Colin Donnelly cannot believe his eyes. The runner in front is inexorably slowing. His legs are faltering. Step by step, Colin is catching the leader. The gap narrows and slams shuts. They run shoulder to shoulder. Colin glances sideways at his rival – and accelerates. He looks back. He is clear. There is no second wind from the man now in second. Colin leaves the road and careers into the finish area, surging around a grass track. The crowd clap and cheer – they have not seen a Scotsman win here for eleven years – but wonder, who is this – boy? He breaks the tape. Moments after, he is photographed. Staring ahead, Colin is dazed and bewildered, and in pain. His feet would later be treated for bad blistering. Two dignitaries appear to be holding him up, with Colin oblivious to their presence. The truth begins to sink in: scarcely a year out of school and still a teenager, he has won the greatest prize in British hill running. He joins the ranks of immortals. He is a champion of Ben Nevis.
To win Ben Nevis is to take a seat among hill running royalty: Eddie Campbell, who prevailed three times in the 1950s; five-time 1970s conqueror Dave Cannon; Bob Graham record holder Billy Bland; mountain running’s greatest rivals, Kenny Stuart and John Wild; Pauline Stuart, the fastest woman; Rob Jebb who won four, Angela Mudge five, Ian Holmes six, Ros Evans seven; Finlay Wild, the monarch of the glen, the undisputed king of the Ben.
The race is the purest in Britain: a straight up, straight down, no-nonsense affair, beginning from virtually sea level, climbing – as Charles Steel noted in his one shilling, 1956 short history The Ben Nevis Race – ‘to the highest point in Her Majesty’s British Islands.’ This is Ben Nevis: the magnet to 200,000 visitors every year; the mountain every British school child can name; ‘arguably the most dangerous mountain in Europe,’ according to Hugh Dan MacLennan, the race’s biographer.
Starting from the grass of Claggan Park, runners dash along a mile of road before joining the tourist track that skirts Meall an t-Suidhe as it rises above Glen Nevis. The race leaves the pony track at Red Burn, the watercourse that drains the western aspect of the Ben, to climb steep, bare slopes of rock. It is interminable. ‘Strength of muscle and physical endurance are qualities which seldom fail to call forth admiration; but when these are employed in foolhardy and dangerous exploits, their possessor is surely acting in opposition to the laws of nature,’ wrote William Kilgour after witnessing William Swan’s timed run in 1895. Kilgour had a point. From Claggan Park to the summit, Finlay Wild will typically take around an hour to run four-and-a-half miles of continuous uphill. After passing Red Burn, the last mile-and-a-half to the summit climbs at an average gradient of almost 30 per cent. ‘Foolhardy . . . dangerous . . . in opposition to the laws of nature.’ You bet it is.
Only the summit plateau, yards from the cliffs of the sheer north face, offers a short respite from remorseless ascent. Relieved to have made it this far, you might relax for a moment – a time ripe for spraining an ankle in the litter of rocks. Ben Nevis never gets easier; it just gets a little less hard. Nor is there a moment to appreciate the view, even if there is one. Very soon, you are going down – and the real suffering begins. After I raced at Ben Nevis for the first time, Steven McIntyre, an Inverness Harriers clubmate, removed his shoes in Claggan Park to reveal the skin on both heels had blistered, then detached from his feet, like slices of cheese being removed from a block. He cut away the skin, enough to cover an apple, and dressed his feet. Later that day, he would begin a 13-hour shift in his job as an operating theatre technician. ‘Just for a laugh,’ he told me years later, ‘I sent my brother in Glasgow the dead heel skin in the post. He said he was going to send it on to one of his friends, and they would keep it going. I don’t know where my heels are now.’
It was late August in 1979 when Colin Donnelly came to Fort William. He was on the cusp of beginning his second year of study at Aberdeen University. He had climbed the Ben once before – as a walker aged twelve with his father. On the Thursday before the race, he asked Lochaber runner Ronnie ‘Cammy’ Campbell to show him the course. Campbell pointed out some ‘short cuts’, but the mountain remained a virtual stranger.
