Adrian Belton no longer runs 120 miles a week. He ‘potters’ these days, jogging only when he feels the need, as his knees ‘suffer a bit’. We are sitting in the beer garden of a pub in Wapping, a stone’s throw from a swollen River Thames. Adrian is fifty-nine, but could pass for twenty years younger. Cleanly shaven, neatly bald and dressed in an open-necked, tucked-in shirt, he belongs in the company of the bankers, brokers and executives of this part of London. Adrian hands me a business card. The father-of-five is a chief executive working in the UK construction industry, splitting his time between London and Sheffield. In an interview with Construction News after his appointment to a £270 million-turnover company, Adrian said: What I am trying to do is encourage a culture of challenging the status-quo. From any other mouth, such words would reek of corporate mumbo-jumbo. But not from Adrian’s.
A man sitting opposite takes a drag of his cigarette, the smoke trailing across our faces. I wave a hand theatrically and want to shout: Do you know who this man is? Do you know what this man did?
‘Invincible,’ Adrian repeats. He is smiling, his mind pushing aside the detritus of 26 years to locate the memories, the feelings, the magic, of those 29 days. ‘I was on a perpetual high,’ he says. ‘I felt invincible. That sense of invincibility is the weirdest of sensations. And then it goes – and you wonder how you ever did it.’ An incredulous shake of the head.
The ‘perpetual high’ lasted for 29 astonishing summer days in 1989 when a man who was living in one of the flattest places in England redefined notions of human endurance. ‘Status quo’? Adrian Belton obliterated it. Only eight people, six men and two women, have completed the three classic rounds in a calendar year. That is 12 months to plan, train, run, recover, and do it all again – and again. Even then, on average, only one runner manages the feat every four years.
Imagine being allocated 29 days to do the lot?
Some things do not need to be imagined.
What is more impressive? The stamina needed to accomplish each round? The extraordinary powers of recovery required to be ready for the next? The logistical nous to navigate across 190 wild, mountainous miles? And it was not just what Adrian did, it was the manner of his actions. In those 29 days, he extended the Paddy Buckley from 47 to 51 summits, and still finished in 22 hours – eclipsing all those that had come before, despite the additional peaks. In those 29 days, he ran Ramsay’s Round faster than anyone else, a record that stood for 26 years, and precisely 28 days, 19 hours and 43 minutes after the countdown started on the Paddy Buckley, he completed a ‘steady’ Bob Graham with five hours to spare.
Adrian pushes a yellowing wad of paper across the table. ‘It’s all there,’ he says. There are photographs too. One shows Adrian surrounded by support runners. He is at the centre of the picture wearing thigh-flashing Union flag shorts. On his head is a white sunhat, the type a child might wear on the beach. Apart from shoes and socks, he sports nothing else. He is topless. His right arm is bandaged. ‘I’d spent several hours in hospital the day before with a suspected fractured elbow,’ he explains. The snapshot captures a gait that looks bow-legged. In his right hand, he cradles a bottle. He looks like a cavorting, drunken Brit abroad; the men that flank him could easily be police officers or inebriated accomplices. Adrian was abroad: an Englishman in Scotland, in Glen Nevis, part-way through a 24-hour run in the mountains of Lochaber.
In the same way as runners today publish online blogs about a run or race, Adrian returned to Hertfordshire and penned six sides of A4 in neat black ink on his record-breaking Ramsay’s Round. In the spirit of modesty, Adrian first listed seven reasons why the outcome should have been different: ‘the weather was the worst of the week and getting worse; preparation was last minute; the schedule looked impossible, especially some legs towards the end, for the record to be broken; the pacers were beginning to get “paced out” from too much orienteering and helping on earlier attempts on the other rounds; we were going the “hard way” – i.e. Charlie’s original route, finishing on the Ben as real men do; it was a mere 18 days since I set a new 22-hour record in Snowdonia for Paddy’s round, extended to include all 3,000-foot mountains; I had been orienteering for three days, plus doing some Munro-bagging, immediately prior to the attempt.’
On 1 August, 1989, Adrian was embroiled in a two-hour orienteering course at Loch Etive, part of the third day of a week-long programme. The following day, 2 August, was scheduled for a rest. ‘I had a calling,’ Adrian says – a calling for an instinctive, improbable round. He pulled together a group of ‘sceptical and grumpy’ pacers at short notice, and drove to Glen Nevis.
