previous ascents – a common occurrence on the technical ground of the Cuillin. The newness must have momentarily disorientated him. Unconsciously, Finlay ran past the top, his mind already preparing for the difficulties ahead, principally the basalt-rudder of the Inaccessible Pinnacle and the six-storey down-climb from its top. The summit of Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich had been ten metres away, amounting to a single metre of height gain. ‘Five seconds,’ Finlay said ruefully.
The Alps were mastered a century before the Cuillin. While man summited Mont Blanc in 1786, the first documented ascent of Sgùrr Alasdair was by Sheriff Alexander Nicolson, Scotland’s original mountain guide, in 1873. ‘I have seen worse places,’ Nicolson would report. As John Mackenzie, another Skye mountaineer, would give his name to Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich, Nicolson would lend his to Sgùrr Alasdair.
The apparently unreachable top of Sgùrr Dearg – known as the Inaccessible Pinnacle – would only be breached in 1880. It was as if the mountains of Skye were the personification of hostile beings, infuriated by the intrusion of man. Throwing down loose rock as they ascended the Inaccessible Pinnacle, Charles and Lawrence Pilkington, two brothers from Lancashire, said the ‘very rock of the pinnacle itself seemed to vibrate with indignation at our rude onslaught’.
The world was preparing for the Great War when the first continuous traverse of the Cuillin ridge was accomplished by Leslie Shadbolt and Alastair McLaren in 1911. Starting at 3.30am on Gars-bheinn and pausing on Sgùrr Dearg to light their pipes, the crossing lasted 12 hours and 20 minutes, turning ‘dreams of the winter fireside’ into a scarcely believable reality. Howard Somerville completed a solo expedition in 10 hours three years later, inspiring a pattern of unaccompanied traverses that would extend into the twenty-first century. Mountaineers had nudged the record down to 6 hours and 45 minutes when, in the 1960s, the approach to the traverse was revolutionised by a hill runner. Born in Leeds, a school leaver at fourteen and not a runner until he was twenty-four, Eric Beard was absorbed in a prolific year of endurance mountain running when he came to Skye. In 1963, he established records for the Cairngorm 4,000s, the Arrochar Munros, the Welsh 3,000s and broke Alan Heaton’s Lakeland 24-hour record, scaling 56 peaks. Employing the fast and light approach of the hill runner, Beard demolished the Cuillin ridge record too, slashing the benchmark to 4 hours and 9 minutes. Beardie, as he was known, was a one-off: an athlete fuelled by honey sandwiches who once connected the highest summits of Scotland, England and Wales in a ten-day run, and who was killed in a car accident at thirty-eight.
Fittingly, the record stood for nearly two decades, and when it was broken by Andy Hyslop, he could only shave off five minutes. Like Beard, Hyslop was a man of obsessional zeal. He would lower the time on two further occasions, spanning four months in 1994, with the second crossing only 35 seconds faster than the first, and in doing so enshrined, for himself and future contenders, what a traverse should constitute. According to Hyslop, not only must the route visit eleven Munros and two additional summits, but four main climbing sections should not be bypassed.
In the era when a traverse of the Cuillin had seemed as unfathomable as scaling the Inaccessible Pinnacle had once been, rock climbing pioneer George Abraham speculated on who could possibly achieve the feat: ‘He would need to have exceptional physique and staying power,’ as well as ‘intimate knowledge of the entire range’. While Hyslop – who had spent part of the summer the year prior to his record climbing in California, notably conquering the formidable El Cap in a day – fitted the criteria, he lacked, by his own concession, the pure hill running ability of an ‘elite’ athlete.
Up stepped Es Tresidder, a climber and mountaineer, but also – having earned a Scotland vest in 2006 – an international-standard hill runner. In the style of Beard, he devoured the record, completing the traverse in what was considered to be an ‘unbeatable’ 3 hours and 17 minutes. Crossing the ridge in a cloud inversion and finishing above a brocken spectre, Tresidder was ‘running in heaven’. Asked if he knew anyone capable of an even faster time, he said: ‘There aren’t that many people with the right mixture of abilities, so I can’t think of anyone at the moment.’ It was May 2007, four months before Finlay Wild’s fourth-placed finish at Ben Nevis as a twenty-two-year-old would announce his arrival at the top table of British hill running.
