You sense Alan Smith before you see him. I sensed him now: a near 13-stone man striding uphill, fingers characteristically knitted behind his back. Reindeer Man, they call him. With a bound, he moved in front. I hung on, transfixed by the thick woollen socks stretching up his ankles. We summited the pyramidal Eildon Hill together. I followed a path to the right. Alan continued directly over the nose and disappeared. He seemed to me to have run over the edge of a cliff. When I glimpsed him again, he was far below, galloping into the clasp of a pass, a rapidly shrinking form, then swerving left along a track, sweeping downhill to the finish line in the Borders town of Melrose.
‘Straight down,’ Alan says when I ask how he got from summit to pass. ‘It was heather and rock, then scree – and on scree you can open up fast. Then there was a wee bit of rocky stuff, then back onto the path. I must have overtaken half a dozen people.’
On the flat, Alan ‘plods like a carthorse’; going up, he is a diesel engine: robust but unspectacular; going down, with his size tens aligned to gravity, he is possessed with the agility of the willowiest reindeer. ‘It’s the strength in my legs, and it’s up here,’ he says, tapping a finger to his temple. ‘If you fall, you fall, but I can probably count on one hand how many times I’ve fallen in races. If you hold yourself back, you jar your whole body. My knees are great – for a fifty-six-year-old.’
Alan has been at the races for three decades, running as many as 50 a year. His regime needs little discussion, he insists: Alan does not train. Raised in the Royal Deeside town of Ballater, he continues to run with the childish impudence that prompted his much younger self to race his father off the hills, rather than ride home on a tractor.
‘I’m a farmer, you see,’ he explains, ‘so I chase reindeer around the Cairngorms – finding them and shifting them. We’ve got a farm at Tomintoul where we’ve got red deer and sheep. We’ve got a quad, so you’ve got to get out for your run as you’ve been sitting on your backside all day. You don’t have to do much – just potter about, four, five miles a day. Every day though.’ In winter, in preparation for the deluge of summer races, he will run further, always in the hills, perhaps up Ben Avon or Lochnagar – the mountains on his ‘back door’. His one concession to ‘training’ is a Tuesday night session of intervals on forestry tracks with his Deeside clubmates. The tracks, he can just about bear. Roads are anathema. ‘I can’t get roads into my head,’ he says. ‘I’d rather go around a corner and see Ben Nevis.’
Alan stands a shade over six feet in his running studs and weighed 12 stone nine pounds that morning, he tells me, wincing a little, despite wielding a half-eaten meat pie in one hand. We sit side by side on a wooden bench in the sunshine, two meagre thighs, two substantial ones. ‘That’s three stone heavier than a lot of others,’ he says, taking another bite of the pie. He looks sideways at me. ‘We should have a handicap. You lot should have to carry a bag of bricks.’
Malcolm Gladwell’s 1993 book, Outliers, argues that the route to excellence in a particular field is 10,000 hours of practice. Alan Smith’s knees could not sustain 10,000 hours of descending. Even the longest continuous descent in British hill racing – Ben Nevis, free-falling some 1,300 vertical metres – only takes the average hill runner around 45 minutes to accomplish. Alan shrugs when I ask him how he descends so quickly. He did not know. Or if he knew, he could not explain. Like any aptitude that has been embedded, when called upon, he acts instinctively.
Brothers Andrew and Iain Gilmore are watching runners dash along the finishing straight of the annual downhill-only race on Caerketton. In a little over one mile, the track drops 300 metres at an average gradient of around 20 per cent. Andrew had won the three previous races, becoming in 2014 the first and only person to breach the five-minute barrier. His split for the first mile was four minutes and 30 seconds. ‘I just let go,’ he remembers. ‘It was very exhilarating.’
The brothers’ brief but frantic races have been run. Iain showed me his time: 5 minutes and 14 seconds; Andrew had not worn a watch. With runners set off at short intervals, the fastest descender would not be revealed until the end. It would be a Gilmore one-two, but Iain – twice runner-up behind his older sibling – had come of age, finishing 21 seconds faster than Andrew. The prizes at the Caerketton Downhill are distributed by lottery and after his name was called, Iain returned to us clutching a two-litre bottle of Irn Bru.
‘When I’m racing, the fears about tripping or injuring myself disappear, unlike training runs when you’re taking it more easily,’ Andrew says when I ask the brothers how they overcome fear. ‘If you’re properly going flat out, that takes over your mind. There’s no room for anything else.’
