I raised an index finger to wipe the line of moisture dripping from my nose, gathering in the cleft below. In a mechanical, rapid gesture I had done a thousand times, the digit slid easily from left to right, the nail brushing the stubble above my lip, grazing the skin that joins the nose. Instinctively, I inhaled. Vomit.
It was morning and Arielle was wailing. Lying in her cot, she was shouting ‘mum-my, mum-my, mum-my.’ As I pushed open the door, I was assailed by a vile smell. Something terrible had happened in there. Typically, when she knew the summoning had worked, when she knew someone was in her room, Arielle would throw herself onto her front, burying her face in a pillow, pretending she was invisible, giggling gamely. We would play along.
‘Where’s Arielle? I can’t see her anywhere.’
‘I ‘iding,’ she would gasp.
‘Hide,’ Fi would say, correcting the dropped ‘h’, Arielle’s symbolic connection to London, her city of birth.
Not this morning. Arielle lay on her back surrounded by the half-digested contents of the food she had consumed the previous day. She was groaning, not giggling. Two-and-a-half years as a parent had prepared me for this moment – and every similar moment. I was emotionless. My programming was passivity: acceptance is always easier. ‘I think that’s scrambled egg,’ I said aloud, ‘and that’s definitely a baked bean.’ I lifted the duvet. ‘A lot of baked beans.’
I plucked a now-gently weeping Arielle from the cot, carried her at arm’s length to the bath and peeled off her clothes. Egg was matted into her hair and I combed the biggest chunks free with my fingers. The food did not even seem chewed. I turned the shower head on her and lathered soap through her hair. Arielle hated having her hair washed, but she accepted her fate meekly. Standing naked in the bath, head bowed, she looked pathetic and thin.
I laid her on the sofa. ‘Milk,’ she whimpered. She drank the milk in the manner she always did, gulping furiously and desperately. She reminded me of myself on Slioch all those years ago, hands urgently cupping water from a mountain stream. We are related, after all. Minutes later, after she had staggered drunkenly into the kitchen, the same milk flooded the floor.
It was 7.30am. ‘Worst case scenario,’ I had told Duncan Steen – how strange to think a meeting on the forecourt of a Chiswick petrol station could lead us here – the night before, ‘we’ll leave just after seven.’
We were entered as a team in the Original Mountain Marathon – the OMM, as it is commonly known – in the hour-distant Tweedsmuir Hills. Our packed bags lay in the corridor. Kit had been divided. Food had been cooked and bagged: cold pizza, tomato soup, couscous, custard powder, hot chocolate, jelly babies.
Aphra was crying now. ‘Feed her, please,’ I ordered Mum. Back on the sofa, Dad was trying to comfort Arielle. She squirmed on his lap, clothed now but still pathetic and thin. I had to decide: stay or go. With Fi away at a wedding, my parents were here to look after the girls; that had been the plan. But then came the profusion of vomit.
I hesitated, glancing at the bags, then Arielle. ‘Let’s go,’ I said to Duncan. I hugged Arielle; she responded with a feeble embrace. We left. I do not know why. My two-year-old daughter was sick. But it is futile to defend decisions made years earlier. I suppose it was like that day on the South Glen Shiel ridge: compulsion overruled what was the right course of action.
Vomit. Arielle’s gift of scent, smeared invisibly into the creases of the ‘Peter pointer’ celebrated in our songs. Remember me, Daddy.
‘Commit now,’ Duncan had said as we jogged to the start. I understood the shorthand: you must now forget your daughter; you must now run for seven hours. I nodded affirmation, but thought of Arielle, naked and shivering in the bath.
Rain skittered across our hoods as we climbed the sodden ramparts of Hog Hill, an innocuous rise on the western edge of a wild tract of high Borders land wreathed in mist. As the gradient steepened, I realised Duncan was moving faster. There seemed an effortlessness in his gait while I was already breathing more deeply than I imagined I should be. I did not realise it then, but this was how it would be. A grim reality emerged from misplaced optimism: I was to be tortured; Duncan – aided by a brown and green enormity – would be my torturer.