He went the way Charlie travelled, through the forest, up Mullach nan Coirean, running against the clock. Adrian’s schedule and splits for a 20-hour round were among the bundle of papers. Due to arrive on the first summit at 3.23am, he got there at 3.20am. Stob Bàn stole 12 minutes and Stob Coire a’ Chàirn three, and it was not until he reached Na Gruagaichean shortly before 7am, that Adrian matched his hoped-for pace, a speed unprecedented on Ramsay’s Round. But the early morning effort was taking its toll. Andrew Addis, Adrian’s partner in a weather-bothered round of close to 26 hours a year earlier, had abandoned having ‘already had enough’.
Minutes were gradually hewn from the schedule before a moment of miscommunication took the round into the realm of 19 hours. Adrian raced down the glen and skirted Loch Treig, convinced he was losing time. It was not until he was almost at the summit of Beinn na Lap that Kevin Harding, his pacer, admitted he had earlier told Adrian the wrong split. The contender was not shedding minutes; quite the opposite.
Be in no doubt: this is a mental game. And so? ‘The effect was incredible.’
Such was the pace, Adrian feared his support crew may not be in place at the Loch Treig dam. He was right. ‘We scoffed food until we heard a screech of tyres, followed by four doors simultaneously exploding open,’ he wrote. ‘Never before have I seen pacers move so quickly into action.’ Adrian paused for only six minutes and began the climb of Stob a’ Choire Mheadhoin, forging relentlessly on, sculpting a legend with every step. But there were many, many steps to go: 22 miles of them, with ten Munros thrown in, separates Loch Treig and Glen Nevis, a journey that took Charlie Ramsay on the only other anticlockwise round 10-and-a-half hours. In drizzle and clag, and fortified by rice pudding, it took Adrian – a man who was ‘recovering’ from a Paddy Buckley – seven-and-a-half. He would arrive at the hostel 18 hours and 23 minutes after starting, a cavernous gap to indisputable class: three hours faster than Jon Broxap; two hours ahead of Helene Diamantides and Mark Rigby.
Years passed. The round became the stuff of mountain-running folklore. The time was untouchable. Up until 2013 – 24 years on – no-one else could breach 20 hours, let alone 19. The longer the record stood, the greater its invincibility. Did runners no longer believe it could be usurped? Might it last forever? Nicky Spinks, a Yorkshire sheep farmer, set about unpicking the myth; in 2014, she became the first woman to break the 20-hour barrier, completing in 19 hours and 39 minutes. ‘I never would have guessed the record would stand for so long,’ Adrian says. ‘I was waiting for it to be broken. I was thinking, why haven’t people done it faster?’ By the end of 2014, there had been 79 successful rounds. None of them had come within even an hour of Adrian’s time.
And then along came Jez.
When news of the success of the expedition to climb Mount Everest was revealed to the world on 2 June, 1953, four days had elapsed since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had stood on the summit. When Jez Bragg reached Glen Nevis youth hostel, surpassing Adrian’s mark, the world knew in seconds.
Jez’s round was symbolic of the technological age. For 18 hours and 12 minutes, his mountain toil was exposed to the world’s glare, as the matchbox-sized tracker that he carried updated his position every 90 seconds. It was as addictive as watching football scores on Ceefax. Nothing for 90 seconds, then the blue line would wiggle forward: a shuffle on an uphill, a great leap on a down. There were no such luxuries in 1989: Adrian noted splits with a chinagraph pencil; maps were guarded in sticky plastic and daubed with compass bearings.
Aphra is crying. I know she will not go back to sleep, but for once I do not mind. I scoop her from the cot, place her on a knee and rock forward and back for five minutes until she is silent. The glare of my phone momentarily illuminates her round, now-peaceful face, revealing the dry trail of a tear. I tap the Twitter icon, propelling me on a roughly northward journey of hundreds of miles, across the rooftops of London, through the fields of the Home Counties and the Midlands, touching the Pennines and the Lake District, flashing over Glasgow, and alighting in the Highlands. Jez Bragg had left Glen Nevis at precisely 3am. Gemma, his wife, had tweeted a picture of Jez and Cameron Burt, a support runner, with Charlie Ramsay to the far right of the shot, all waiting for the moment of release. Standing in darkness with head torches blazing, and Jez in short sleeves, there is no hint of what is to come.