The precocious teenager led a field of 365 at the summit, but he knew what was to come. Not far behind the Scotsman were two Englishmen, Billy Bland and Brian Robinson. The former had won the previous year’s race in what was then the second fastest time. Sure enough, Robinson first, then Bland, edged by on the descent. Although relegated to third, Colin was content: ‘I didn’t feel any pressure because I thought, Billy’s here, Robinson’s here, there’s plenty of people who can beat me. I’m not going to win. If I get in the top four or five, that’s fine, that’s all I’m looking for.’
Having nipped in front of Robinson where the route momentarily climbs from a burn, Bland was racing down the tourist track when disaster struck: he slipped on an aluminium bridge, gashing an arm so severely it would require fourteen stitches at Belford Hospital in Fort William. Colin, inadvertently elevated to second, ran on, down the tourist track. Robinson had been a ‘good way ahead’ at Red Burn, but the chaser ‘really started to shift’, wrote Roger Boswell in The Fellrunner. Down the path, unbeknown to Colin, Robinson, like many others in the humid conditions, was wilting.
‘A lot of people are going strong until they hit that road, and then their legs just go,’ Colin says, ‘and that’s what happened to Brian. I thought, hang on a minute, what’s going on here? I’m catching up. He’s not going very fast. I overtook him.’
Boswell noted, creating a new word in the process: ‘Robinson had no reply to Donnelly’s pace on that tarmackiller mile, conceding over a minute.’
‘It’s like you are in a position of disbelief,’ says Colin. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m not expecting to be at the front. The Ben Nevis Race.’ His pitch rises with relived excitement. ‘It’s legendary. I’m in front. That was some feeling, one of the best feelings I’ve ever had in my life.’
Colin did not get the chance to defend his crown in 1980; the race was cancelled for the first and only time. The start had been delayed for thirty minutes – even though the runners had already been piped to the start – when referee Tom Mackenzie made an historic announcement: ‘The police and medical authorities, taking note of conditions on the hill as reported by the mountain rescue, advise us that anyone getting into difficulties would be dead within twenty-five minutes. Gentlemen, we cannot take that chance with your lives. The 1980 Ben Nevis Race is cancelled.’ In addressing the ‘gentlemen’, Mackenzie had overlooked the female runners – fourteen of them – who were among the field, two years before they were even allowed to be ‘official’ competitors.
‘They were quite right to call it off,’ Colin said in the aftermath. ‘I am sure there would have been broken limbs.’
Not everyone agreed, notably Billy Bland: ‘They should have advised us of the situation and left it to us.’ In protest, Eddie Campbell and eight others ran the race route anyway, reaching the top and reporting conditions as ‘flat calm’ – effectively demonstrating how understatement in the face of adversity and reason is an essential quality of the hill runner.
Colin Donnelly grew up a ‘typical Glasgow teenager’ in the suburb of Newton Mearns, playing football at school and supporting Celtic, although his secondary education was spent away at a Dumfries boarding school. Having started running to keep fit, Colin realised he had found his calling. ‘When I started to do it regularly – because people didn’t in those days – I began to win things and do well. I remember winning a county cross-country and thinking, I am not super-duper, I am just one of those people who probably trains three or four times a week.’ As a novice runner with ‘lots of raw talent’, he would later join Cambuslang Harriers, winning the Galloway and Renfrewshire Schools under-19 cross-country championship.
Even as a teenager, Colin did not like being told what to do. ‘They were trying to push me onto the track when I was a youngster. I had heard about a race on Ben Lomond and I thought, if I tell them I’m doing that, I’ll get out of this bloody track race. I don’t like track races, never have.’ For a moment, he sounds like Finlay Wild: ‘What’s the point in doing something you don’t enjoy?’
Unwittingly, Colin made a life-changing decision. Others, at that age, would have bowed to the pressure of their coaches. Not Colin. He went to Ben Lomond. ‘The heart wanted me to do it,’ he says. Aged 17, he ‘got in under-the-radar’; by the letter of the law he should not have been allowed to compete. He came 22nd, but position was incidental – it was Colin’s epiphany. ‘I loved the descent – out of control, and you’re just holding it there,’ he says.