Originating in the late 1960s as the Karrimor International Mountain Marathon (KIMM), the OMM is the Glastonbury of mountain marathons: both are filthy and teem with the unwashed, but unlike the festival that finds permanence in Somerset, the OMM’s organisers annually seek new mountainous territory in England, Scotland or Wales, with the location kept deliberately vague until around two months before the event. Even then, you do not know exactly where you are being sent until you are handed a map sprinkled with obscure checkpoints on the start line. Glastonbury, I imagine, is also more fun.
Mountain marathons stretch the definition of fun. A two-person team must carry on their backs everything they need to survive for 36 hours on the hills. On top of camping and cooking equipment, and food – the burden of which can be shared – individually, runners must also transport a raft of other paraphernalia: waterproofs, hat and gloves, spare clothes, first aid, whistle and compass, head torch, survival bag, pen and paper, and emergency rations. On paper, the list seems onerous. It is better, nonetheless, than the alternative: hypothermia is even less fun.
There are plenty of mountain marathons in Britain, but none quite like the OMM. It is the most uncompromising of them all. The traditional late October date – typically timed to coincide with the culmination of British Summer Time and the subsequent gaining of an hour on the night of the year a cold, hungry, confined runner camped in a field in the middle of nowhere would least want an additional 60 minutes – lies at the root of the aggravation. Late October raises the likelihood of inclement weather: rain, high wind, low cloud and snow. Borrowdale in 2008 demonstrated just that: a month of rain in 24 hours, flash flooding, 100mph gusts, runners famously ‘unaccounted for’. Late October means the mid-camp is inevitably cold and dark, with night arriving before 6pm. Late October tends to bring a ground saturated from autumn rain, frustrating the runner’s ability to cross hills and valleys that have already been selected for their awkward, rough and pathless nature. Because of the inclemency and the darkness and the cold and the extra hour and the liquidity of the ground, competitors must commit to carrying more than they might in a spring or summer mountain marathon. There is no such thing as just in case at the OMM; probably is more accurate. Not that any of this puts people off. Some 1,500 runners and walkers – paying £150 per team for the dubious privilege – descended on the bleak, mist-smothered peaks of Tweedsmuir.
Quality mirrored quantity. The OMM had lured the year’s doyens of British hill, fell and ultrarunning to the Borders. The male and female winners of the Dragon’s Back, Jim Mann and Jasmin Paris, were racing with their respective partners, Nic Barber and Konrad Rawlik. Kim Collison, second Briton at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, and Adam Perry, whose attempt to break the record for visiting the most Lakeland summits in 24 hours ended in clag and cramp on Yewbarrow, hilltop number 51, after 15 hours and more than 8,000 metres of ascent, had joined forces. Andy Fallas and Iain Whiteside were the strongest team Carnethy could muster, with Fallas a winner at Slioch and Whiteside a runner-up at the Pentland Skyline. Paired with Jean Brown, Nicky Spinks had not had a bad year either, having set a new women’s record for the Bob Graham. In such exalted company, Duncan Archer and Shane Ohly, winners of the OMM the last time it came to Scotland, could almost have been overlooked.
Beneath Mann, Paris and Spinks, and the other ‘elites’, were the rest – the mortals, sprinkled among seven further categories. Five of the eight classes, including the elite, instructed runners to follow linear courses of varying lengths between checkpoints, at times labelled as obviously as ‘trig pillar’ but ordinarily as ambiguously as ‘stream bend’. Nevertheless, the premise is simple: the fastest pair in a respective category to visit all the checkpoints is the winner. The remaining three groupings are known as the ‘score’. Instead of a set linear route, the twosome are faced with a plethora of checkpoints – far more than even the most agile runner could hope to visit – of different numerical values, from 10 to 50, from easily accessible to infuriatingly awkward. The snag is time, not route: finish too late and you are penalised.