Charlie leads a countdown: ‘Four, three, two, one, go . . .’
Then Gemma’s voice: ‘Good luck.’
‘Gone. That’s it,’ says Charlie ominously.
At 5.26am, the blue line is poised on the cradle between Carn Mòr Dearg and Aonach Mòr. I am clasping a baby in a London bedroom. Boxes line the walls; we are moving in a week. I sniff Aphra’s nappy and put my phone down.
When I check the tracker again at 7am, Jez is approaching Stob Coire an Laoigh. Soon after, Gemma confirms his location, noting that Jez is ‘moving well’ having ticked six summits in four hours. He reaches the dam at 9.57am, the tracker reveals. Gemma tweets again. In the photographs, the sky is blue and the day bright. Charlie sits nearby on a stool. There are other seats, but Jez is standing in all the photographs. I know what he is eating because Gemma tweeted a picture of Jez’s ‘fuel’ a few minutes earlier: bananas, sandwiches, Coke and rice pudding. It is reassuringly low-tech.
It is 11am and I have taught two English lessons, although I cannot stop thinking about Jez and the blue line. We were reading Macbeth. I asked my pupils if they had been to Scotland. Three out of 22 had. I did not pursue the line of questioning further. Meanwhile, Jez was progressing up Stob Coire Sgriodain. After two further lessons, I check again at 1pm. He is coming off Beinn na Lap, nearing the railway line.
The emails begin. ‘I was comparing his tracker to Nicky Spinks’ schedule,’ Duncan Steen writes. ‘It looks like he’s 30 minutes-to-one-hour up, so going very well indeed.’
Andy Higgins responds: ‘I was doing the same. He was 30 minutes up at Loch Treig, but I’d say he is in the region of 50 minutes up on that schedule now. Mental. Isn’t the record still over 18 hours?’ It was, for now. Jez needed to finish before 9.23pm to outdo Adrian Belton.
I emerge from an hour-long exam invigilation at 3pm to see the blue line scaling Sgùrr Eilde Mòr. There were further pictures at Jez’s pit stop by Loch Eilde Beag: more blue sky, Coke, Charlie. Jez is sitting this time, with a selection of food in grabbing distance on a bench.
Andy, at work in Newcastle, is getting excited: ‘Looks like record pace to me. Come on Jez!’
Shortly before 4.30pm, Ramsayist Steve Birkinshaw tweets: ‘He is going to be close to the record.’
Adrian Stott, the events coordinator at Run and Become in Edinburgh, resorts to Shakespearean inspiration for the modern generation: ‘#thegamesafoot.’
‘There is no sense of solitude such as that we experience on the silent and vast elevations of mountains,’ said Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the nineteenth century writer. But the Victorians had not heard of GPS tracking and social media, had they?
Still the tracker moves. Over the Binnein hills, onwards to Na Gruagaichean. With Arielle and Aphra sleeping, I run, a cautious, post-injury twenty-minute wander around the block. I think of Jez as I jog along Streatham High Road, dodging pedestrians. This street and Na Gruagaichean – could two places be more unlike? Gemma continues to tweet: Jez is 13 minutes up, then eight, then five.
Home again, I press refresh immediately. He is on Mullach nan Coirean. It is 8.26pm. A thunderstorm breaks over London. I shower, stretch, watch five minutes of Don’t Tell the Bride and return to the computer. It is the 90th minute and I cannot take my eyes off Ceefax. Jez is descending Mullach nan Coirean rapidly, but his route kinks as he drops through the forest. I gasp as the twist unravels on the screen. Normality is soon resumed. He is on a marked path, heading north, dropping through the plantation towards the road, now running along the road, now seeing the hostel, now reaching the hostel. A line of red and white tape had been strung across the road. I know because it was on Twitter.
At 9.12pm, I make an announcement to Fi: ‘He’s finished.’
She starts to say, ‘who’s finished?’ but stops herself, replacing the words with, ‘did he break the record?’
I read Gemma’s tweet aloud: ‘@jezbragg does it! 18hr12min – 11min record #RamsayRound a record that has been held since 1989, not anymore!’
There is a version of the story – a glossy, glorified, distorted telling through the narrow lens of social media. Now for what it is really like to take on Ramsay’s Round.