As he paused on the summit of Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich, 102 years after Shadbolt and McLaren’s dreams were realised, Finlay’s own dream hinged on a decision of conscience. ‘The weird thing was that I knew I had done it, but at the same time, parallel to that, I knew I couldn’t claim it the way I had done it,’ he said. Finlay could have been excused for erring, for prevaricating. It was five seconds. The oversight was not deliberate. He had done everything else by the book: adhering to the Hyslop standards; taking splits at every summit on two watches. In races and mountain marathons there are marshals or checkpoints to ensure competitors do not – for want of a better word – cheat. ‘No-one is policing this traverse,’ Finlay said. ‘These things are done on trust. It’s totally on your own conscience.’ Ultimately, there was no doubt, no debate. By strict definition, he had not summited Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich, and if he had not summited Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich, he had not traversed the ridge. There could be no record. Not today.
It was a gesture that symbolised the ethos of his sport: nothing was more important than doing things the right way.
Finlay was frustrated, of course, but the outlet for such emotions was obvious: he would do it again.
He did not wait long. The traverse-that-was-not had only to remain secret for an anxious week, for Finlay was back on the echoing mountain of Gars-bheinn the very next weekend, ready to climb again, in Nicolson’s words, the ‘peaks to the clouds that soar’. Such was Finlay’s eagerness to bury the memory of that momentary lapse on Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich, he allowed optimism to rule his mind, deciding to attempt in inauspicious conditions: a ridge immersed in mist. Even at Bruach na Frithe, the third from last summit, he was down on Tresidder’s pace. Finlay rallied, stopping the clock on Sgùrr nan Gillean after 3 hours and 14 minutes. The record was his.
It did not end there.
What came next was not motivated by greed or foolish ambition. Finlay knew he could go faster, knew that perhaps he could close the gap to the ‘fabled’ three-hour barrier. So why not try again? This time he would wait for optimum weather.
The story of that next traverse was filmed by his father and mountain guide Roger Wild. First, on the day before, we see a car driven by Finlay approaching Sligachan. The Cuillin are silhouetted against a cloudless sky, while a glinting October sun throws shafts of low light across the island. Then, morning: Roger pans the camera around flawless mountains, before catching Finlay’s slow trudge towards Gars-bheinn. Next, they are on the summit. Finlay, bare-footed, straps a bandage to his left foot, pulls on the sock, then the shoe. He takes a swig of water, then repeats the routine on the right.
‘Rock looks dry,’ Roger remarks. ‘It’s a nice cool wind, but not too cold.’
As he ties a lace, something on Finlay’s wrist catches his attention. ‘I’ve got a tick on me,’ he says, plucking it off with a forefinger and thumb.
‘It might be the fastest tick to ever do the traverse of the Cuillin ridge,’ Roger quips.
As the minutes to midday go by, Finlay, in front of an extraordinary backdrop of mountains, islands and ocean, does a series of lunging stretches. He adjusts his shoes one final time. Roger steps back from the summit to film the departure. Finlay is outlined against the sea. With one hand on the cairn, he pushes off and is running.
‘Have a good one,’ his father calls after him.
Finlay’s movements are less of a run, more of a leap. Like the monarch of the glen, he seems to belong in a high, wild world. The camera follows the initial minutes of the traverse, watching the runner becoming ever smaller until he is swallowed by the monstrous enormity of the Cuillin. ‘At times the desolation of the Coolins is positively repellent,’ the travel writer Alasdair Alpin MacGregor noted in 1926. ‘There is nothing here but trackless wastes and a colossal welter of rocks and mountains.’ As for Finlay, he saw only the beauty of opportunity.
By Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich, he was nine minutes up on his schedule. He consciously touched the cairn and descended. Two climbing sections, the Inaccessible Pinnacle and Naismith’s Route on the Bhàsteir Tooth, remained. Finlay’s familiarity with the ridge mitigated the potential for accident, but he feared the things he could not control. If he were held up or stopped by others on the technical parts of the ridge, the attempt was over. Coincidentally, he knew a group of friends were in Skye that weekend and as he approached the Thearlaich-Dubh Gap – like a missing tooth, a sheer cleft in the ridge – before Sgùrr Alasdair, he could see them ahead. ‘I got there just before they started abseiling,’ Finlay recalled. ‘If I had been five minutes later, they would have been abseiling where I needed to down-climb. To clear the area may have taken an hour. I don’t know what I would have done. I might have stopped.’ It was a good omen. To go faster than he or anyone else had gone before demanded tens of thousands of perfect moments: every foot strike of the rock, every handhold, every thought, be it cognisant or instinctive.
The perfect moments continued. Chain-eating jelly babies, Finlay felt ‘free and flying’. Not only was the record going to fall, the runner sensed he could breach three hours for a journey that was once deemed impossible and will still take a confident scrambler two days of stupefying exposure split by an overnight camp.
‘For at least the last hour, I was chasing sub-three,’ he said. ‘Not in a crazed sprint but a persistent push. I had learnt this over many hill races and thought I had enough fuel in the tank. I got to the top of Am Bàsteir and had just over ten minutes to do it. I could get there. Push. More jelly babies. My route up Sgùrr nan Gillean could have been ten seconds shorter but it was okay. Keep pushing. I was breathing hard and my knees were aching from all the high stepping. It didn’t matter.’ As the moments before three hours melted, he stepped onto the last summit. He had made it with 38 seconds to spare. ‘I knew I had done it. No doubts about summits touched, or route taken,’ he said. As he had done four months earlier, Finlay surveyed the ridge, counting off each top, but this time he ‘did some shouting’.
Those almost-but-gloriously-not-quite-three halcyon hours on the Cuillin, the day Finlay Wild’s stars aligned, loom large above everything else. ‘Cuillin dreaming,’ he calls it. For Finlay, the traverse provided the ultimate synthesis of mountaineering and running – his ‘biggest strength as an outdoors person’. Going far beyond the physical, however, the ridge is an emblematic representation of his past, present and future. His first experience of the Cuillin – as part of Aberdeen University’s Lairig Club – was characterised by ‘bad weather, scrambles and trying to climb’. Later, when Finlay was twenty and working at Ellis Brigham in Fort William in the summer between his second and third years at university, a ‘weather window’ opened. Successfully begging time off, Roger and Finlay travelled to Skye, Motown music blaring from the car stereo. Up before dawn, father and son climbed Gars-bheinn by a direct route featuring a series of ledges. When Finlay emerged on the crest, he was ‘blown away by how amazing it was. It remains my favourite view.’ Eight hours later, they were on Sgùrr nan Gillean. They descended via Coire na Creiche, down which a crashing burn creates a series of deep, ice-cold baths known as the Fairy Pools. ‘We swam in the pools, looking back at the Cuillin having completed this great mission,’ Finlay said. ‘I just felt privileged.’
Finlay went back, this time on his own, this time in five-and-a-half hours. He continued to visit, becoming increasingly accustomed to the mountains, even in mist, and got ‘faster and faster’. The Cuillin were no longer capricious protuberances of basalt and gabbro that sent compasses into a spinning frenzy; they were tapestries of his knowhow and growing expertise, with every excursion layering fresh appreciation to his proficiency. He would traverse the ridge four times in 2013, culminating in his record, with a four-hour crossing preceding his ‘failed’ attempt.
With Suzy, his girlfriend, he goes back every January, when the Black Cuillin are white, to simply ‘run about’. He will always return: for pleasure, to breathe the spotless air of Skye, to stare in wonder at the world, or perhaps if someone dare take his record. And one day, just one day, he might stand at Glenbrittle with his own children, and point to the mountains that have ‘no equal in the world’. He will identify the jagged outline of Gars-bheinn. Then he will tell a story that will make them quiver.