That is where Duncan and I found ourselves: racing the long score with a fixed completion time of seven hours on day one and six on day two. That is why we were here: the wind and rain-blasted malice of Hog Hill. Seven hours, I thought. Seven. Following a fence line, we descended by a broad ridge. The terrain was appalling: a confusion of slime and tussock. No two steps were the same; no rhythm could be gained. I flailed forward, chasing my teammate. Where the ridge plateaued, we crossed a fence and scarpered downhill to find our first checkpoint amid an avenue of trees in a plantation. Having gained 20 points, as if we had seen a bear in a cave, we did an abrupt about turn: through the forest, over the fence, across the bog, down a slide of grass, through a stream, and then rather than hiding under the duvet, we forged up the lower slopes of Broad Law, the highest point of the 400 square miles of the OMM.
I do not know what came first: mental submission or the physical equivalent. We were halfway up the dome of Broad Law when Duncan told me to hand over the stove, gas and tent to reduce the load in my bag. We had been running for less than an hour, but I was already slowing him down. It made no difference. If anything, the division seemed to make Duncan stronger. My body seemed overwhelmed by a brand of tiredness I had never experienced. I decided very quickly I wanted nothing more to do with the OMM. Except I could not say those words aloud. Duncan had to utter them – and then I might agree. But I knew Duncan too well; he would not say what he knew I must be thinking. Pride – if nothing else – kept me going. I trudged; Duncan ran. He was always 20 or 30 paces ahead. He would stop, check the map, scan the landscape like a mountain hare, examine the map again, seemingly satisfied, and off he would go.
We accumulated points steadily, with Duncan keeping a running commentary: ‘That’s 110 in two hours. There are 30 points ahead, then another 20.’ I did not care. The notion of being competitive left me cold. If we were to do well, we must run quickly – and I did not want to go anywhere, let alone move through mountains with a sense of urgency. Duncan was momentarily out of sight when my foot sank into a hole. Dragging it out with a pop, I slumped to the ground. Just sitting, being stationary, was wonderful. I looked down to a river and across a glen to russet slopes, sighed, and for a few seconds gave up. And then I carried on.
‘You okay?’ asked Duncan.
‘No.’ He pushed three jelly babies into my palm and continued uphill. ‘Greasy,’ I said, ‘and – meaty?’
‘They were in the same bag,’ Duncan said.
‘As what?’
‘The cocktail sausages.’
Seven hours. The rest would be unremittingly awful, I knew that. I swallowed two painkillers and hoped. Breaking my leg had never seemed such a pleasing proposition.
The OMM is unsatisfactorily billed as ‘hard’. What counts as hard in running parlance these days? A parkrun? A marathon? A multi-day ultramarathon in the Antarctic winter? The blurb offers little clarity: ‘The OMM is meant to be hard.’ Getting out of bed can be hard; coping with grief can be hard; extricating the day-old remnants of scrambled egg from the scalp of a two-year-old who is irrationally obsessional about her father even touching her hair is hard. The word ‘hard’ is as graspingly and unimaginatively subjective as describing a fellow human as ‘nice’ or a book as ‘good’. The OMM is undoubtedly one of the toughest undertakings in the British outdoors, but it offers difficulty and discomfort that goes far beyond the necessity of having to cover many miles, and ascend and descend thousands of metres.
Consider how humans like to move over hills and mountains. We follow defined paths; we cross rivers at bridges; we yearn for summits. Instinct (and logic) tells us not to step off the track, not to ignore the top, not to inexorably slide into the filth of a bog. Even in the mountains, humans are not as free as we would like to think. We still crave comfort. We remain constricted by the trappings of an easier life. As humans, we live in a profoundly oxymoronic world of wanting something hard to be easy. Whether we are walking in the Lake District or the Highlands, the Pennines or the Brecon Beacons, innumerable paths will be found connecting summits and valleys. Even runners in hill and fell races follow defined paths. Why wouldn’t they? They are the fastest and easiest routes. That is why when Duncan found a trod – because it was never me who found a trod – he would gleefully shout ‘trod!’ And for a few moments I would be happy.