When Colin finished school that summer, he began searching for a waiting job to fill the gap before the onslaught of university. The main criterion was easily established: the position must be in the mountains. ‘It had to be a hotel near some three-thousanders, ideally at the foot of a three-thousander,’ Colin remembers. ‘I wrote away to about twenty or thirty hotels in the Highlands.’ Only one – the Ledgowan Lodge Hotel at Achnasheen – responded with a firm job offer.
There is little to Achnasheen: a cluster of houses, some tourist shops, a railway station. Lying exposed in its valley, the village’s Gaelic translation is ‘field of storms’. Here, three roads diverge at a roundabout: north to Kinlochewe, west to Kyle of Lochalsh and Skye, and east to Inverness. The geography of the village meant Colin was driven to the mountains by necessity. Achnasheen is not a place of pavements and paths. ‘I don’t like running along car-filled roads,’ he says. Cross-country in its traditional sense was not possible either. ‘You go off the road and you’re into bog and heather and hill.’ Despite his performance at Ben Lomond, Colin still did not identify himself as a hill runner. His ‘regime’ at that time was to run cross-country and hillwalk on alternate days. ‘I had always thought, what if you could combine the two: forget your hillwalking and do it as a run?’
Fionn Bheinn, a lone outlier of the Fannich range, is the closest Munro to Achnasheen. ‘I liked the idea of getting up that one, but I had to work my way up,’ Colin says. ‘I went up to about 700 metres. There was a wee flat bit and I would have a rest, and eventually I thought, ah, I can tackle the whole thing. I used to be puffing and panting, and I was getting my ankles used to the rougher ground. Eventually, after maybe a month, I was getting to the top, and I thought, right, that’s great, I’ve got the hang of this now. This hill running lark is great fun.’
The following year, 1978, would be Colin’s breakthrough, starting with a third-place finish at Ben Lomond. ‘There were all these top blokes in Britain and they were going, “who’s this guy? We’ve never heard of this one.” I was surprised as well. I didn’t expect to be up there. I thought, what am I doing up near the front?’
It was no fluke. Colin went on to win the Manx Mountain Marathon on the Isle of Man and came second in the Three Peaks Race, but the summer was also spent ‘exploring’. He was in the Highlands again, running and walking in the Fannichs and Torridon. His pursuits in those months of freedom, even as an eighteen-year-old, defined how Colin would spend his existence. He would work to live. He would race and win, but nothing would be more important than simply being out there, being in the hills – and so the mountains and wilderness of Scotland became his life-force.
That explains what happened to Colin in the early 1980s: quite literally his wilderness years. He focused on long, multi-summit expeditions. ‘As much as I liked hill racing, I was more interested in exploring places, doing big rounds, big runs in the hills, bagging peaks, doing Wainwrights, Corbetts and Munros,’ he says. The period is perhaps best characterised by a journey linking the 129 summits over 2,000 feet (610 metres) in the Southern Uplands. In the spring of 1981, Colin ran for eleven days, covering 380 miles, climbing 25,000 metres. After five days, he reached Talla Reservoir in the Tweedsmuir Hills in a state of physical and emotional capitulation. ‘Mentally, I couldn’t face going up Broad Law the next day. I went home to Glasgow, came back the following day, felt rejuvenated, and finished the other tops. It was just an adventure, really.’ Adventures are what Colin does best. A year earlier, he ran the fastest known traverse of the Mamores, and might have broken the seven-hour mark had he not been ‘held for several minutes on Na Gruagaichean, simply captivated by the view down Loch Leven’.
As he did on the hills, Colin drifted in life. After university, he spent two years unemployed, albeit doing seasonal and temporary work, including a stint as a stalking ghillie on the Attadale Estate in the north-west Highlands. ‘Running around the hills all day? It was my dream job,’ he laughs. He applied to be a radio operator with the RAF – and failed. He would eventually find a future with the RAF, however, working in the force’s stores, distributing everything from clothes to fuel, and in 1984, Colin was posted to RAF Valley in Anglesey, becoming Senior Aircraftman Donnelly.