Iain chips in: ‘All your concentration is on running the right lines at full pace. You don’t have time to think about the risks involved.’
The Scottish Hill Runner in the late 1980s was a satirical affair. ‘The sport of hill running and particularly the attitude of its participants from organiser, marshal, champion, to the slowest boggie, is precious,’ Pete Crane declared in his editorial in the January 1988 edition. ‘So please let us all resolve not to take ourselves too seriously,’ he added.
‘Matey Jockland’ was parodying – and knew his audience – when he penned The Art of Descending for the magazine. Rule one is ‘reduced sensory awareness, especially sight’, he wrote. He advocated ‘closing the eyes prior to descending’, and failing that, ‘consuming alcohol for longer lasting effects.’ Rule two is ‘mental instability’. Matey recommended the best way to ‘reduce sensory input’ was to undergo a frontal lobotomy. ‘Rumour has it that certain of the more successful clubs operate a “lobotomy at birth” policy as a means of developing strong junior squads. A spokesman for Lochaber AC strenuously denied that his club operated such a policy, adding that the pre-natal method was much more effective.’
There is truth, of course, in satire. When Alan Smith was competing against his father’s tractor, he was unwittingly skilling himself for a life in the mountains: where to place his feet, selecting the line of least resistance, thinking multiple steps ahead. Hundreds of descents, hundreds of thousands of footmarks. The Gilmore brothers are in their twenties, three decades behind Alan, but the same principle applies. Youth does not equate to inexperience. In seven years, since the brothers were old enough, they have run almost 400 hill races between them. Running his first Caerketton Downhill as an eighteen-year-old, Iain finished in 6 minutes and 48 seconds, a time that would have placed him mid-pack in today’s race. As we speak – having also won Bishop Downhill, at 1,140 metres the shortest race in the Scottish hill racing calendar, and Nebit Downfall, the two races that bookended Caerketton in a late-summer downhill series – his descending speed was unmatched.
Malcolm Patterson knows how to get off a mountain. Coming to hill running via orienteering, he raced extensively in Scotland, notably winning at Ben Lomond and Dollar. He was ninth at Ben Nevis in 1984, in what was arguably the strongest field to ever contest the race, and won a Great Britain vest the same year, before making five further international appearances. He now works for Scottish Athletics, answering to the title of ‘national coach mentor’ for the country’s best hill and mountain runners, as well as coaching at the hill running powerhouse of Shettleston Harriers. He reels off a list of the qualities that make a good downhill runner: strength, balance, coordination, agility, proprioception, anticipation, keeping the body in line, fast feet. I nod inwardly at the list. None of it surprises me. We come, inevitably, to the brain-off, brakes-off cliché. ‘The classic quote is you have to have a screw loose,’ Malcolm says. ‘But running downhill is a calculated risk. Confidence comes from knowing you have done the right sort of training and that you have the strength and balance necessary for you to come downhill at speed without falling or breaking down.’
He acknowledges some runners are innately less scared, but believes instinctive dread can be overcome. ‘It’s about knowing you’ve fallen and survived; you’ve drawn blood and haven’t died. A lot of this does come naturally, but you can overthink it too. That was one of my problems. I over-analysed rather than letting things flow. It’s not about disengaging the brain and being reckless; it’s about relaxing and calming yourself, and getting rid of tension. I used to think it was a macho thing about having the bottle – I don’t buy that line.’
As Malcolm conceded, there is an argument too for simple genetics: those, in a sporting sense, born lucky. Stewart Whitlie is in his mid-fifties, but like Adrian Belton, he could pass for two decades younger. He is a self-confessed ‘uphill specialist’, switching to hill running after a decade of success in amateur cycle racing. ‘There must be something in the way we are made. Right at the start of cycling, I could always cycle up hills fast,’ he says. ‘There’s probably a genetic thing about strength to weight ratio, and some people may have this naturally.’ The cadence and style of cycling uphill mimics the short, fast steps needed to climb. A slight figure, standing five feet and seven inches, and weighing around nine-and-a-half stone, Alan Smith would have Stewart carrying a bag of bricks. ‘Compared to other runners going uphill – when you can hear them blowing – I don’t feel like I’m breathing particularly hard,’ Stewart admits. In a downhill-only race, Alan might be the better of the pair, but in conventional races, Alan will not be anywhere near Stewart. There is no shame in that. Few runners get anywhere near Stewart. He is a 13-time Scottish hill running champion: once as a senior, five times as an over-40, seven times as an over-50. Even in his sixth decade, Stewart strikes fear into the hearts of athletes half his age, racing prolifically and still winning outright. He is, it seems, ageless.