Trods – narrow, informal paths that punctuate sparsely-visited terrain, and unmarked on maps – are unpredictable, however. Created by wandering sheep and deer or the occasional walker that followed in the footmarks of their predecessor, they offer the runner respite. Instead of hacking through gorse or heather, or crossing a welter of loose boulders, or an ankle-turning chaos of tussocks, they represent a clear route through the madness. But not for long. They will invariably and infuriatingly peter out, reappearing – if you are fortunate – as another sliver to the left or right, or, more commonly, vanishing into the hillside and disappointingly plunging the traveller back into calf-deep vegetation. Trods occur in places you would not choose to go – precisely where the checkpoints scattered across the OMM map demand attendance. They are deliberately placed to be problematic. Getting from A to B is meant to be a puzzle. They lie next to falling-down cairns at the end of long, nondescript ridges, by sheepfolds buried in bracken, and on peat hags that clutch and grasp.
Why would I want to go to these places? Where is the summit? Where is the path? Where is the bridge? There lies the intensity of the OMM: its insistent demand that you override decades of intuition, and for humans who fool themselves into assuming hills and mountains are in some way a total escape from the conventions of towns and cities, that is the problem. That is why the OMM is ‘hard’.
Mike Stewart was told the location of the OMM before the mountain marathon public even knew the event would return to Scotland. He had a need to know: Mike – a fifty-seven-year-old engineer from Forfar and a veteran of more than 50 mountain marathons – had been appointed by the OMM to plot the routes. Armed with a clutch of Ordnance Survey maps, the course planner immersed himself in the hills, investigating glen, moor, summit and ridge, and recalling his memories of the OMM held here in 1994. Mike had changed much in the intervening period: he emigrated to New Zealand, doing ‘anything conceivable outdoors’ for three years, before returning to Scotland; he met his future wife; he spent a decade working in facilities management at the University of Edinburgh; he raced whenever and wherever he could. Amid the flux of a human life, the hills were unshakeably clamped.
An overnight camp by farm buildings at Manorhead was quickly established as the fulcrum; the checkpoints would necessarily form a lasso around the farm. With a confirmed start and finish, Mike began to draw the linear courses, with the locations of the checkpoints for the score categories emerging thereafter. The aim of the score courses, he explained when we met in Edinburgh two months later, was ‘to reward people for going to difficult locations’. What started as rough etchings on a jumble of maps became a Harvey map re-printed 2,500 times.
Mike was an eighteen-year-old university student at St Andrews when he travelled south-west across Scotland to Galloway for the KIMM in 1976, an edition that would be won by a pair of world champion Norwegian orienteers. Amid the professionalism of Stig Berge and Sigurd Daehli, who were part of a European invasion of top-class orienteers racing for supremacy against the like of Joss Naylor in the 1970s, a story of farcical failure for a Forfar teenager unfolded in a watershed OMM. ‘Half the controls weren’t there,’ Mike said. ‘The Boy Scouts who were putting them out had given up and gone home. We went around on trust. There was no electronic timing like now.’ Naturally, it was late October and the weather was ‘atrocious’. Competitors were handed paper that was not waterproof and had to copy the course from a map provided by the organiser. ‘You had to make it waterproof yourself.’ I looked up from the page on which I was scrawling notes, seeking clarification. ‘A plastic bag,’ he muttered. ‘You try marking up a map when it’s pissing down with rain.’ On his back, he carried a canvas satchel weighing around 25 pounds – three times the weight of mine. He ended day one ‘soaked to the skin’ and his partner’s feet were blistered. ‘We tried to bail out, but it was a remote camp on the side of Loch Dee and we couldn’t. It was minimalistic in those days. By law, you must now have a clean water supply and toilet facilities at the mid-camp. We had burn water and a trench.’
The tale of catastrophe went on: lost tent pegs, no sleeping mat, a soaking sleeping bag, a tent with no groundsheet, a stove that would not light. ‘We had the most miserable night and felt pretty sorry for ourselves. We bailed out in the morning. There was a film crew there and we were so pathetic, they took us back to a hotel.’
