The alarm sounds at 5am. Jasmin Paris opens her eyes. She knows what is to be done. She climbs out of bed, pulls on running gear and makes her way to the kitchen, where she scoops a handful of muesli into a palm and chews her breakfast as she ties her laces. She shuts the door behind her. As her breath condenses in the cold air, she adjusts the head torch and starts running, her studded shoes clacking along the road, the only sound in the darkness of a January morning. Within ten minutes, the road is a memory; she is among hills. The Moorfoot range, wild, high and illuminated by torch light, embrace the runner. They are well acquainted. An owl hoots. Deer skitter. Foxes gawp. She runs as she feels, across pathless hillside, through heather and bog. After an hour, with the hills still immersed in darkness, her smeared legs turn for home. The click-clack heralds her return. At the back door, she pulls off her muddied shoes, tosses them on a growing pile, and steps inside. She will be out there again tomorrow, and the day after, and next week, and next month. She will break trail in fresh-fallen snow; she will battle malevolent wind and frantic rain; she will watch apricot dawns. Sometimes, she will want to ignore the ringing of the alarm, to stay in bed for a little longer, to not step out the door. She goes nonetheless.
There is more than one way to make a champion. This is the Jasmin Paris way.
While she travelled along the faint tracks of the Moorfoots, Jasmin could have allowed herself to dream of what may be. But this is a woman who understands cause and effect; a woman who dedicated six years to train as a vet, then another four to earn specialist European Diploma status; a woman whose parents, Jeff and Alena, are university academics renowned for their work on mathematical logic. While Jasmin’s approach to running is ‘uncalculated and spontaneous, and definitely not measured or considered’, her efforts are underpinned by pragmatism. Once she had committed to being the best she could be, it was not enough to simply hope. The Jasmin Paris way is based on common sense: I will reap what I sow – and sowing is what Jasmin does best.
‘The hardest thing is getting out the door,’ Jasmin says. ‘Once you’re out there, it’s okay. I like being outside and being in the hills, even on those bad days. I remember one time when I was running on the hills in a blizzard and thinking – in those white flakes at five in the morning – anyone would assume I was completely crazy.’ She stops, turning her head to call into the kitchen. ‘I don’t sleep enough. Konrad would say that, wouldn’t you?’
Konrad Rawlik is Jasmin’s husband of three months. On the morning of their wedding on the Inner Hebridean island of Jura, the Paris-Rawlik Jura Whisky Chaser was inaugurated. Jasmin, dressed as a cow, and Konrad, wearing the attire of a milkmaid, along with a herd of mountain running friends, trotted up an island hill. The milkmaid had the edge, for the cow had been drinking Prosecco on the beach the night before, giving Konrad time to kneel and proffer a ring at the top. The happy couple took a dram with the group and raced downhill, the cow, even on her wedding day, leading the charge.
‘Yeah,’ Konrad shouts. He is making fishcakes for a dinner party.
The irony of the reversal of stereotypical gender roles – Konrad industrious in the kitchen, Jasmin seated, cradling a mug of tea – was not lost on me. This is Jasmin Paris: a runner defying stereotype. In the world of ultra-distance mountain running – the rougher the better – Jasmin is the equal of men. ‘Gender isn’t a big thing in my mind,’ she says. ‘I feel I’m level with men. I don’t even think about gender inequality because we’re the same, and if I know someone runs similarly to me, man or woman, I try to beat them.’
She points to the Dragon’s Back, a five-day, 180-mile stage race across the mountainous interior of Wales. In 2015, Jasmin was second overall behind Jim Mann, while two other women came in the top six: Beth Pascall was fourth and Lizzie Wraith sixth. There were a further three women in the top fifteen. ‘We can compete on an even playing field, especially in long-distance events,’ Jasmin reiterates. She could easily have referenced the Fellsman: Jasmin finished fourth in the 2015 race, having never previously run further than 47 miles – and that was after getting lost in a 40-mile event – in a single outing. Such was her unease about the distance, she packed extra clothing with the expectation of walking to the finish. Or Jasmin could have mentioned the Glen Coe Skyline, also in 2015, when Swedish ultrarunner Emelie Forsberg finished only eight minutes behind Joe Symonds. Jasmin, having run with Forsberg for the first two hours, ended the day fifth, with a who’s who of hill running – Tim Gomersall, Es Tresidder, Adam Harris, Jon Ascroft, Jim Mann and Jon Gay – finishing in her, and Forsberg’s, wake.
