The hour was approaching midnight as the car swept westwards along the A66. Headlights momentarily illuminated a road sign: THRELKELD. We had entered the realm of the Bob Graham Round. Wiping condensation from the windows, we looked out and up, peering into a heaving maelstrom. The darkness was vast and perpetual; Blencathra was engaged in battle with a furious monster. Someone was up there though. Someone, somewhere. A fell runner. The woman had left the traditional starting point of the Moot Hall in Keswick four hours earlier. She would have paced nervously through the alleyways of Keswick; she would have climbed the stony slopes of Skiddaw, the fourth highest ground in England, where the wind would have sought to whirl her away; she would have paused at the summit, checking her watch, making a mental note of the split; she would have dropped into a boggy trough before rising again to Great Calva, reassured by a line of old fence posts that lead the way to the cairn; she would have forded the surging River Caldew and with water slopping in her shoes started the long ascent of Blencathra. About now, she should be descending that stupendous mountain. Threlkeld waited for her, as one day it would wait for me. We looked again to where Blencathra should be, seeking the starry glare of a head torch. The car bucked. The window wipers thrummed from side to side in a frantic, thrashing action. We looked again. Nothing.
There were four of us: Robin Sanderson and his wife Shayda, Duncan Steen and me. What would Joss Naylor – whose valley we would steal into tomorrow – have made of us: an IT specialist, a tax consultant, an energy consultant and an English teacher, driving 300 miles in Friday night traffic from London, fuelled by a tray of Marks and Spencer sandwiches? Duncan and I would share a tent, pitched on liquid ground in a Borrowdale campsite in the early hours. A little over a year later, this then-stranger, who I first encountered on the forecourt of a Chiswick petrol station, would stand by my side on the summit of Robinson, the last hill on a clockwise Bob Graham, gesturing manically to the south and east, bellowing into the wind: ‘Look at these hills; you own them.’
Joined by Adam Stirk, an IT project manager, and Andy Higgins, a mechanical engineer, in the watery light of morning, we went for a run, first over a mountain pass apparently haunted by a thirteenth century ghost named Bjorn, before sweeping downhill to the single-track road that punctures Wasdale. We came to a halt by a rickety wooden gate. ‘This is it,’ Andy said knowingly. ‘It’ was the start of a path to the top of Yewbarrow, rising some 500 metres above our heads. Yewbarrow is a middle-sized Lakeland fell, overshadowed by illustrious neighbours, Great Gable and Scafell Pike. Yet in the context of the Bob Graham, Yewbarrow is an appalling proposition. Put yourself in the shoes of an aspirant. You have run continuously for 12 hours, probably through part of the night, possibly in incessant rain, over 30 peaks, including the nine highest summits in England, covering 40 miles, when you are faced with Yewbarrow – the third longest and one of the steepest ascents of the round. Attempts founder here for good reason. The fell had claimed another victim that morning: the woman we had hoped to see descending Blencathra. Somehow, she had made it this far.
We went up, first to Yewbarrow, then to wonderfully-named places like Steeple and Pillar, with rain starting to fall as we reached the pinnacle of the latter. Weather in the Lake District has a knack of accelerating in seriousness with alarming alacrity. A fine day can evolve into an abominable one with merciless speed. And so it did. Light rain became heavy rain; heavy rain became hail. Visibility of miles was curtailed to a few yards. By the time I located a waterproof jacket and turned it from inside-out while it flapped madly in the wind, I was soaked. The spare kit – hat, gloves, thermal top – contained in my rucksack was also rapidly gaining moisture. Such was my fell running naivety, the notion of placing these in a waterproof bag had not occurred. Over Pillar and on the long descent to Black Sail Pass, I began to shiver in a way I knew would only worsen. I was a featherweight then as now and the cold seemed to tear at my core, making every step a small agony. We passed a walker going up, swaying in the wind. ‘It’s gone a little bit wrong, hasn’t it?’ he yelled.
I sensed panic in the group. We had stopped eating and drinking; hunch and hope had replaced rationality. In our haste, we overshot the summit of Kirk Fell. We looked back forlornly, instantly dismissing the prospect of returning, and blundered on towards Great Gable. We had very quickly become imposters. What use was a mechanical engineer or an IT consultant or an English teacher in the chaos of a Lakeland storm? It was, in hindsight, an unwitting examination – one that we would all just about pass.