Less than 30 per cent of the field completed the Galloway KIMM. Asked by a BBC interviewer if the race was ‘too tough’, Gerry Charnley, the event organiser since 1968, dismissed the accusation. ‘Everybody knows this is the KIMM, the toughest event on the calendar, and it’s not a Sunday afternoon picnic.’
Mike would spend the next eighteen years hillwalking, Munro-bagging, orienteering, climbing and ski mountaineering, but the KIMM? Too ‘hard’. He would not darken its door again until he found himself in the Tweedsmuir Hills in 1994. Now, with the event relabelled as the OMM in 2004, he was back again.
I wanted to know if Mike practised what he planned: whether he found fulfilment in immersing himself in typical OMM terrain, and whether such difficulties offer a heightened level of escapism from the emotional and physical confines of ‘normal’ life. ‘No,’ was the short answer. ‘I’m not going to wander through a bog if I don’t have to,’ Mike conceded. ‘I go to the hills for wilderness, and, yes, I do call our hills wilderness. There’s wilderness in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Scotland and a bit of Iceland. The Alps and the Pyrenees? That’s not wilderness. I like getting away from modern life. I won’t take a GPS. I like to get away from machines, all those trappings of life.’
There is a series of photos of Duncan and me some thirty minutes before the expiry of our allotted seven hours. Duncan is captured first in graceful, alert flight over a burn, progressing to what would be our penultimate checkpoint. I come next: tongue out, chin down, white-faced. In the next photograph, Duncan stands alone by the checkpoint, scrutinising the time on his watch. There is a further picture of me. I seem bewildered. Duncan motioned uphill: ‘We have time.’ My gaze could not mask the two silent words in my head. Above was an ever-sharpening slide of long grass, decorated with a line of toiling runners. They seemed to move in slow motion, desperately clambering upward on all fours as if they faced some kind of awful persecution if they stayed below.
‘Brave,’ Mike said when I told him. The steepness of such ascents is characterised by the inability to change muscle groups. Runners are forced onto their toes for every stride, punishing the calves. I counted my steps to 100, then 200, then began to 300, until Duncan shouted and pointed to an orange and white swirl ahead. I ran. The first staggering movement, the transition from walking to running was dreadful, as if my legs were rooted in the mountain. I punched the control and turned to see Duncan already descending. ‘Follow me!’ he ordered.
As he had done for seven hours, Duncan carried me through the night. Our tent – pitched by Duncan, naturally – was one of hundreds on the sloping Manorhead field we had glimpsed from the final checkpoint atop that grass cliff. With eight minutes to lose 200 vertical metres, we had made it in five, running with a fluency and energy that had previously deserted me. Darkness came suddenly, prompting the return of the malaise. Duncan prepared dinner by the light of a head torch: soup from a packet, couscous from a packet, hot chocolate from a packet, custard from a packet. We ate from the cooking tin, taking turns with a spoon, the custard course tinged with everything that went before. ‘Do you even know where we went today?’ Duncan asked, before making me chart our route, checkpoint by checkpoint. When it was time to sleep, I wrapped my feet in gloves, then socks, placed them in the pockets of my jacket, swaddled a plastic bag over the lot, and then sunk them into my sleeping bag. Seconds later, I needed the toilet.
Morning. A skirl of pipes. A flutter of voices. Footsteps on wet grass. A flicker of hope. Perhaps it will be better today? In the darkness of pre-dawn, an outline of hills was silhouetted against the sky – a glimmer of stark beauty in this mountain masochism. We were called forward to the start. Pulling back a sleeve, I stared at the plastic dibber, gesticulating to my wrist. The tip – required for logging our arrival at checkpoints – was somewhere else: missing in action, trampled into a muddy field, buried in a sleeping bag. ‘That’s not right, is it?’ I murmured. Duncan said nothing. Incredulity returned my stare.