Obsessively waiting and watching the who-knows-what-it-will-do Scottish weather is the prerogative of the would-be Ramsayist. Such had been the case for Jez. The weather preoccupied him for a fortnight and, as the assigned day approached, he scrutinised forecasts. It was bad news: mist, rain and a brisk breeze. If only he had chosen the day before, a Friday, when the weather was due to be dry and bright with light wind. But it was to be Saturday. The complex logistics of pacing and support were now in place. A carefully-constructed team had already devoted their weekend to a Dorset man living almost 600 miles from Fort William.
Jez took a chance. To break the record, to achieve his ‘crazy dream’, he had to be ruthlessly selfish. He sent out a message, bringing the attempt forward by a day, gambling that the advantage of favourable conditions would outweigh a potentially smaller support team. ‘I just wanted to have a proper crack at this thing,’ Jez reasoned, ‘not least because these opportunities are typically few and far between. If I failed at this attempt, it would be another year at least before a re-attempt would be feasible. After spending so much time learning the lines and getting everything ready, I had to be bold and give the record a go.’
The new start time meant Cameron Burt – a runner who would complete the round later that summer, the third of five people to achieve the feat in 2015 – was the only capable person who could make it to Glen Nevis. Contender and supporter met for the first time at dinner in the hours preceding 3am. Together, they then went up the Ben.
‘The next few hours turned out to be the most inspiring running I’ve ever had,’ Cameron said. As the runners reached the snow line, the moon was setting and the sky burned with the rising sun. The astonishment of those moments on the Ben acted as a prelude for the innocence and purity that would characterise the early hours of the round. ‘I pulled out the ice axes and we hurtled down the snow towards the Carn Mòr Dearg Arête like a couple of children released from school early,’ Cameron remembered. Soon they were crossing Aonach Beag where the runners shadows were three times longer than their height in the morning sun. ‘There was nowhere I would have rather been at that point,’ Cameron said.
Chris Busby and Anna Hayes left the Steall Falls car park at 4am for an arranged rendezvous with Jez and Cameron – two men they had also never met – in the pass between Aonach Mòr and the start of the Grey Corries. They were not hard to recognise. Anna spotted the runners descending swiftly, a figure in a yellow T-shirt – Jez, they would soon find out – leading the way and ‘whooping in response to the arms we raised in greeting’. The running – charged with adrenaline and excitement – felt easy at first. Reality began to bite: Cameron started to fall back; with his hamstrings cramping, Chris was hanging on through the heather; the cool of morning gave way to the heat of day.
Cameron arrived at the dam as Jez departed, following a pause no longer than the commercial break in a half-hour soap. ‘He was still moving smoothly and looked strong,’ Cameron said. ‘I was in pieces.’
Olly Stephenson set off with Jez at a ‘fair clip’, with Loch Treig reflecting the surrounding peaks like a mirror. When the pair reached Beinn na Lap, even a Ramsayist like Olly was overwhelmed by what Jez still had to accomplish: ‘Ben Nevis looked miles away to the west, with a multitude of peaks in between. It’s perhaps a scale and perspective that would more normally be associated with a space station than a run.’
As the runners turned to home, Jez became increasingly silent. If he was struggling, he did not admit it, but the silence was a cover. More than most, Olly knew what Jez was going through.
‘The change from feeling strong and confident, to weary and disheartened, had happened worryingly quickly,’ Jez said. ‘It was probably a direct result of the heat in the middle part of the day, and not allowing myself the time to cool off properly in the streams when the opportunity arose. It was an aggressive and probably quite risky approach I was taking. I feared letting my guard down to do anything other than move forward as quickly as possible.’
A slowdown wiped out a 20-minute buffer he once had. That Jez would get around within 20 hours was unquestionable, but he was eyeing something seminal. It is easier to chase, however, and he might have imagined Adrian Belton’s time as a moving line on the ground. Jez just had to stay ahead of it, but victory would come at a price: suffering. ‘My climbing legs felt trashed. The rough and steep pull up Sgùrr Eilde Mòr felt so hard, a hands-on-knees job to support my legs. I really wasn’t sure I could even run again after summiting.’ One Mamore down, nine to go in Jez’s ‘semi-tortuous’ existence – an existence on the very edge. Jez ‘hurled himself down the scree run’ to Binnein Beag, Graham Nash, a fresh pacer, recalled. ‘Rocks and stones were flying in all directions.’