There was no requirement to proceed to Kirk Fell or Great Gable that day. We could have changed course at Black Sail Pass, retreating to the safety of valley floors at Ennerdale or Wasdale. What would have made us descend? A broken leg? Hypothermia? Concussion? Being cold, tired or disorientated were unsatisfactory excuses. Choosing what appears to be the logical or sensible option is not the prerogative of a contender seeking to accomplish a Bob Graham or Ramsay’s Round within 24 hours. Ironically, the psychologically easier solution is to continue the set course. That is when you know you are obsessed: when the chronic fear of failure overrules the urgency of common sense. So we stuck to the plan: running the entirety of the ten miles of the fourth leg, however horrible it was.
My teeth chattered as we ran in a line down Green Gable. My hands, bare and wet, were blue-white. I clapped them together, then created a cup, blowing hot air into the barrels created by my curled fingers, creating momentary relief. Once over Grey Knotts, the final summit, the land fell sharply. Ahead, the air cleared for a moment, revealing a shiny coil of the Honister road pass, only for the mist to slam its door. Seconds later, we punched through the clag. The world had come back to us. Honister lay beneath our feet.
We traipsed into the shelter of the mine museum that occupies the pass. Someone unearthed a collection of coins, enough to pay for a mug of tomato soup between the five of us. Still shuddering, I found the gents and stood slumped by the hand dryer, repeatedly pressing the button to start the air, before Andy came to tell me we had to run a further four miles to the campsite.
Many years later, Fi and I would debate the purpose of doing anything: watching television, going to work, running in the hills. ‘Because you enjoy it; there must be an element of fun,’ was her argument.
‘I don’t enjoy everything I do,’ was my retort. That exchange summarised my feelings on the Bob Graham. Having entered a circle of fascination, I could not extricate myself, even if I wanted to. Enjoyment – or lack of it – was not the point; the Bob Graham had quite unexpectedly become imprinted in my consciousness. Like Ramsay’s Round would one day be, it was a calling that demanded an answer.
Convinced they were ready – ready to respond to the mountains’ summons – Adam, Andy, Duncan and Robin, along with a single support runner, Konrad Rawlik, who had completed a solo round earlier in the year, made their attempt. At the same time, I was camping in Swanage on the south coast of England. When I went to bed that night, listening to sprinkling rain and the flapping of the canvas in the wind, I feared for them. I had seen the weather forecast.
For four hours, all was well. Then darkness dropped, and night brought a nightmare: fierce headwind, driving rain, appalling visibility. ‘We caught another group of runners at the summit of Clough Head: one guy on an attempt and a least a couple of support runners,’ Adam said. The ‘one guy’ was Bingley Harriers’ Andy Nicoll, and as the five contenders and their support descended, the pack fragmented. ‘There was practically zero visibility with it being dark and claggy, and simply too many people with headlamps to work out who was who,’ Adam remembered.
As the confusion unravelled, Adam, Andy and Duncan – who had stayed united – had no way of knowing if Robin and Konrad were in front or behind or even together, and, of course, vice-versa. Ordinarily, this would not be a problem, but the runners were not self-sufficient: Konrad was carrying all the food. ‘Once we got onto the ridge itself, conditions were unpleasant – poor visibility, windy and wet – so Konrad stopped to put his waterproof on,’ Robin said. ‘I waited briefly beside him and checked the bearing. Once Konrad and I set off, we couldn’t see the others ahead, so we trotted off briskly on the bearing I had taken to try to catch up. Konrad and I became more concerned and we pushed on faster. Our navigation turned out to be accurate, so although we didn’t realise at the time, we overtook them. We were constantly scanning the ridge for signs of head torches but the visibility was so poor it was unlikely you’d see anyone more than thirty yards away unless their torch was pointing in your direction at the time.’
The others spent an agonising fifteen minutes squatting behind a cairn waiting for Konrad and Robin, not realising they had already passed. Conditions were getting worse. ‘By now the wind was raging,’ said Duncan.
‘Stopping for that length of time in really grim conditions was the beginning of the end from a physical and mental point of view,’ Adam added.