Positioned on opposite sides of Finlay’s living room at his home in Inverlochy (the interwar extension to Fort William originally intended for workers at the town’s aluminium smelter, and less than two miles from the start of the pony track to Ben Nevis) are two mountain paintings. On the left is Stac Pollaidh, imagined as a blue-lipped silhouette against a yellow sky. To the right is a deep blue Coire Mhic Fhearchair on Beinn Eighe, framed by an orange firmament. The creator of this ‘psychedelic mountain art’ is sitting before me. I had previously seen the images on display at the John Muir Trust’s Wild Space Gallery in Pitlochry as part of an eight-week exhibition called Kaleidoscape. ‘His paintings feature Scottish mountains – his first love as a mountaineer and hill runner – which he depicts in stylised block colour using the energy and passion he draws on when running,’ the exhibition blurb had explained. I had asked the woman staffing the gallery how many pictures had been sold. ‘One. Just one. If you ask me,’ she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, ‘they are quite expensive.’ The two pictures in Finlay’s living room were priced at a combined cost of £1,500 – which goes a long way to explaining why they are on his walls, not someone else’s.
‘I only sold one,’ Finlay says. I feign surprise. ‘I didn’t want them to all disappear, so I put the prices pretty high.’ With that reasoning, it is unsurprising that his top-valued painting at £1,000 was of Bla Bheinn, a Skye mountain.
‘The colours,’ I ask, ‘is that how you see the mountains?’ The question came with an unintended barb – a cruel interrogation of a man of obvious modesty. After all, there have been numerous occasions when I have seen hills dressed in countless shades of humble green and brown. Just an hour earlier, before a billion stars were pricking the sky over Glen Nevis, I had seen Ben Nevis spotlighted in an auburn glow. Finlay, on his cycle home from the medical practice where he works as a GP, had noticed it too.
They are ‘silly bright colours’, he admits, ‘but because I’m not a traditional artist, it kind of frees me up to do what I want – which is what the mountains are like, because you can go and do whatever you want.’
The artwork treads a delicate balance between realism and abstract. Some of the paintings are obscure; some more obvious, perhaps most explicitly a dark blue Ben Nevis behind a green Carn Mòr Dearg. The sky is on fire – a red and yellow aether flecked with black and white. In another, the North Face of the Ben is red and black, saturated with a demonic air.
Finlay could paint the Ben upside down and decorate it with pink polka dots. He has earned the right, for this has become his mountain, a mountain he first encountered aged eight. Shortly after moving to Fort William, Finlay and a childhood friend, under the auspices of Roger, spent a night at the Charles Inglis Clark Memorial Hut, a brick building buried beneath the sweep of the arête that connects Carn Mòr Dearg and Ben Nevis. ‘I remember it being so exciting because we were staying in a mountain hut, then we weren’t just going up the tourist route, we were going up a climb,’ Finlay says. The trio would summit the Ben by Ledge Route, an easy scramble on a north-east ridge. Some twenty-five years later, he might have imagined crossing the path of his eight-year-old self – wearing a thick knitted sweatshirt that made him feel ‘like a real mountaineer’ – on Ledge Route, as he plunged downhill on part of a route known as the Nevis Five Ridges. Beginning at sea level, Finlay ran into the shadow of the renowned North Face, and moved onto the prow of North East Buttress. From the top, he came down Tower Ridge, then up Observatory Ridge, down Ledge Route, and up Castle Ridge, before returning to the start. It was classic Finlay, existing in an intoxicating world between running, mountaineering and climbing, teetering on the edge of breathless risk, and, inevitably, doing it faster than anyone else.
Long before Finlay had scrambled up Ledge Route to gain Ben Nevis for the first time, he was absorbed by mountains. It was in the blood that pumped through his veins. His mother, Fiona Wild, won Yorkshire’s Three Peaks Race in 1981, and back-to-back Carnethy 5 races in 1981 and 1982. Fiona, wearing the blue and white of Lochaber Athletic Club, was also twice second woman in the Ben Nevis Race, again in her peak years of 1981 and 1982. Finlay would be born at Thurso on a Saturday in 1984, a week after the Keswick fell runner Kenny Stuart set a course record at Ben Nevis.