If Stewart has an equal, it is Bill Gauld, an athlete who notoriously won the 14-mile Seven Hills of Edinburgh as a fifty-seven-year-old. Two years later, a few months shy of sixty, he negotiated the immense tangle of scree at Jura, quite possibly the sternest race in the hill running year, in under four hours – a feat worthy of an engraved whisky tumbler. When I ran with Bill on Bruntsfield Links, on the sort of blue sky and breezy March afternoon that makes Edinburgh feel like the happiest place on Earth, the weather did not seem coincidental. He was trying to ‘get fit’, Bill told me. I looked down at a little snow-haired man in sunglasses, kitted out in tracksuit, fleece and running shoes, all the while clutching a stick in his right hand. He was eighty-three. We would run for a minute, then walk, before breaking into a jog again. He moved slowly but instinctively – as a three-time British over-50 hill running champion and world over-65 silver medallist would. There was no shuffle, no stoop. The stick scarcely touched the ground. We completed three laps of the Links, around a mile. He had already been up Blackford Hill that morning: ‘I walked up the steps, then ran down to the road,’ he said nonchalantly. That night, he was planning to meet a group of Carnethy women who run socially on alternate Mondays. I see him on the hills occasionally. On the evenings of the Carnethy handicaps in the Pentlands, if he is not running, Bill often walks partway along the course. He does not cheer or encourage; he just seems to look and think. We dash past him, every one of us offering a greeting: ‘Hello, Bill.’
Alan Smith is non-conventional. He would claim not to train. What he means is he does not follow fads; he does not do anything flashy. You will not catch him uploading a run to Strava or wearing cushioned anklet socks. He lives offline, asking others to enter him for online-entry only races, but his ability to run competitively in the Scottish mountains is easily explained. He is as hill-hard as they come. And that is what links Alan Smith to the Gilmores to Stewart Whitlie to Bill Gauld. Unwittingly, they buy into the philosophy of Malcolm Patterson: that the best are made, not born. ‘When I started hill running,’ Malcolm said, ‘I thought I would have to be the world’s strongest man and eat rocks for breakfast.’ He knows better now.
When the Gilmore siblings are jogging up Caerketton and careening downhill, refining their technique, Stewart is moving deeper into the range, running from Flotterstone, following the route of the Pentland Skyline. He will save surges for the climbs, pumping his legs and swinging his arms up Turnhouse, then Carnethy, then Scald Law. For almost twenty years, he ran short, fast repetitions on the grass at Edinburgh’s Inverleith Park during his lunch break on Tuesdays. Such was his longevity, when his workplace changed – and he would no longer be able to make the session – a party was thrown in his honour. After completing yet another session of intervals, a four-person relay was staged, with Stewart running alone. For once, he finished last.
Stewart’s other staple sees him in Holyrood Park for the so-called WASP, the anacronym for Wednesday Arthur’s Seat pain. The clue is in the name: 30 minutes of self-induced torment. As well as the understatement characterised by Eddie Campbell, the other quality a hill runner must possess is a willingness to suffer – and suffering must be rehearsed.
Colin Donnelly has been suffering ever since he ran up Ben Lomond in 1977. ‘Get a lap, say it’s a half-mile, on the grass, don’t do it on the road, set a plan of around ten laps,’ he explained. ‘Time your laps, and make sure that you get faster and faster, even if it’s hurting.’
Bobby Shields expressed a similar sentiment in the 1980s: ‘It’s easier to chicken out because you don’t know your limitations until you hit them. Although you’re lying in the gutter, you might not be at your limit. People don’t realise what the body can do until they’re put in the position of having to do it.’
Aberdeen-born Jack Maitland, who won the British championship in his first serious year of competition in 1986, states the case even more concisely: ‘It’s what you’re prepared to do yourself.’
Suffering, I get. That is a decision of will. But what about the ‘genetic thing’?