As he began to explore the running possibilities in North Wales, it was Colin’s girlfriend and later first wife, Angela Carson, who encouraged him to race. ‘She kept badgering me, telling me to do more races. I wasn’t interested. “You go off and do your race, Angela,” I’d say, “and while we’re here, I’ll go off and do this big round and bag some hills.” She nagged and nagged, insisting I should go for the British championship.’ Finally, Colin agreed, ran the designated races, and came second in 1986, just four points shy of Jack Maitland. Angela encouraged him. “You’ve done that and you were a wee bit half-hearted,” she told me. “If you put your mind to it, you could win the British championship.” So, I thought, I probably can.’
That year, Colin returned to Ben Nevis for the first time since 1980. Gone was the teenage naivety. He exuded swagger. ‘I was very fit and I didn’t have any trouble,’ he says. ‘It didn’t daunt me at all.’ Third at the summit, he won in 1 hour, 25 minutes and 48 seconds – still the third quickest time on record, 14 seconds slower than Kenny Stuart’s record and 13 seconds adrift of John Wild’s 1985 mark. ‘I could have got that record. When I hit the road, it would’ve been nice if someone had said, “Colin, keep going at a bloody good pace and that record’s yours.” I think I was outside the stadium when somebody shouted, “you’re quite close to the record.” Well, it was too late by then. With 400 yards of track, you’re not going to make it up.’
An injury sustained while cross-country skiing forced Colin to sit out the first two races of the 1987 championship, but he was third on his comeback at Ennerdale in the Lake District. The fourth championship race, Y Garn in North Wales, came a week later. ‘I remember turning up and Angela saying, “Colin, if you don’t beat this Malcolm Patterson, you won’t win the championship.” Oh, right, I hadn’t thought about that. I suppose I should beat him. I ran my arse off and did beat him.’
Writing in Athlete, the journal of the RAF Athletics Association, Colin recounted his battle with Patterson. ‘I was having trouble gaining the lead – as soon as it was mine, stubborn Malcolm Patterson would surge and claim it back. My legs felt so heavy after the descent. Malcolm’s must have been heavier. His unsteady legs lost a tussle with a boulder and he hit the ground in a welter of unprintables.’ Colin then won the Moffat Chase in July and Moel Hebog in August, both in course record times. The final race revealed a canny side to the Scot. Even though he had only to finish in the top five at Moel Hebog to win the championship, he outmanoeuvred Rod Pilbeam. The pair were at the head of the race when Colin veered away from the path to follow a reconnoitred ‘short cut’. Pilbeam followed. ‘Much of this involved clambering up boulder fields on which I noticed Rod was unhappy. So I forsook grassy ramps for as much rock and boulders as I could find, adding in some wet, slimy slabs for good measure. Rod didn’t know the mountain. We were off the main route. His hands were tied: no matter how much he disliked the ground, he had to follow me. By the summit, my lead was sufficient to allow me to relax on the descent.’
Angela deserves the credit for his success, Colin insists. ‘She was mentoring me in a way. Without realising it, she was guiding me and got me into the idea of bagging titles. I’m not really into titles, you know. A lot of people are into titles. For me, it’s no big deal.’ The man uninterested in titles would win three British championships, adding the 1988 and 1989 crowns to clinch three-in-a-row. ‘By the time I got to the third or fourth year, I was finding them quite addictive, and I was thinking, I like this winning thing. It’s quite an ego trip when you’re winning races. I was at my fittest in 1989, when I was going to races and not bothered because I knew I would win them. The only thing that bothered me was getting the record. I did get quite a few records that year.’
Appropriately, Colin’s most famous record came in a long-distance challenge, not a race. There was no hanging around to survey the aspect as he had on the Mamores when he traversed the 15 Snowdonia summits over 3,000 feet in 1988. The clock, starting on Snowdon, and stopping at the top of Foel-fras 24 miles later, read 4 hours and 19 minutes. Innumerable adjectives have been attached to this unsurpassed achievement – ‘astonishing’ seems apposite.