There are photographs of Finlay in a baby carrier being lugged up hills on his father’s back. When Roger was guiding in the Alps, the family would join him. ‘I remember going to huts and holding an ice axe,’ Finlay says. Back in Fort William, he attended a running club at school. Aged fifteen, Finlay asked Roger to teach him to lead rock climb – a ‘terrifying prospect’ for the father of a teenager, he remembers. A Lochaber childhood, for Finlay, meant a life in the outdoors. In the summer, he and his high school mates would ride their bikes up the glen, then camp under the gaze of Ben Nevis. When he was not on a hill or looking up at one from a saddle, he was sailing a dinghy on Loch Linnhe.
A seed was sown, but if there was to be a turning point, an epiphany – a moment when passing interest became lifelong fascination – it came at the impressionable age of seventeen. As he had done many times before, Finlay went up Glen Nevis looking for adventure. Two mountains that rear above the glen, the Ramsay’s Round peaks of Binnein Mòr and Binnein Beag, seemed to be calling. ‘It wasn’t particularly hard, but it was the first time I thought, I’m going to do this on my own. I just took to it.’ Then, for someone with vaulting ambition in the mountains, running up them was the logical progression, enabling Finlay to go ‘a bit further, a bit faster’.
He ran his first hill race in 2005, finishing tenth in Speyside whisky country at Ben Rinnes, some 17 minutes slower than the winner, far enough back to make the twenty-year-old’s presence of little note.
‘When did you realise you were good at this?’ I ask.
Finlay paused for several seconds, searching for the right words. He was too polite to simply dismiss my questions. ‘I don’t think I ever felt like that,’ he says.
An answer emerges, framed around a race on Morven, an Aberdeenshire mountain immortalised in verse by Lord Byron: ‘When I rov’d a young Highlander o’er the dark heath, / And climb’d thy steep summit, oh Morven of snow.’
There was no snow that September, two years after his Ben Rinnes debut, but Finlay’s prize for finishing third was a voucher. ‘I got a book about the Cairngorms from some wee shop in Aboyne. It’s up there,’ he says, pointing to a shelf. ‘I was dead chuffed with that.’
He was not a prolific racer in the early days, preferring ‘big, hard days’ of running and climbing, seemingly saving his all-out effort for Ben Nevis. As they warmed up for the Ben, English hill runners would tease Finlay about his lack of participation in the season’s other races. He was 13th on his debut in 2006, fourth in 2007, fifth in 2009. The 2008 race – the only event Finlay had missed in eleven years – coincided with a post-university sabbatical of nine months in the west of Canada and the USA. It was a pilgrimage to the outdoors: he climbed at Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Red Rocks and Squamish; he ice-climbed in Colorado and Wyoming; he ski-toured in the high mountains of the Rockies.
He had seen the world, but there was no place like Fort William, especially on the first Saturday in September. Finlay’s Ben Nevis graduation, the beginning of the Wild dynasty, came on his fourth attempt in 2010. I was there that day. It would take me 1 hour and 19 minutes to reach the summit. I was only halfway. Finlay would finish the course in 1 hour and 34 minutes, which, by his future racing standards, was slow. My memories of Ben Nevis and the agony of it all have thankfully fogged. I recall sunshine and concentration and rocks and Finlay Wild. I was still some ten minutes from the summit when the race leader galloped downhill, stones flying around his ankles. In a moment, he was gone.
A period of domination unprecedented in such a major hill running race followed. Through a combination of luck – having never been injured pre-race or falling on a descent – and simple brilliance, he had won seven in a row. His success was built on an ability to descend faster than anyone else, even the cream of English fell racers who flock to the Ben every year, a trick stunningly exemplified in the 2014 race. It was what had got David Gallie so animated in an Inverness café – the day he had seen a human fly. Rob Jebb had accrued a seemingly unassailable lead, and as Finlay began the descent, he did not spare a thought for the leader; he was fixated on getting to the finish in the shortest possible time. If catching Jebb was a consequence, then so be it.