Joe Symonds and Tom Owens are facing an audience at Kinlochleven Primary School on the eve of the Glen Coe Skyline. Joe had won the 2015 race; Tom would finish second in the 2016 version the following day. The question and answer session is arranged by Salomon, the race sponsor, and has a disjointed, awkward air. Joe runs 60 to 70 miles per week, he tells us, much of the volume accomplished by commuting from his family home to work as a doctor. Hill repeats, a threshold session and a long run in the hills are standard features of his week. When Tom speaks, he virtually parrots Joe; there is little to distinguish their training. I sense the audience searching for something: a collective yearning to know the answer to that crucial question: why are you so good at running? And perhaps more pertinently, why are you better than us? We ask about tapering and shoes – as if wearing the same studs as Joe and Tom will make an iota of difference. The questions continue: motivation, cross-training, race strategy. I cannot help but think of Stewart Whitlie’s words about genetic inheritance. Perhaps they should use this platform to make a public apology? After all, it is not their fault.
Tom dismisses the notion when, several months later and days before he is due to fly out to Costa Rica to race in the six-day, 142-mile Coastal Challenge, I ask him to elaborate on the comments he made in Kinlochleven. ‘One of the main things I like about running is that generally you get out what you put in,’ he says. ‘For me, that means a lot of hard work but also trying to be clever with training – focusing on key sessions, build-ups and of course proper recovery. I believe there are very gifted athletes, but without the commitment to hard work, they won’t stick it out or will break down. I certainly don’t think I have any particularly good running ability other than persistence, determination and a fairly positive mindset.’
In the world of Tom Owens, ‘persistence’ and ‘determination’ look like this: a solid base of winter mileage; two or three ‘quality’ sessions a week that could be hill work, a tempo run, flat intervals or a race, as well as twice-weekly visits to the mountains; a week or fortnight-long warm weather training camp in the peaks of the Canaries; a job as an ecologist that means many hours every day on his feet wearing heavy boots; miles of cycling because he does not own a car; a summer sabbatical in the Alps or Pyrenees running alongside some of the best athletes on the planet – in 2016, Tom ran the 100-mile route of the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in three days, then climbed Mont Blanc; racing regularly and racing hard – he has twice been a Scottish hill racing champion and a runner-up in the Extreme Skyrunning Series; at the end of a season, usually in November and December, running is temporarily replaced by cyclo-cross. And then it starts all over again.
I was still unsatisfied. Despite his obvious aptitude for hard work, how could Tom not accept that he was born lucky – that his heart, lungs and legs were better equipped for running than the overwhelming majority? He would dominate the Coastal Challenge, winning overall and each of the day stages. ‘Would you accept you are blessed with natural ability?’ I wrote in a message to Tom when he was home again. ‘It is indisputable that not everyone can be a champion hill racer,’ I explained. ‘If two people undertake the same training and share similar discipline, talent will naturally separate them.’
Tom disagreed again, naming a handful of mountain and ultra-distance runners who he considered to be ‘naturally gifted’: Kilian Jornet, Jonathan Wyatt, Marco de Gasperi and Angela Mudge. Tom Owens, he insisted was not on the list. ‘Even then,’ Tom said, ‘they still have the desire to compete and train very hard. I certainly don’t put myself in the same category as those guys. Without determination and training, and the ability to recover from training and racing, I would not have any success.’
In the end, I got an answer that satisfied my probing from Stephen Pyke, a runner who would know: he has run all the Munros in 39 days. ‘Kilian – in terms of the physiology he has been blessed with – is that Usain Bolt freak of nature type athlete,’ he said. ‘Tom is probably blessed to be in the top five per cent of having a good physiology for running, and through hard work he has turned himself into a top athlete – but he has probably not been born with the physiology and talent that Kilian has. Ultimately, however hard he works, if Kilian works at the same level, Tom is not going to beat him.’
When utilised then, there is no substitute for raw genetically-conceived talent – but tenacity comes very close.
Kate Jenkins won three hill racing championships in seven years, as well as several Scotland vests, through sheer force of will. She is proudly alternative. ‘I can’t sit still,’ she says. ‘I never trained to race. I feel restless and I go for a run. That’s the bottom line. It’s my anti-depressant, my anger management, my frustration release; it’s for when I’m feeling crap at work. And I love beautiful places. They make me feel at peace.’
Kate grew up on a Pentlands hill farm, walking the fields and moors barefoot. Burying sheep and cutting tracks kept her fit. She was ‘feral,’ she admits, and it was little wonder she was ‘tomboyish’ at school. At university, fellow students would ask, ‘you’re not running again?’ Kate would nod – and go for her run.