Some things cannot be removed: the ‘typical Glasgow teenager’ had three British championships. But it should have been four, he maintains. Despite starting nursing training in 1989, consequently ‘catching everything under the sun’, Colin was on course to win another title in 1990. The final race of the championship was Ben Nevis. What a story it would be: Colin would win a remarkable quartet on the Ben, the race in which he first triumphed as a teenager. ‘I wrote away for a place and they said it was full, and you can’t get in. This was May or something. I thought, it’s a British championship race; if I don’t do Ben Nevis, I won’t count.’ Colin was not alone. Some 60 others had also entered after the organiser’s limit of 500 was reached. ‘Emergency meetings were held,’ reported The Fellrunner, ‘but concluded nothing could be done.’ The bitterness and frustration remains today, almost 30 years on: there was no place for the youngest winner, the two-time winner, the third fastest winner. ‘What Lochaber should have done is put on an alternative Ben Nevis race, with a half-price entry fee. I think they would have elbowed that event out the way,’ he says. ‘I only needed to finish in the top 12 to win the championship.’ Mark Rigby won the race. Gary Devine, in third, won the championship. Colin – who would later spend eight years living and working in Fort William, looking up at Ben Nevis every day – would never run the race again in defiant protest. Nor would he be British champion again.
I arrange to meet Colin at his home in Hawick, the knitwear and cashmere town of the Borders. The exterior walls of the building are piled high with chopped wood, seemingly enough to survive a nuclear winter. When he answers the door, Colin glances at me shyly, as if he had not expected this intrusion. A handshake is awkwardly executed. An ice-breaker is arranged: we are going for a run. The start is two miles away, and – to avoid even a moment of road running; he would later tell me that ‘roads are for tyres’ – we are to cycle there. We pedal along Wilton Glen, Colin leading the way. With a three-decades-old blue Reebok jacket that covers his shorts, he appears to be wearing a mini skirt pinched to his saddle. At one point, he swerves onto the pavement. Fastidiously, I ignore him, staying on the road. An oncoming motorist passes me, shouting out of the open window: ‘This is a one-way street, you idiot.’
We stop by a farm and leave our bicycles in a layby of rusting machinery. The pace is easy as we follow a rising track, then cross a fence into a field of grazing cattle. The next hour is a joy. We wander through undulating fields of long grass, following faint paths. We stop at the highest point of a moor. The view, from scarcely 300 metres above sea level, is unbroken. He leads me around the 360 degrees, identifying every lump and mark on the horizon. ‘You can see why the English and Scots fought over this,’ he says. We continue, up a grassy incline to the summit of Wiltonburn Hill, sheep scattering left and right. Running side by side, as Colin had once been with Brian Robinson, he is fractionally ahead. And like he had done to Robinson, I knew that even at the age of fifty-six, if he wanted, he could drop me in an instant.
Back in Hawick, Colin hands me a mug of boiling water adorned with a chunk of bobbing ginger. He slides two slices of iced ginger cake on the living room table. We sit on a sofa, facing a large window overlooking the town. I glance around the room. He senses my thoughts: ‘It’s bothy-like, isn’t it? I like it simple.’ A set of shelves carries mementoes of his travels: a twisted piece of bark, a fir cone, river-smoothed wood. The walls are adorned with paintings, predominately of North Wales mountainscapes, although there is a picture of Ben Nevis above a fireplace. There are trophies and medals everywhere. Next door, a four-shelf cabinet is brimming with silver, and is simply not big enough to hold everything. On a table by the front door, there are piles of The Scots Magazine dating back to the 1980s.
Sitting next to Colin, he seems smaller than he had been when we were running, but I realise Colin Donnelly grows when he goes to the hills. I imagine him running up 129 mountains in eleven days; I imagine him charging down the scree of the Ben; I imagine him leading a perplexed Rod Pilbeam across the slabs of Moel Hebog. For a moment, I am awestruck.
Colin once said in an interview he sought to climb a cumulative 365,000 feet every year. The maths is staggering. That figure (or 110,000 metres) amounts to 9,200 metres every month or 300 metres per day. ‘Is that true?’ I ask.
He nodded. ‘The whole idea is to get 1,000 feet (300 metres) a day. For the last few years, I haven’t managed it because of injuries, but before that I was managing no problem. Maybe for twenty-odd years I did. I still keep logs of how much ascent I have done and there have been years when I have been well over 400,000 and getting towards 500,000.’ Half a million feet. That is Claggan Park to the summit of Ben Nevis 114 times.