There was no contingency plan. ‘We hadn’t made any plans for what we’d do if we got separated,’ Robin admitted. ‘Konrad and I assumed the others were still ahead, so we continued to push on; the others assumed we were behind. Unfortunately, both groups were wrong so the error was compounded.’ Robin saw sense and abandoned his attempt; Konrad went with him, descending to the road. At least they were well-fed.
The others pressed on, summiting the mountains they had to, in the teeth of a storm, arriving at Dunmail Raise in a wretched state. That they were demoralised and had haemorrhaged time was not enough to force them off the mountains – at least not yet for Andy and Duncan.
The pair walked up Steel Fell, accompanied, again, by just one pacer. Declan Phelan was a hardened Munro-bagger but unfamiliar with the Lakes and had never been on the route of the Bob Graham. ‘The three of us made it through to the Langdale Pikes,’ said Duncan, ‘but morale was pretty low.’ Andy was the first to bow to inevitability, ending his attempt at Rossett Pike. Duncan and Declan marched on to Bowfell. ‘We went pretty much straight up,’ Duncan said, ‘and had to climb a dirty gully to the top. I think being on the go for more than twelve hours in bad weather and missing an entire night’s sleep was taking its toll on my ability to navigate. At the top, we turned left and very quickly found a cairn which I assumed was the summit. Descending towards Esk Pike, the truth dawned on me: we hadn’t actually topped Bowfell, but rather a subsidiary lump to the north.’ They could not ignore the oversight like we had once on Kirk Fell; as rain continued to fall, they retraced their steps. For Duncan, it was the end: misery heaped on misery. Morale? It was gone. Duncan faced reality: he was not going to make it. ‘I was fed up with being wet and miserable, and fed up with having to try so damn hard.’
That was that. The decision made, Duncan and Declan bypassed the next three summits, continued over Scafell Pike, then eased down to Mickledore, the defile between England’s highest ground and Sca Fell, where they met Duncan’s father. Ian Steen, who had attempted to fix a rope on Broad Stand, the rock climb that offers the swiftest passage to Sca Fell, had been embroiled in his own adventure: falling in a river; attempting to climb dripping wet rock using a complicated back-roping technique to protect himself from falling; becoming mildly hypothermic; bivvying behind a rock to try to get warm. Chastened and, on this occasion, beaten, the three descended. As for Andy Nicoll? He made it.
Some find it easy to dismiss the disappointment of a failed round, regardless of the conditions. Declan Phelan later described his hours on the Lakeland fells as the ‘most grim he’d ever spent in the mountains’.
Even so, Andy struggled to find closure: ‘To say we were disappointed doesn’t do it justice. I was consumed with a sense of failure and self-pity for weeks afterwards, feeling that Mother Nature and the Bob Graham had combined forces to humiliate four experienced and determined hill runners. In a sense, they had, but they did it for our benefit. The Bob Graham deserved more respect, especially in those conditions; it is so much more than a physical challenge.’
Robin was a little more circumspect: ‘I just spent some quality time feeling grumpy.’
Robin and I made one last dash to the Lake District that year. Two days after the shortest day and two days before Christmas, it was the time of year when midwinter rounds are undertaken, with the paucity of daylight hours adding to the plethora of challenges that a late-December attempt poses. The round was attracting attention from elite ultrarunners and one of the best of them, thirty-seven-year-old Nick Clark, was in town. Kent-born Clark – who emigrated to the US in 2006 – had finished third among world-class fields in the Western States 100 and Hardrock 100, two of the planet’s toughest ultramarathons, that summer. But coming to the Lake District, Clark admitted he was ‘taking a stab in the dark’.
As he reached the summit of Skiddaw in the early hours before dawn ‘all hell broke loose’. His thoughts echoed those of many a desperate mountain runner: in poor visibility and ‘pummelling’ sleet, with rocks covered in ice, Clark began ‘to wonder what in hell’s name had I been thinking in signing up for this gig’.
The headline act of the ‘gig’ was a thaw. The Caldew was flowing hard and deep, and it took Clark 30 minutes to find a safe passage. He persisted: up Blencathra, over the Helvellyn ridge, and into the hills beyond Dunmail Raise. Clark and Bill Williamson, his support runner, had reached Scafell Pike when the ultrarunner encountered the ‘nastiest snow I’ve ever had the displeasure of moving over’. The metre-deep layer was melting on the top and bottom, leaving a freezing sandwich of slush in between. Every step held unknown peril. When Williamson screamed after sliding waist-deep into the mush, Clark thought he must have broken a leg. It was only cramp. ‘This was not a cushy carpet of pow-pow that could be ripped down with careless abandon,’ Clark said. ‘It was a dangerous freaking minefield where one wrong step could spell disaster.’