‘They would think I was a freak or weird,’ she says. In later years, coaches wondered why she lacked focus, despite her obvious ability and endurance. She twice attempted to follow training schedules. The first – a six-month programme – had no effect, she insists. As for the second: ‘I was injured after two weeks. I’d never been injured before, so I thought, stuff this training bollocks.’
Stuff convention too. When Kate won the first of her seven West Highland Way Race titles in 1999, finishing third overall, she was averaging a mere 30 miles a week in preparation. Her nutrition for the 95-mile route included 16 bags of crisps – effectively one packet every six miles. ‘I eat what I want,’ she declares. ‘And I drink – lots.’
Perhaps it was Kate’s carefree attitude that made her excel – an attitude characterised by eight extraordinary days in 2011. After winning her seventh West Highland Way, she raced in the Pentlands four days later, ahead of two long back-to-back weekend races, Arrochar Alps and the Lairig Ghru, taking her racing miles in that period to almost 150. A fortnight later, Kate was second Briton in the women’s race in the Trail World Championships in Connemara, Ireland, but paid the price for her formidable effort: ‘I ended up in the back of an ambulance.’
Kate’s mantra for success is as credible as Alan Smith’s: ‘I am bloody-minded.’ When we speak several months later, she tells me she has ‘trashed her heel’. She was heading out to ‘beast hill reps’ nonetheless. Her rationale? ‘I can’t bear weight on it, so up on the toes work instead.’
It is the collision of talent and grit that prompts success in Ramsay’s Round. It is why Adrian Belton held the record for 26 years. ‘What the Ramsay requires is mental determination and focus – that and a bit of luck,’ he says, before using the same adjective as Kate to describe himself. ‘I just kept buggering on. I suppose I have a combination of doggedness and bloody-mindedness.’ Those qualities propelled Adrian into the record books. But sometimes, in the rough world of Ramsay’s Round, even that is not enough.
Bill Johnson was new to hill running in the late 1990s when he supported three fellow members of Macclesfield Harriers on successful rounds. ‘I remember Craig Harwood sprinting down the road, eyeballs on stalks, to get in on time,’ Bill said. ‘I was amazed at those mountains: nature at its grandest.’ He vowed to emulate his clubmates. Life intervened: family and work, and the alternative of a closer-to-home Bob Graham. A decade had slipped away when Bill’s wife, Anne Stentiford, who then held the women’s records for the Bob Graham and the Paddy Buckley, sought to complete the trio. They travelled north, with Anne convinced she was fitter than she had been on the previous rounds. As they neared Fort William, Bill and Anne, and a trio of leg one supporters, came to the scene of an accident. ‘There was no-one else there,’ said Bill. ‘The driver had careered off the road into a field. He died.’ Police interviews followed; the 4am start time slipped by. They lost the will. ‘No-one’s heart was in it,’ Bill recalled. Anne never regained the same level of fitness and two years later had an operation on both knees. She will never run Ramsay’s Round.
Pursuing the dream, Bill attempted for the first time in 2012, abandoning after 15 hours with crippling stomach cramps. He tried again three weeks later. Same problem, same outcome. After seeking advice on what he should eat – egg butties and boiled potatoes, he concluded – he returned to Lochaber in 2014. He would call Anne from the darkness of Beinn na Lap. There was a resigned sadness to Bill’s tone: ‘She tried to keep me going, but I knew I wasn’t going to.’
The ‘stubborn fool’ went again. ‘You’re almost there,’ a walker descending Ben Nevis encouraged as Bill began a clockwise attempt. He was as ready as he could be, having completed long back-to-back days in the hills and a Tranter a fortnight earlier.
And yet: ‘I felt rubbish – no strength at all in my legs.’ Bill decided on the Grey Corries to quit at Fersit, unaware that his crew had made a pact to dismiss such notions. He continued, carried forward on a wave of positivity and a reassuring sense that there was no way out, while explicitly aware that he was not going to crack 24 hours. It did not matter; that day, just getting around was enough. He made it back to the hostel, almost 26 hours after starting. Bill – one of the silent, unrecorded Ramsayists – went back to his rented lodge and lay down. ‘I crashed out – sleeping the sleep of the just. Just finished. Just completely knackered. Just delighted.’