I wondered many times what Duncan thought of me that weekend. We had run a Fellsman and a Bob Graham together, but he had never seen me worse. Pity, I decided, was the word. I had pitied him once. Some years earlier, Duncan, Robin Sanderson and I had caught trains to Guildford on a Friday night in January after work. The plan was to run home to London, some 35 miles away. We climbed onto the North Downs, negotiated a maze of paths on Box Hill and crossed the M25 at midnight, before emerging into the sprawl of London, from Epsom to Sutton to North Cheam to Morden to Mitcham to Streatham. The distance was much further than it had appeared on the map. On a long pavement stretch between Mitcham and Streatham, Duncan succumbed. The meltdown was spectacular. He was shuffling and stumbling, jabbering about jelly babies. I did what he did to me now: stayed a shouting distance ahead, looked back occasionally to check he was not dead, and never, on any account, offered a way out of the drudgery. ‘What do you prefer, carrot or stick?’ he had asked me several hours into day one. I shrugged. Only later would he admit his frustration: ‘We would be together. I would run for what felt like twenty seconds, look back, and there would already be a huge gap.’ I shrugged again.
I shrugged now. The marshal went away. A momentary wave of relief – we might be forced to retire. He came back and made me proffer my wrist. With a new dibber attached, we were sent on our way. We did not mention it again. Duncan would get his revenge: he set the pace.
The day took on a fuzzy reality. I was chasing again, being out-thought again. The terrain for the first two hours was exhausting: either saturated or coated in deep heather. We made our way to a river, Megget Water, with the hills beyond it hiding three checkpoints worth a combined 120 points. Duncan crossed first. I followed, wallowing up to my thighs in brown water, facing upstream. I was a step from the far bank when my supporting foot slid on the green of a rock. Lunging at the mud bank, flailing desperately at nothingness, I slapped into the water.
Duncan’s sympathy was wafer thin. ‘By the time you get up there,’ he pointed, ‘you’ll be warm.’ Even at the top of the climb, twenty minutes later, I was shivering. I put on every item of clothing I carried. Duncan gave me his hat. My feet were suffering the most. I seemed to be running on ice skates, with the outer edges so numbed by cold the only remaining feeling was down the centre of the foot. The consequence was an alarming sense of disorientation, as if I was literally on ice and that I could topple at any moment. Still shaking, I thought of Arielle; now I was pathetic and thin.
We kept on moving, very steeply down, very steeply up, down again, then up Broad Law for a second time. I walked, lacking the coordination to run, fearing a stumble that would cause horrible injuries. Duncan was a long way ahead – perhaps two minutes by the time he reached the glen beneath Broad Law. At that moment, I despised him. I imagined he returned the hate. With the six-hour barrier rapidly approaching, we relented to the inevitable: Duncan had to carry my bag. I battled the notion for two minutes, then surrendered. My emasculation was total.
As Duncan and I bagged pizza and counted cocktail sausages on Friday night, Jim Mann and Nic Barber had travelled, registered, then – having noted the tent of Shane Ohly and Duncan Archer, their elite category rivals, pitched in mud by the event centre – driven north to spend a more comfortable night at the home of Jasmin Paris and Konrad Rawlik. Nic was uneasy. Although it was his fifth OMM in seven years, this was his first outing in the elite group. Despite believing he was not as fast as his rivals, he was convinced of his capacity to suffer. He had come to the right place. Nic’s nervousness stemmed from his partner’s reputation. When his original teammate dropped out, the Sheffield-based runner ‘put out a tweet as a bit of an experiment to see who would reply’. The ‘who’ came in the shape of Jim Mann, the Martin Stone of his generation. ‘I was terrified,’ Nic admitted. But it was only September. Nic embarked on seven weeks of ‘serious’ training, running between 65 and 80 miles a week. In two of those weeks, his total ascent reached 5,000 metres – equivalent to three-and-a-half ascents of Ben Nevis. Whether he was in the high Pyrenees or the moors of the Peak District, he was running.