In the pitch black, with Williamson navigating, they made it into a gully that leads to Sca Fell. ‘The melt was in full effect,’ remembered Clark, ‘and we were climbing up rocky waterfalls, punching through snow up to our waists every fifth kick-in, before the final straw came for me as I dropped through a snow bridge into a snowmelt creek up to my shoulders. That was it. I was done. I wanted no more to do with this undertaking. After what seemed like an eternity, we finally gained the ridge. I tagged the summit block and then we got the hell out of Dodge.’
The attitude of the Lakes compared to Clark’s stomping ground in Colorado made up for the lack of comparative altitude, he concluded. ‘The British fells and the guys and gals who run on them are tough little buggers,’ he added.
Enter two ‘tough little buggers’.
Mike Park and Andrew Graham, both members of Cockermouth Mountain Rescue Team, set off a day later – at 8pm on the winter solstice – than Clark. At 7.35pm the next day, Graham returned. At 7.56pm – with four minutes to 24 hours – head torches were glimpsed down Keswick High Street. It was Park. He put his palm to the green door of the Moot Hall at 7.57pm.
With Robin a step behind, we marched up a gully on Steel Fell, where contours jostle like isobars in a hurricane above an ever-shrinking Dunmail Raise. Once on the undulating ground between Steel Fell and Calf Crag, we quickly learnt why two rounds so close together had experienced such mixed fortunes. The snow that blighted Clark for 40 miles had gone. The melt he had experienced had concluded. Had Clark waited 24 hours, like the mountain rescue duo, he might have succeeded.
We did an about-turn at Rossett Pike. I voiced a half-hearted suggestion to continue to Bowfell. The voice of common sense, Robin, dismissed the idea instantly. A prodigiously-white Bowfell was practically Himalayan to the eyes of runners unused to winter on the mountains. Hail chased us off Rossett Pike as we began our journey in reverse. We ate pork pies on Pike of Stickle and jogged all the way to Sergeant Man. The hills were ours. Cold and tired, we found the top of the gully on Steel Fell, paused for a moment in a still, pre-dusk chill, and plunged downhill. Ten minutes later we were driving home for Christmas.
A year to the day after I had pulled on a waterproof on Pillar, 30 seconds too late, I was in Yorkshire. The notion that if you complete a Fellsman Hike within 16 hours you can then run a 24-hour Bob Graham, had taken on the proportions of an eleventh Commandment. I had no interest in the credibility of the statement. If one led to the other, that was good enough for me. A 16-hour Fellsman is not easily won, however, and the 2012 edition of the race – a 61-mile horseshoe from Ingleton to Threshfield in the Yorkshire Dales – would be the most bruising encounter in its 50-year existence.
Conditions were not wintry and there was no snow on the hills, but a bitter wind blew persistently all day and as night crept over the Dales, the temperature nudged below freezing. A runner being airlifted off a mountain with a broken bone was always a possibility in such a long contest, but the misfortune was merely the starting point of a chain of near-cataclysmic events. At one checkpoint, 16 people were being sick; later in the day, a further 20 were hypothermic. The race was terminated for the first time in its history at 1.40am on Sunday, nearly 17 hours after it had begun. Runners were stopped at checkpoints and driven to the finish. At dawn, a competitor was plucked off a hillside suffering with wind-blindness, some five hours after the race had been halted. The organiser was in tears as she announced to those who had already finished that the rumours were true: the Fellsman had been abandoned.
At 1.40am, I was in my sleeping bag on the floor of a sports hall in Threshfield, having completed the Fellsman, while hundreds of people were still on the hills battling that crippling north-east wind and darkness. Jez Bragg, the race winner, had already tweeted that this Fellsman had been ‘the hardest race of his life’.