Mark Hartree is more Kate Jenkins than Tom Owens. He could run Ramsay’s Round, but while the vagaries of terrain and weather, and a thousand other uncertainties, might have extended Jon Ascroft’s round from 17 to 19 hours, such an occurrence on Mark’s would tip him over 24. It was always going to be tight. Mark’s strategy was constructed on unrelenting optimism, surrounding himself with hill running friends and filling his mind with verse. On Aonach Beag, he felt a twinge in his right knee – the return of an old injury. ‘I hoped I would run it off,’ he said. ‘I put it firmly into the back of my mind, in a box, and shut the lid so I could not see or hear it scream.’ The music – The Rolling Stones, Take That, The Killers – was not enough to drown out the insistence of a throbbing knee. As Mark trudged through the glen to Sgùrr Eilde Mòr, his pace inexorably slowed to a halt. Searching for a reason to carry on, he remembered why he was here: Molly Williams, a two-year-old from Sheffield suffering from spinal muscular atrophy, who had inspired Mark to run eight ultramarathons, ultimately raising more than £10,000 for her charity. ‘I was blessed to be able to do this sort of thing when others can’t,’ he realised. It was enough to get him to his feet. He was going to finish no matter what, but within 24 hours? If you are moving and can keep moving, it is possible.
As Mark climbed Sgùrr Eilde Mòr, the vapour trail of a plane glowed crimson as it caught the dying rays of the sun. He was fed cashew curry and jelly babies, and sang Wild Rover. There was light, but then there was dark, and with the darkness came clag, adding a slick, slippery coating to the rocks of the Mamores. A dodgy knee, a bit of clag – it was enough. The balance tipped.
The day elapsed on Mullach nan Coirean. On the road, Mark broke into a trot. His knee had inexplicably stopped hurting. ‘My left leg felt brilliantly strong and my right one was just numb.’
He heard the voice of Charlie Ramsay ahead: ‘Get your arms up!’
‘I wasn’t a champion, so I put them out and ran through the finish line in 24 hours and 47 minutes,’ Mark said. ‘As we sat down on the wall to get a group picture, I looked up at the Ben. The top was clear with blue skies. The sun was out and it looked perfect conditions to do Ramsay’s Round. I laughed. So much for planning.’
Great Borne rises in the Western Fells of the Lake District, casting a tumbling reflection into Ennerdale Water. Standing 616 metres, it is dwarfed by the summits of Lochaber. Bill Williamson had three times been unsuccessful on Ramsay’s Round. When he tried again, he finally made it back to Glen Nevis: it was not enough; he was timed out. He would not be able to walk properly for three weeks afterwards. When he removed a sock, blood poured from a toe; closer inspection revealed the skin on his toes had been torn off. Infection followed. That summer, while his family played on the sand of a Cornish beach, Bill sat watching them, wearing a pair of wellies to cover his swollen feet. But, despite the pain, was he, like Bill Johnson, ‘just delighted’? At the time, ‘it felt like some sort of closure.’ Who was he kidding? Bill Williamson would be back.
The weather had been characteristically cruel on his attempts – support runner Bob Wightman had to grab hold of Bill to stop him being blown off Na Gruagaichean as the wind gusted to 60mph, with Ian Charters, another water-carrier, cowering on all fours at the same moment, in one attempt – but it would be too easy to blame failure on the elements. Bill was repeatedly bothered by a recurring knee injury that could not cope with the extraordinary requirements of repeated ascent and descent. That physical affliction then ate into his belief that the round could be done.
Bill went back to his home in the western Lake District, wondering if Ramsay’s Round was simply beyond him. He had accomplished the Bob Graham and Paddy Buckley, but the Scottish equivalent seemed to reject his every advance. What was the difference? What did he have to do to be a Ramsayist? He looked up. The answer stared back at him: Great Borne.
He stood at the bottom of the fell and started running, climbing 500 metres to the bouldery summit. From there, he descended a grassy slope, reaching the falling water of Red Gill, then turned uphill again, rising a further 300 metres back to Great Borne’s highest point via a rugged approach on Floutern Crag. Bill would run the route twice, three times if he was feeling sprightly, every fortnight.