‘I have always thought that it’s a race against yourself,’ Finlay says. ‘At the top, you don’t know how far ahead they are, you can’t see them, you’re not really thinking about them. You’re thinking: I have to get down this hill as fast as I can. You’re going as fast as you think is reasonable to sustain, but not hurt yourself.’ He shrugs. ‘I don’t know why I’m good at running downhill. I haven’t done downhill reps or anything. I think it’s because I have always been in the hills, scrambling, on bikes, out in winter with a big bag, and by just being out in all these terrains, my body knows what to do. I can remember when I was about twenty or twenty-one doing the South Glen Shiel ridge with a friend and I was jumping between rocks, boulder-hopping, and loving it, and thinking, this is what it’s all about. I enjoy that. You forget about the cardiovascular part of running and just have to concentrate on what you’re doing.’
Perhaps Finlay could run the Cuillin ridge even faster? It would not matter, for his legend is built on Ben Nevis. The race is what he will always be known for. He will probably be turning on the Christmas lights in Fort William in 2040 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his first win. He has raced all over Scotland, winning the races that ring with import – Glamaig, Isle of Jura, Stùc a’ Chroin, Goatfell, Ben Rinnes (seven years after scraping into the top ten), and Slioch – and just about everything in the Lochaber postcode area. But it is Ben Nevis that casts the rest in shadow. As it should. Here is a context the non-hill runner can understand. Because of that, the race and the mountain – and therefore its hero – transcend a sport. Hundreds of thousands of people have journeyed up and down the Ben, each with their own motivation. They will have slogged up, along the seemingly endless zig-zags, into portentous mist, glimpsed the outline of the ruined observatory, then – at last – found the roof of a country. It will be several hours before they get back down. They might never exert themselves like this again. Tell these mortals that one of their own species, a man called Finlay, can match what they have done in 1 hour and 28 minutes, and they are slack-jawed in astonishment.
And so, every year, as September nears, at the approaching sight of Finlay, visitors to his surgery, acquaintances in the town’s High Street and clubmates at Lochaber training sessions will have the words ‘Ben’ and ‘Nevis’ on their lips. ‘I do other races as well, you know,’ Finlay laughs. ‘And I’m British champion – or I was.’
It takes Finlay fifteen minutes of easy running to get to the foot of Ben Nevis from his front door. Blaenau Ffestiniog in north-west Wales, the location of the first race in the 2015 British hill running championship, is seven hours by car and 400 miles from Inverlochy. Finlay had finished equal second – behind Jebb – in 2013, while his tilt at the 2014 title ended in clag on Slieve Donard. First-hand experience of the mountains in Lochaber was key to his success locally, but a dearth of knowledge of courses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland was his undoing in previous championship assaults.
He arrived in Blaenau Ffestiniog early, giving him enough time for a ‘good long look at the course’ of Ras y Moelwyn. He deciphered the lines he would run, located the checkpoints, worked out the best way to cross the bands of slate. Finlay would win comfortably, more than three minutes ahead of his nearest rival. Such dominance might have prompted complacency, but on the long journey north, he left the M6 and set a course for the Lake District. The destination was Wasdale, the valley imbued by the spirit of England’s greatest fell runner, a man dubbed ‘Iron’: Joss Naylor. The Scafell massif and Great Gable stand imperiously above Wasdale, but Lingmell, one of the 214 fells celebrated by Alfred Wainwright and the location of the third championship race, was his reason for being here. As he had done in Blaenau Ffestiniog, he ran the race route, committing to memory the unrelenting climb from valley to summit, and got back in his car. This time, nothing would be left to chance.
Durisdeer in the Borders came first. Knowing the amount of ‘flat running’ would not suit his strengths, Finlay relied on guile. On the descent from the first peak, when the leaders went one way, Finlay went another, the move propelling him from sixth to first. Tom Owens would win, but in the context of the championship, second place for Finlay would suffice. He celebrated in fine hill running tradition – with cake. ‘There were angel cakes, rock cakes, fruit cakes, every type of cake,’ Finlay remembers.