‘It’s good to have a background of doing big, long stamina runs . . .’ He trails off. Nicole, his girlfriend, has arrived. Her three dogs, mini long-haired dachshunds, all gasping on their leads, skitter into the room. ‘I’m not a dog person,’ Colin says, ‘but I like these ones.’
‘They wanted to see you,’ Nicole says, backing out of the door, ushering the dogs away.
Colin’s focus instantly snaps back to running. He goes on, as if the conversation has not been broken: ‘You’ve got to spend time in the hills. All day out of the bothy after a big fry up, running over hills, covering a huge number of miles, back to the bothy, barely able to walk, stumbling, absolutely shattered after a day pushing myself over rough terrain for miles. After a week like that, I’d be whacked, but two weeks later I’d suddenly notice the benefit, and run fantastically well.’
It worked for Colin, but there were exceptions, he says. ‘You know John Wild? One of the top guys ever in hill running. John never trained in the hills except if he was looking at a course. The likes of John Wild, Kenny Stuart, a lot of them who have done well, were speedy. Kenny was a top-notch marathon runner and John a fantastic cross-country runner. He would have been under 50 minutes for ten miles, I’m sure; he did a lot of road running as well. These guys built their speed up, and if you’ve got speed, you can do hills. You’ve got to have a mixture of the two. It is advantageous to spend time in the hills, but I would do that anyway because I love them. Nicole lives in Lincolnshire. I could never live in Lincolnshire. I’d be driven demented. The highest point in the Wolds is 400 feet. I’ve been telling her, the bothies we’ve been staying at are 400 metres.’
We went back to the 1990s and I could hear the disenchantment in his voice again. ‘I had proved myself, winning three times, and being deprived of four. I was a bit disillusioned with the Fell Runners Association about that and I thought, why should I support their championship? I’m going to do the races I like doing, and ever since then I’ve done that.’
There is symmetry in the Colin of the early 1980s to the Colin of the early 1990s: a decade older, but the same man. He turned his attention to the classic rounds. He did the Paddy Buckley first, travelling solo and unsupported in 1990, becoming the 18th person to complete. He did a Bob Graham on a whim. After working on cardiac arrest procedures on a Friday morning in 1991, then going for a five-mile lunchtime run, he decided to drive to the Lake District that night. Once again running alone, he ran down Skiddaw, the final hill in an anticlockwise direction, in ‘shrieking winds and heavy rain’. The stringent rules of the Bob Graham 24-Hour Club, demanding that an applicant must have a witness at each of the 42 summits, means Colin is absent from the official list of completions. He does not care. The Bob Graham, once under his skin, was extricated, as satisfying as eliminating a skelf.
Colin saved ‘the best’ – Ramsay’s Round – for last. On holiday in Orkney in 1995, he woke to one of those days when the hill runner will look to the sky and lament they are not somewhere else, for if there is a long day in the hills on their mind, they will only see a lost chance. Afraid of just that, Colin went to Fort William. It was not a vintage performance: his head torch conked out on the Mamores; he climbed Stob a’ Choire Mheadhoin wearing a balaclava to protect his already-burnt scalp from the sun; once off the snow of Ben Nevis, he descended with the ‘speed of a granny in high heels’. He ended a pithy report with words that could be the inscription on his grave: ‘No fanfares, no fuss. Perhaps how these things should be done; just for the challenge.’
Colin could turn his back on championships and the Fell Runners Association, but never Scotland. An unashamed nationalist, he represented his country in 18 consecutive World Mountain Running Trophy races between 1985 and 2002, with a nineteenth appearance in 2004. The individual peak came almost inevitably in 1989, when he won an individual silver medal in the short race at Châtillon-en-Diois in south-eastern France. But the emotional summit was in Auld Reekie in 1995, when Colin was the third finisher in a four-man Scottish team that won team silver on Arthur’s Seat. ‘Running for the Scotland team on home territory in Edinburgh – it’s the same feeling of wellbeing I got when I blundered into first place at Ben Nevis in 1979, when I didn’t expect to be there, and the pipes were striking up, and I was running into the stadium,’ he explains. ‘We did our country proud that day. Scotland at football are always promising big and never delivering, but that day the Scottish hill running team produced the goods.’