That was only the beginning. There was the weekly tempo-style uphill session, either a 25-minute, mile-long climb up 450 metres of Great Borne, or another mile effort over 35 minutes on the north-west ridge of Grasmoor End. There was the monthly psychological slog on Crag Fell or Gale Fell, eschewing tourist tracks and finding deliberately steep lines buried in bracken and heather, the sort of place a person would wander only when lost. There were longer runs too, inevitably up Great Borne, then left into Mosedale and over Hen Comb, Mellbreak and Red Pike, or onto the heights of Grasmoor above Crummock Water. The purpose was fixed: controlled suffering. The preparation must match the objective. With a month to go before a fifth Ramsay attempt, he climbed 5,500 metres in a week; the following week he did 4,600. Around the same time, he ran a final seven-mile effort on forest tracks. The route – comprising around 500 metres of ascent – had once taken him 1 hour and 35 minutes. It was a session Bill had prioritised, knowing he needed to cover the theoretically runnable ground between Beinn na Lap and Meanach as fast as possible. This time the run took one hour and two minutes. Bill was ready.
Standing outside the hostel in Glen Nevis, three years after his last attempt, Bill was not apprehensive. He was excited. He was imbued with confidence. What did he have to worry about? ‘I knew I could run much faster than just under 24 hours, but the main goal was to complete,’ he says.
With confidence came a revelation: this thing now offered the potential for enjoyment. ‘If you enjoy what you’re doing,’ Dr Lucy Rattrie, an Edinburgh-based sports mindset coach, told me, ‘you’re going to get so much more out of it.’ So it would be for Bill. The hours spent hauling his body up Great Borne, Grasmoor End, Crag Fell and the rest had dislodged the abstract sense of the round. It was suddenly – and quite wonderfully – plausible. The doing would be easier than what had already been done. Heading clockwise, it took Bill a conservative eight-and-a-half-hours to reach Loch Treig, but he seemed remarkably fresh, as if he had been jogging.
Bill had found the difference – but it was not down to training alone. After reading Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run and Tim Noakes’ Lore of Running he was convinced the cause of the knee pain was poor running technique, not the far easier excuse of 40 years of walking and running in the fells. He transitioned to low-drop footwear and began drills in aqua shoes. ‘Within a few months,’ he says, ‘I experienced for the first time since my teens the feeling of floating along as I ran, and the knee pain disappeared.’ Bill was also 25 pounds lighter than he had been on his previous attempt, having adopted a near-paleo diet, massively reducing his consumption of refined carbohydrate. It was a logical step to becoming faster. Comparing times, his recovery pace was now the same as his tempo pace had been five years earlier.
I thought of Alan Smith and his meat pie, Kate Jenkins and her 16 bags of crisps – salt and vinegar before she could no longer stomach the flavour and resorted to ready salted. While sports nutritionist Renee McGregor would not specifically recommend a paleo diet, she makes a living by encouraging others to change the way they think about food and drink. When we speak, I attempt to dismiss diet as a ‘marginal gain’. She gives the notion short shrift, insisting the balance of sporting performance hinges equally on the physical, the mental and nutrition. As a performance and clinical dietician, Renee’s job is to optimise the ways in which nutrition can enhance an athlete’s performance. Typically, that entails identifying a perceived weakness caused by ineffective nutrition and finding ways to reduce or overcome the issue. For ultrarunner Robbie Britton, that means periodising his nutrition over different blocks of training, whether he is returning from injury or conditioning at high-altitude in the Alps; for Paralympic fencer Piers Gulliver, that means maintaining blood sugar levels to maximise his ability to concentrate, particularly as fights become more aggressive and recovery time diminishes; for Holly Rush, another ultrarunner, that means careful planning of hydration and salt levels during races, factoring length, terrain and temperature. For Bill, it just happened to be a paleo diet.
The euphoria continued, not least on the prepared-for run to Meanach. ‘It just seemed to flow effortlessly,’ Bill recalls, ‘as if I could run forever. I wish you could bottle that feeling.’ At the bothy, he met Bob Wightman, Andy Kitchin and Jim Mann. ‘I remember telling them I thought I was holding back, and I was told not to bother holding back any more. When I got to Binnein Mòr I found I had knocked an hour off my schedule. The rest of the final leg was surreal as I knew I would finish in under 24 hours.’
A low sun bathed the mountains in a cherry blush as Bill ran down Mullach nan Coirean. An easterly squall marched along the glen, the rain glinting in the fading remnants of day. The runner seemed to tread water, as if in a dream. Once on forestry tracks, he suddenly felt desperately tired. The merest incline reduced his movements to a walk. But still the reverie, like an ‘outer-body experience’, as Bill puts it, cradled him. He thought of how he had failed, over and over again – and then was catapulted to a hallucinogenic present. He is a Ramsayist.