Jon Gay, waiting for Jez close to Na Gruagaichean while incongruously clutching a carrier bag, knew what the hours ahead would hold: ‘I had a fair idea that the pace would be relentless.’
Watches were scrutinised at Am Bodach: seven minutes had been gained since leaving the loch, a minute for every Munro. They ran on. Amid the chaotic pace to Sgùrr an Iubhair, Graham was running behind Jez. ‘The downside of a day’s diet of sugary snacks is backwind,’ Graham said. ‘Jez guffed one in my face and it caught in the back of my throat. I coughed and dry retched, thinking it would be bad form for the support runner to hurl. I kept encouraging Jez to make the most of the runnable bits. “Stay on Jon’s heels,” I’d say. The only reply was a loud fart. At the summit, we had lost two minutes. We needed to up the rate of progress.’
The temperature was dropping and clouds were building in the west. Three mountains remained. ‘The last out and back was fast,’ said Jon, and by Stob Bàn, he sensed that Jez was ‘preparing for an all-out effort’ to the end.
One last climb, one last endeavour: Mullach nan Coirean. Then down, down, down to the glen. ‘Jez was giving it everything; the pace was getting quicker,’ said Graham. ‘He was asking for flat Coke, but it was long gone. At the summit, we’d lost three minutes. The time was tight.’
Leading the charge downhill, Jon screamed into the wind: ‘Let’s fucking do this!’
Graham was anxious nonetheless. ‘I had previously timed the descent from the summit to the youth hostel and managed 53 minutes on fresh legs. Jez had 55 minutes on his schedule, but he’d been going for more than 17 hours.’
That evening, as I ran along Streatham High Road, watched Don’t Tell the Bride and repeatedly refreshed the tracker, three men seemed to run for their lives down a Scottish mountain.
‘How far?’ asked Jez.
‘A mile.’
Some 49 minutes after standing on the top of Mullach nan Coirean, Jez, fists clenched and grinning deliriously, ran through the tape.
There is a picture of Jez surrounded by his team outside the hostel. Sitting on his right is Charlie Ramsay. To his left is Graham Nash. Standing behind are Olly Stephenson and Chris Busby. Ramsay, Nash, Stephenson, Busby – a roll call of Edinburgh-based Carnethy Hill Running Club stalwarts beaming for the camera. ‘I suspect his record will last a while,’ said Olly.
He was wrong, and Gemma might have regretted the last two words – ‘not anymore’ – of her celebratory tweet. The new record lasted fewer days than Adrian Belton’s had years.
Late on a Sunday night in July, three weekends after Jez’s round, a news item was published on the Carnethy website. The message was brief but shattering: a man named Jon Ascroft had set a new ‘world record’ for Ramsay’s Round. The time was astonishing: 16 hours and 59 minutes. It seemed beyond belief. Jon was relatively unknown, certainly in comparison to the North Face-sponsored Jez, but then I saw the identity of the person who had posted the message. Written in red italics was the name Charlie Ramsay.
When Billy Bland ran the fastest time of 13 hours and 53 minutes for the Bob Graham in 1982, he had won the Ennerdale Horseshoe the previous weekend, finishing ahead of Joss Naylor and Jon Broxap. Three weeks after his round, Bland prevailed at the Wasdale Fell Race in a record time that was 20 minutes in front of second place.
As 2014 came to a close, Jon Ascroft had completed close to 100 Scottish hill races. He had won once, coming first at the Glen Rosa Horseshoe on Arran in a field of 25 runners. Even then he had to rely on Andy Symonds, the race favourite, getting lost, and Es Tresidder being injured. When his wife, Lorna, saw him with the winner’s trophy, she asked him if he was looking after it for Es. In the three months leading up to Jon’s Ramsay he raced twice in the Scottish hills. He was 37th out of 239 athletes at Birnam in March, and 25th at Ben Lomond in a field of 166 runners, 11 minutes adrift of the winner, Tom Owens, in May. Sam Hesling, one of Jon’s support runners on the latter part of his round, described him as a ‘very solid runner’. No-one would describe Bland as ‘solid’. Even by his own admission, Jon is a ‘reasonable’ runner.