Nic and Jim ended day one in second place, running for seven hours, covering 25 miles and climbing 3,300 metres. The pace was slow, around three-and-a-half miles per hour – akin to Jon Ascroft’s 17-hour Ramsay’s Round speed. Even the elite were overcome by the conditions and Mike would later admit the linear courses were ‘overegged’, with the weather and a wet summer diminishing the runnable nature of the terrain. Sounding like a modern-day Gerry Charnley, Mike was not about to apologise. ‘This is the OMM. What do you expect?’ he would write in his planner’s report. ‘Special thanks must be made to the Botanic Gardens for the loan of heather and tussock, the assistance of the local keepers in digging bear pits and traps, my climbing buddies for advice on scrambling routes, and last but not least, Mikey (The Hurricane) Trout for meteorological assistance in providing typical OMM weather.’
At the third checkpoint on day two, four teams came together, creating the intensity of traditional hill racing. Iain Whiteside and Andy Fallas were first to drop back, with Andy suffering from short-term blindness caused by a lack of food; Shane Ohly and Duncan Archer were next to cede to the furious pace. As Adam Perry began to struggle, Nic and Jim saw their opportunity to attack the overnight leaders. ‘Adam was gapped by maybe 20 seconds, but Kim stayed on us – a tactic Jim had played earlier when I dropped a little,’ Nic said. Adam recovered. The gap closed. The defenders would then become the attackers. On a short, steep climb from a clough, Adam and Kim ‘eased away’, with Nic and Jim’s quest for OMM glory dissolving. ‘They were only 30 seconds or so ahead, but that was the elastic gone,’ admitted Nic.
Nic and I spoke on the phone a few days later. He was on crutches. How does a man who finished as a runner-up in the elite category of the OMM find himself in such a predicament? At the end of the second day, Nic removed a filthy, bloodied right sock, uncovering a blistered big toe and a fourth toe shorn of nail and skin. As the pain intensified on the journey home, Jim drove Nic to accident and emergency in Darlington. ‘They were quite puzzled,’ Nic said. ‘They didn’t know what to make of it. They asked me what was normal for this type of event, so I got my left foot out.’
As Duncan and I dropped off Hog Hill, we saw the event centre in the valley. I took my bag back: a minor victory – albeit for appearance’s sake only. I mustered something resembling a sprint and crossed the finish line, running blindly beyond the last checkpoint. ‘Jonny, dib!’ Duncan yelled at my latest act of ignominy. There was still to be one more.
A kit check was obligatory, with missing items likely to lead to disqualification. An OMM official carefully looked us up and down, glanced at a clipboard, peered at us again, and said: ‘Can I see your waterproof trousers, boys?’ I laughed, probably for the first time in two days.
‘I’ve lost them. They are up there – somewhere,’ I said, waving dismissively at the hills. I imagined them tangled and half-submerged in a bog.
They had vanished the previous afternoon. ‘How long have you been running with your bag wide open?’ Duncan had said at the time. It was the sort of question a parent would ask a child.
‘What?’
‘Your bag is wide open!’
‘Oh . . . The stove?’
‘I’ve got the stove.’
‘Oh.’
Home still smelt vaguely of vomit. Arielle was in the corridor, playing with a doll, wheeling it round in a little pink buggy. She glanced at me and continued around a corner. ‘She’s been fine,’ Dad said. ‘She perked up a few minutes after you left.’ Somehow her not being fine would have made things better; her not being fine would have given me an excuse.
‘How did you get on?’ Dad asked.
‘We weren’t disqualified,’ I muttered. That might have made it better too. Like Colin Donnelly and Ben Nevis, I could have made a purportedly moral stand over a pair of waterproof trousers, vowing never to return to the hills of Tweedsmuir.
Gradually, the self-pity subsided. Only a flutter of disappointment remained – a disappointment that was nothing to do with the OMM. This was about the mountains of Lochaber, not the heathery hills of the Borders.
‘When I get there, I will just get on with it.’ What unrealistic nonsense those words seemed now. The equation was plain: if I cannot cope with the challenge of the OMM, how can I possibly do Ramsay’s Round?
I wondered, idly at first, then obsessively: what exactly does it take to be a Ramsayist?