In 1999, Colin turned 40. By the same age, Billy Bland had retired; Colin kept running and kept triumphing. In 2001, he won the over-40 category in the World Mountain Running Championship in Poland; he was third in the same race in 2002, this time in Austria, and then second in the over-45 group in 2005 when Keswick hosted the event. He continued to clean up in Scotland, winning everywhere he went: Ben Rinnes, Creag Dhubh, Two Breweries, Knockfarrel, Norman’s Law. If he did not win, he was scarcely out of the top ten. A week before we met, he won the Oxton Border Games race; a fortnight later, he was first at Philiphaugh.
Mark Hartree remembers meeting Colin in 1985. Mark was a member of RAF Valley Mountain Rescue Service and Colin was sent to his group for a weekend trial. ‘He was just a boy,’ Mark said; even though Colin was the older of the pair, rank meant more than years. Staying at Llanbedr, they were spending the night in neighbouring beds. Rising before breakfast, Colin ran a fifteen-mile round-trip along the coast to Barmouth. Back at Llanbedr, he embarked on a full day in the mountains around Cadair Idris. Being on trial, he was handed a heavy bag containing a rope. ‘After that, I’m pretty sure he went for a run in the evening,’ Mark recalled. ‘We just thought he was weird. A freak.’
‘I went to see my cousin,’ Colin tells me. ‘Running was just a method of transport.’
‘It’s not very scientific, is it?’ I pursue. ‘No coach would recommend that as a day of training.’
Colin Youngson recounted a similar story upon meeting his namesake at university. ‘Once or twice I kept him company on a training run. Apparently, he ran 60 miles per week, as hard as he could. When I suggested that a few slower recovery sessions might be a good idea, he ignored the suggestion completely.’ Colin’s tendency for excess extended to the bar: ‘He turned up on a trip to the Isle of Man Easter Festival of Running. No doubt he ran well, but what I remember is his total innocence about the probable effects of beer drinking on an inexperienced young fellow!’
‘I’ve always been quite a disorganised person,’ Colin says, shrugging. ‘I’ve bumbled around and not focused. I’ve never had a coach in my life, but a coach would be saying this and that – and I don’t want to do this and that. I want to do things my way. I like my bothies. I like my big, long runs and exploring. I want my peace and quiet. It has given me a much more rounded life. These guys who have gone through their lives, doing all the championships, saying “I want to win it five times”, or whatever, does that make them a rounded person? Do they really love the hills? Do they really love wild places? Okay, I haven’t achieved everything I could’ve done, but I’ve got a lot of satisfaction from what I’ve chosen to do, and there’s been nobody telling me you’ve got to do this and that.’
Is Colin Donnelly Scotland’s greatest hill runner? He is unabashed at the suggestion. ‘I suppose, yeah, but it depends what you’re after: people who win loads of races? The guys who are going out winning the races, have they done the Bob Graham, the Ramsay? Have they had a crack at the Munros record?’
What perhaps lifts Colin above his counterparts is his role in creating a framework for hill running in Scotland that survives today. Like Charlie Ramsay, his achievements, particularly in the wilderness years of the 1980s, redefined the boundaries of long-distance hill running, but in that same period, he helped to re-shape the administration of the sport, giving hill running in Scotland identity and independence. Colin was part of the ‘gang of four’ that decided Scotland needed to break free of the shackles of the England-based Fell Runners Association. The idea of a Scottish equivalent – what would become known as the Scottish Hill Runners Association – was forged in the back of Robin Morris’ Lancia after a road race in Glasgow early in 1984, and the first meeting was held after the Carnethy 5 a month later. Colin, along with Roger Boswell, Dick Wall and Robin Morris, would be the founding members, with Mel Edwards the inaugural chairman. The group’s newsletter was called Booze n Trouble. And trouble the breakaway caused: it would be the great schism of hill running. The Fell Runners Association did not like it; the Scottish Amateur Athletics Association did not like it; many in the hill running community still do not like it.