So how did a forty-three-year-old architect and father-of two from Edinburgh become the fastest to run the jewel in the crown of the classic rounds? And how did a ‘reasonable’ athlete crush a time recorded by Jez Bragg – a former winner of the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, the world’s most prestigious mountain race – by 73 minutes?
I was waiting for Jon in the Canny Man’s pub in Edinburgh. Having locked his bicycle outside, he enters wearing a fluorescent yellow jacket. He places his lights on a table and orders a pint of Deuchars. Utterly normal. Just a bloke having a pint in a pub on a Sunday night. A bloke who a few days earlier had won the Fell Runners Association Long Distance Award. I push the picture of Jez and his support crew across the table. Jon’s clubmates stare back. Born in Gloucestershire and university educated in Sheffield, Jon moved to Edinburgh in 2005 and immediately joined Carnethy. ‘They didn’t know I was planning a Ramsay,’ he says. I repeat Olly’s words. He shrugs.
I tell him about Bland’s achievements before and after the Bob Graham. ‘And you’ve won one race?’ I say, adding a tone that suggests I am merely seeking clarification, in case a man whose company I had shared for only minutes took offence.
He laughs. ‘Don’t compare me to Billy Bland.’
Jon was there on the night Jez broke the record. Lorna had dropped him off at the foot of the Nevis Range ski station and he ran the last three Munros in what was his final outing on the route before he returned to attempt the entire loop. He arrived in Glen Nevis an hour after Jez. There was no commotion or evidence that anything exceptional had happened in the quiet glen. ‘I was hitching up the valley and Pete Duggan, one of Jez’s support crew, picked me up and dropped me in Fort William,’ Jon says. Pete told him about the record. It did not change anything: Jon was convinced he could also run the round in 18 hours and for all of Jez’s accomplishments and fame, he was ‘not intimidated’ by Jez ‘as a runner on that terrain’.
Jon’s rationale was entirely logical. He had completed a Tranter’s Round a year earlier, running at a pace equivalent to an 18-hour Ramsay. Jon believed he could replicate that intensity on the longer round and began calculating summit-to-summit splits based on the assumption. After establishing a 19-and-a-half-hour schedule, he was persuaded to be more ambitious: he would aim for an ‘aspirational’ 18 hours. He remained tentative: ‘I wasn’t sure I was in the same form as the previous year.’ But now, he felt, was the right moment. Leading up to July, his training was unspectacular, but ‘solid’ – that word again. His weekly focus was on height gain (and therefore also loss), not mileage. He aimed for 3,000 metres, but rarely attained that figure. His mantra was relevance – essentially, quality over quantity. He did long repetitions on the flat parkland of The Meadows in Edinburgh to maintain speed; he attended pilates classes to improve his core strength; from Swanston, he ran into the Pentlands, hoping to claim 800 metres of ascent and descent in an hour – more than would be required on the round. He was surprised by his clubmates who would typically run the established routes and well-worn paths of the Pentlands. Jon would look for rougher, more awkward ways up the same hills, actively seeking the heather. When he ran into the mountains above Blair Atholl that May, he deliberately selected routes that avoided popular trails. ‘It just felt more rewarding,’ he says. Those rewards would be cashed when he found himself on the pathless terrain in the far east of Ramsay’s Round.
Family was a further complication. Jon’s children were two and five when he ran the round. ‘The training had to be of quality,’ he says. Jon kept a record of his running on Attackpoint, an online log geared to orienteers, where athletes choose an effort rating for their session of between five and one, hard to easy. ‘I never wanted to do training that was a three. I didn’t have time for that.’
In meeting Jon, I hoped to discover a potion, a magic spark, a silver bullet. Just how had he done it? There was no discovery to be made. It was simple. The ‘reasonable’ runner had found Adrian Belton’s invincibility; he ran the greatest race of his life. He was fit and injury-free. He controlled his enthusiasm at the start. He surrounded himself with a stellar support team. Apart from what he described as ‘head fug’ in the glen between Sgùrr Eilde Mòr and Beinn na Lap, he did not succumb to sickness. The weather was fine. Navigation was trouble-free. He was prepared for a long mental game in which he would be the victor. In completing a Bob Graham some twelve months earlier, he felt ‘great’ in the final miles. ‘As I did the Ramsay,’ Jon tells me, ‘I kept thinking, that’s how I’m going to feel again. I’m going to feel great at the end. I kept telling myself, I’m going to start to feel brilliant. I had the mental confidence that I wouldn’t fade.’ And he did not. He ran down Ben Nevis in 37 minutes – slower than Charlie Ramsay, admittedly, but these were two men inspired by differing objectives.