Back in Wasdale a month later, Finlay knew he could not let the fast ascenders get too far ahead before the fifteen-minute mad dash to lose 800 vertical metres. He had not had a straightforward build-up: the doctor had become a patient. A calf strain sustained ten days before the race resulted in Finlay ‘frantically’ calling on massage and physiotherapy. On race day, he wore an elasticated bandage stretching from foot to knee. The sight must have given a glimmer of hope to the others. Fifth at the summit, Finlay pushed downhill, overhauling everyone except Simon Bailey – a Mercia runner who was not a threat in the overall standings. The monarch of the glen was a champion. The champion would then meet another: Joss Naylor was handing out the prizes. ‘I don’t think he knew who I was,’ Finlay admits.
The Seven Sevens in Northern Ireland was the final event of the championship series, but with only three finishes out of the four races to count, Finlay did not even need to go. Besides, the race was in mid-August, three weeks before Ben Nevis. He would save his legs.
‘There’s no training regime,’ Finlay promised.
‘None?’
‘None.’ I was disappointed. I was hoping he might whisper the secret of a British hill racing champion into my ear and I would be transported to a similar plateau of greatness.
‘I’m pretty low-tech with my training. I go for long runs in the hills. I go mountain biking. I climb. I might do a jog with Suzy. Go for a walk. It all feeds in. I use running to switch off. At work, I’m thinking about complex, analytical problems. When I go running, I don’t need to think.’ He pauses. A but is coming. ‘Arguably, I could be better.’
Malcolm Patterson, one of the selectors for the Scottish hill running teams, once told Finlay the Cuillin traverse was something he could do at ‘any age’, and that he should concentrate on running fast while he was young.
Finlay runs his fingers through his hair. ‘I just don’t feel that way. That is what I want to do, so why wouldn’t I do it now?’
He works part-time, clocking in for three-and-a-half days. Why does he not work full-time?
He smiles incredulously. ‘Why? So, I can do other stuff – like go running and go to the mountains. I’m lucky that money-wise, because of my job, I don’t need to be full-time. Even before I went to medical school, going out in the mountains and having adventures was as important as doing medicine or any career aspirations.’
Finlay motions to a clutch of awards perched on top of a wardrobe. A trio of Ben trophies – first to the summit, first local, first place – are not among them. They are being looked after by Roger and Fiona who carried them home while Finlay celebrated yet another victory in Fort William. Apart from the silverware, there is little to identify Finlay’s home as the resting place of a hill runner, let alone a champion – a line of running shoes by the front door excepted. There are shelves of books, many of them about running and climbing, but also the classics of English literature. Three guitars point to a musical streak: Finlay played the saxophone, electric guitar and viola at school. After making me a mug of tea, he asked if I wanted more, if I wanted water, if I wanted food. His phone repeatedly bleeped in our time together. He ignored it. There was no television. A wood burning stove stood where a set might.
I am standing to leave when he points to a quaich on the living room table. The bowl was a gift from Lundavra Primary, a newly-opened school in Fort William that was created out of the amalgamation of two primaries, Fort William, Finlay’s old school, and Upper Achintore. At the opening ceremony, the pupils sang the school song, Give it all you’ve got. Finlay then ran a mile with the children as part of a national ‘daily mile’ initiative encouraging children to be more active. ‘Everyone should do this,’ Finlay enthuses. ‘Change the Scottish couch potato reputation!’
I realise we have spoken predominately about records and elitism, but the quaich seems to represent what really matters. In the words of the school song: ‘Give it all you’ve got, ‘cause you’ve really got a lot! Give it heart, give it mind, give it soul, don’t stop!’
Being the fastest person up and down the Ben this century, being the swiftest to traverse the Cuillin ridge, being Scotland’s pre-eminent hill runner – they were the consequence of the cocktail of heart, mind and soul and, perhaps most importantly, never stopping.
I sense he would swap it all simply to be able to go to the hills, to find a fundamental pleasure in high places.
Finlay was once running on Meall an t-Suidhe, a heathery lump overlooked by Ben Nevis, when he noticed pairs of stags and hinds, pacing across the hillside. The runner joined the dance. ‘For a few seconds, it almost felt like I was running with them,’ he says. ‘I suppose that sums it up for me: to be a moving element within the landscape.’
We all have our place. This is the place of the monarch of the glen.