In a mountain ultramarathon, a point will inevitably be reached when things only get worse. After 50-something miles and approaching eleven hours of continuous running, I decided everything ached: my legs, of course, but also my arms, back, stomach, chest. My ankles throbbed; my right knee was twingeing; my feet were desperately sore; my eyelids drooped. My thoughts, inevitably, meandered to the Bob Graham. Never, I decided. No way. I cannot feel like this again. Duncan Steen and I had been together for the last eight hours and had said little beyond confirming where we were and where we were going. We were running up Great Whernside, the last significant peak, in a blustery dusk, and had retreated into our own internal worlds. Resolving that I must eat, I stuffed a custard cream in my mouth. I bit once but the cold had locked my jaw, preventing chewing. I opened my lips and allowed the wind to blow away the crumbs like dust.
We lumbered on, besieged by a howling cold, but a conclusion did not seem a reality. Something forced us on, into the night. Even when Duncan fell awkwardly over a metal fence, he wordlessly got up and started running again. I understood then why he had got as far as he did on that ill-fated Bob Graham. Our pace was inexorably slowing, but there was no collapse, no capitulation. Suddenly, wonderfully, there was road beneath our feet. We were two miles from salvation. Enthralled by the alarming brightness of a village below, I surged into incongruous civilisation, sprinting downhill, flashing past pubs and an Indian restaurant, then tumbling through the doors of Upper Wharfedale School.
Sitting on a chair in the foyer, a forearm cradling my head, I could already feel a fuzziness shadowing the ghastliness. Had it really been so bad? A week later, the experience would seem positively romantic. As I lay awake listening to ripples of snores in the school gym, I mulled over the Bob Graham – not ‘never’, I decided, but when?
Failure is intrinsically more interesting than success. Three weeks after the Fellsman, Adam, Andy and Duncan got around. There is little to say on the matter. What could have gone wrong did not. Unwilling to repeat the mistakes of the previous summer, the trio set off together but with individual support runners. By Wasdale, Duncan was almost an hour ahead after gambolling across the central leg, with Adam and Andy running within minutes of each other further back. Nothing really happened – and that is just the way you want it. The weather was benign. Injuries sustained in the build-up did not worsen. They ate, they drank, they ran. They could have wished for no more. Duncan was in the pub, having completed in 19 hours and 32 minutes, when Adam and Andy finished some 40 minutes later. For Andy, demons had been slayed: ‘I felt surprisingly calm and a strange sense of relief at completing, yet a reluctance to accept that this amazing day was over. For so long, completing the Bob Graham had been a dream. Now it was a surreal reality.’
My turn came in June. Duncan was by my side again as we jogged towards Skiddaw, torch beams thrown back at us by the clag. The light of dawn arrived on Blencathra, but the glorious daybreak I had envisaged would never materialise. Above Threlkeld, the Helvellyn range was entombed in mist. I ran on quietly, becoming morose and frustrated. ‘You’re doing really well,’ Duncan kept insisting. Inside, I was fighting an insatiable urge to escape, to stop. I simply could not fathom how tired I was. The further we ran, eventually onto the deserted plateau of Helvellyn, the deeper I became immersed in self-pity. Contemplating abandonment, I rehearsed conversations, considered the ignominy of failure.
But, like Scotland and its mountains, this was a love affair, and instinct told me to persist. Somewhere and somehow, after ten hours of running, I began to feel content. Weary, deprived of sleep, nauseous and weather-beaten – but content. As the clag began to dissolve, the Scafells rose into a blue sky. ‘You’re flying,’ Robin said, and I truly believed I was. Back in the rubble of Bowfell or Esk Pike, I had passed an invisible line, a tipping point: the moment I realised the plausibility of what I sought.
What followed was a mesmeric, euphoric high that I wished would never end. I moved quickly and freely up Yewbarrow, then onto the hills of my Lakeland baptism: Pillar, Kirk Fell and Great Gable. I did not feel weary. Movement was joyous, almost effortless. I had no sense then that at the end of this I would be unable to run without pain in the balls of my feet for the next three months. As I came off Robinson, I could not recall the Lake District or mountains anywhere ever being so serene, and on the day that time meant everything it paradoxically seemed to be suspended. Duncan shouted those words, swinging his arm in an arc: ‘You own them!’ I was back in Keswick 19 hours and 33 minutes after last being there. It was not even dark. I felt many things in the immediate moments that followed, but disappointment seemed to swallow them all: I knew I might never feel like that again.