‘I felt amazing,’ Jon says, with an almost disbelieving grin. As the round entered its concluding minutes, his biggest fear was falling. He knew he was a twist or an awkward landing away from disaster. But it never materialised. Everything that could have gone wrong, that so easily will go wrong, that so often does go wrong, did not. Lucky, perhaps? That depends if you believe the adage of making your own luck.
As has become customary, Jon wrote an account of his round. It has none of the intensity of Jez’s version. There is no flatulence, no flying scree, no swearing. There is little sense of the history Jon was making. He began to edge towards emotion as he reflected on crossing the Grey Corries, writing: ‘the exhilaration was mounting.’ Describing his feelings as he ran off Ben Nevis, he noted: ‘The final descent I’ll remember for a long time.’ His closing words? ‘It was a memorable day.’ This string of sentences puzzled me at first. Any passion was buried under the weight of humility. After two hours in his company, I understood. To veer from modesty seemed tantamount to being boastful – and that is not the hill runner’s way; it is certainly not Jon Ascroft’s way.
Adrian Stott later told me that Jon had visited Run and Become on the Monday after his round and was served by his wife. ‘He said that he had been running at the weekend. His hands had got cold, so he wanted some gloves,’ Adrian said. ‘He didn’t mention what the run actually was.’
‘I’ve had my fifteen minutes of fame,’ Jon says. I point out that he had not courted publicity, that his fame did not amount – by his own choosing – to even a metaphorical quarter-hour. Beyond the world of fell and hill running, he was anonymous. ‘People have said, “you could get a sponsorship deal,” but I don’t really want to. I guess the only way my ego would be fed is if other people try to beat my record.’
That is exactly what he thought would happen. Names are bandied about. ‘There are plenty of runners who beat me in races who could break my record,’ he insists. ‘The record was low hanging fruit.’
Now I laugh with disbelief. Was he being honest or resorting again to modesty?
‘Not many people have made aggressive attempts,’ he goes on.
I mention Adrian Belton. ‘I don’t think he considered it low hanging fruit.’ Another shrug.
Jez disagreed too: ‘I ran as hard as I could on that day.’ After seeing his record erased so soon, Jez admitted he was ‘gutted and somewhat shocked. The reason I was a little conservative with the schedule was simply awareness that Adrian’s record had stood untouched for so long. I figured that was for good reason.’
Jon listed the numerous complications of the round: the difficulties of support, the committing territory, the uncertain weather, patches of snow that can linger into summer, the need to stay healthy and clear of injury, the tremendous height gain and loss – ‘it’s the 28,000 feet of descent that will get you first’, he remarks – and the fortune, planning, and understanding of the people around you, that goes into achieving long-term objectives.
‘But isn’t that the point?’ I say. ‘Even runners who are supposedly better than you on paper have to overcome these obstacles. But you are the person who did that.’
He nods.
Words on the round do not flow naturally for Jon: ‘I wasn’t lucid for much of the time,’ he admits. I could not blame him for that. Yet eloquence flows when he speaks about the spirit of running and racing in the hills. ‘Being wild,’ he calls it. Jon is a climber and mountaineer first, discovering the hills for running in his late twenties, but the principles that define running as a sport had resonated since childhood. His family were road cyclists. ‘I found all the gear distasteful,’ he says. ‘That aspect propelled me into running. Money doesn’t help. Running in the mountains is an antidote to consumerism.’ That explains why hill runners make up the bulk of Jon’s friends – friends who, as he puts it, understand what it is like to ‘feel the brush of heather on your legs’. He adds: ‘The bond you have after a race comes from that shared experience.’ At that moment, Jon reminded me of Adrian Belton: two men who had achieved sporting greatness; two men at peace; a pair of invincibles.
I shake Jon’s hand outside the Canny Man’s. He goes right; I turn left. A startlingly bright moon is high above the Pentlands. I move towards it. The pavement slopes down. I start to run – an instinctive, spontaneous movement. Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, ‘I don’t even know what I was running for – I guess I just felt like it.’