Colin, of course, does not regret his role in the affair. ‘It was very Anglocentric,’ he says of the Fell Runners Association. Of particular annoyance to Colin was the use of the word ‘fell’. ‘I actually wrote to them at one point saying, this is ridiculous. Fell running is a regional term. It’s the Lake District, it’s Yorkshire. It’s mountain running, if you want to have a view of a whole sport.’
Robin Morris felt strongly too, arguing that Scotland deserved the independence it already had in cricket, football and rugby, as well as the Commonwealth Games. ‘Scottish independence from the Fell Runners Association was not only important, it was almost an imperative,’ he insisted.
The doorbell sounded. It was the gardener. Colin came back in the room muttering. ‘Fell Runners Association: that was just ridiculous. We weren’t getting a voice. It was bringing back power to the people in a way. People need to feel they have a say in the sport in their own country.’
Ultimately, Colin is an amateur – an international-standard amateur – who for three decades before early retirement (from work; certainly not running) had to balance competitive racing and compulsive hill-going with the rest of his life. Unless you want to spend thirty years waiting on tables in an Achnasheen hotel, or you are prepared to dismiss the notions of marriage and children, a mortgage and a career, or your sport offers an avenue to professionalism, a complex, delicate juggling act is inevitable.
Colin’s years in the RAF gave him time to train and weekend freedom to race. The mere existence of Athlete shows the RAF encouraged its runners. It was more difficult in nursing. ‘Time off was a problem because I was working a lot of weekends,’ Colin says. ‘I resented that, as the job was coming between me and my great love of hill running. I ended up in nursing for twenty years not being able to do what I wanted to do, which was loads of races.’
At one point, he was taken to one side by the ward sister, puzzled at his numerous requests for weekend leave.
‘Well, that’s when all the races are,’ Colin had said. ‘I don’t request as many in the winter.’ He was told others had complained. It was the same in Scotland. ‘In Fort William, I negotiated – because we were doing twelve-hour shifts – that I would have a small break in the morning joined up with my lunch break, giving me forty-five minutes to go for a run.’ Objections came again; others wanted to combine their breaks too. Colin was told he could not be an exception. ‘I had to do a run in half an hour,’ he says. ‘You might say, you can get your run after work. But not after a twelve-hour shift when you’re on your feet the whole time. This was eating into my . . .’ He struggles to find the right words and starts again: ‘My whole being is running.’
He means it. ‘Running has cost me relationships. I can remember one girlfriend saying, “Colin, you know I really like being with you, but the trouble is, you put your running first and me second.” She was right. I did.’ He laughs. ‘There have been other relationships that have broken up for the same reason.’
‘Is that obsession?’ I ask. ‘Is that healthy?’
‘There’s been a bit of obsession about it. It’s taken injuries for me to try to put my life into perspective, to see that running isn’t the be all and end all. Because it will come to a halt eventually through old age and injuries.’
‘What is the obsession?’
‘With that particular girlfriend? It was 1989 when I was top dog anyway, and I think the obsession was about wanting to win. It was wanting to prove myself. I had this dad that never showed us any love at all. He was a stern Victorian sort of dad, a bit of a disciplinarian, but he loved outdoor stuff and hillwalking. The only way I could please him was when I was doing well in running. He suddenly wanted to know all about it and I gained his favour. I think I was trying to prove myself through that. He took a big interest in my running career and he was always asking, “what’s your next race?” and “I see you did well in that race”. When I won Ben Nevis, he was delighted. He came up to watch. For the first time, I had a bit of love and attention from him. A lot of stuff comes back to childhood and us wanting to make something of ourselves.’
As I leave, two cards on a sideboard catch my attention. Handmade and faded, and obviously several years old, they are the work of Claire, the oldest of Colin’s two daughters who live in Wales. The first has a podium in the foreground, on top of which is a man with a Saltire across his chest, holding aloft a cup. The background is framed by green hills. The second is a birthday card. There are mountains again, and this time a bothy with a bicycle outside. A yellow sun shines from a cloudless blue sky. A line wiggles up one of the peaks. Running up that line, running up that hill, is a runner: Colin. Like a photograph, the image is fixed and permanent, for Colin Donnelly will always be running up a hill.