It is late October when we meet at the newlywed’s white-painted cottage on the edge of a Victorian reservoir that collects water from the Moorfoots. Jasmin’s running year – a year characterised by an invincibility trademarked by Adrian Belton – was over, and frankly, the truth of it was hard to fathom. Adrian broke two records; Jasmin smashed the lot, becoming the fastest woman to run each of the classic rounds. But to fully appreciate the records, Jasmin’s times should be addressed in their overall context, including men, and, by her concession, she does not mind such comparisons. Her Bob Graham was the fifth fastest of all time; a Paddy Buckley the fourth. Jasmin’s Ramsay – sandwiched by the others – was the pinnacle: she was number one. When news of her record-breaking Bob Graham emerged, I thought immediately of her likely next intention, a Ramsay, and my conversation with Jon Ascroft about the athletes capable of a faster round than his. ‘Jasmin,’ he had said without hesitation. With the support of Jon on the Grey Corries, Jasmin did as he predicted, slicing 46 minutes from his time, finishing in 16 hours and 13 minutes. Cumulatively, her times for the three rounds were faster than any man. The next quickest, Chris Near, was six hours slower.
Actions speak louder than words: a woman could compete with men, could overcome men. But Jasmin Paris is not a symbol of some sort of female revolution. Humility – like her close friend Jon, she is imbued with the quality – prevents her admitting otherwise, but she is a one-off, unique, a freak even. ‘I think it’s notable how excited folk get whenever a woman ranks well against men,’ says Helene Whitaker, the joint winner with Martin Stone of the first Dragon’s Back in 1991 when she was still an unmarried Diamantides. ‘Surely that says most about how unusual it is? Physiologically, the differences are impossible to overcome, but the longer endurance events always seem to level the field’ – Helene chooses her last word carefully – ‘somewhat.’
Helene is another one-off. Like Jasmin, she breathed the rarefied air of holding the outright record for Ramsay’s Round. ‘I had hoped to see more occurrences of outstanding female athletes, such as Jasmin and Angela Mudge, in the twenty-plus years since the original Dragon’s Back, as technology and our understanding and knowledge of sports performance has escalated. But there are only one or two females doing so and – possibly I’m only one of a few able to say this and get away with it – the women who do are often more “masculine” in physique. We have smaller bums and boobs. We don’t seem to have curves in any of the desirable places and quite frankly run in a very male way with aggression and an unashamed competitiveness that is frequently discouraged in girls but not boys. The fact that these women are exceptions rather than the norm by now suggests that endurance events simply come down to good genes, an awful lot of bloody hard work and an appropriate psychological temperament. Just the same as good male athletes.’
Wendy Dodds calls hill running a ‘genderless activity’ but recalls how female racers in the 1970s could only participate unofficially, typically starting some twenty minutes after the men and rewarded by items that might help in the home. The ‘disadvantage’ of being female did not hold Wendy back: she was the first person to complete the newly-devised Paddy Buckley in 1982 and ran an unmatched 53 Lakeland peaks in 22 hours at the age of 50 in 2002. She is an undisputed ‘legend’ of the hills, still running and racing in her mid-sixties, and unashamedly outspoken. Running as part of a team supporting two Canadians attempting the Ramsay for a television show, when Paul Trebilcock dodged one too many puddles on the track to the Abhainn Rath, she chastised the man nicknamed ‘Turbocock’: ‘It’s a waste of time because in half an hour we have to wade a stream.’
Women should be slower than men, Wendy, a retired consultant physician and rheumatologist, specialising in sports medicine, explains. Women have a higher proportion of body fat, reduced blood volume, smaller hearts and lungs, lower oxygen uptake and less muscle strength. The physiology is undeniable. There is, however, some logic to explain the success of women in ultra-distance events. ‘Some studies have suggested that female skeletal muscle may have a greater capacity for converting fat to energy than male muscle,’ Wendy says. ‘It means that in ultra-endurance events, they have a larger store of potential energy on board because of their naturally greater proportion of fat.’
Dr Andrew Murray, a sports and exercise medicine doctor and director of the Scottish Running Clinic at the University of Edinburgh, concurs: ‘The longer the distance, the narrower the gap in performance. Male runners are still at an advantage, but because running economy, fuelling and mental resilience take on increasing roles, the average gap is less.’
Jasmin Paris is one of the few to bridge the gap. ‘Simple physiological differences mean that on average the fastest males are likely to be faster than the fastest females,’ Andrew says, listing the reasons: higher testosterone values meaning more strength and aggression, along with greater lung capacities and blood circulating volumes, both of which lead to increased aerobic capacity.
‘Jasmin’s achievements are phenomenal,’ Andrew adds, ‘particularly when you consider she is smashing records for all-comers, despite the fact that for most distance records males are at a six to eight per cent advantage, and times normally reflect that. If you look at Paula Radcliffe’s marathon world record, she is a country mile faster than any other female in history, but there were 100 men from one village of 4,000 people in Kenya who ran faster than her world record in 2016 alone.’
Whatever Jasmin is and represents, she remains a female. In the 2016 Rio Olympics, the Chinese swimmer Fu Yuanhui helped her team come fourth in the 4x100m medley relay. When asked about her performance, she broke a sporting taboo: she revealed she was menstruating. ‘My period came yesterday,’ she admitted, ‘so I felt particularly tired.’
‘I can recall a couple of times when I’ve gone to races and been emotional beforehand, but generally running makes it better,’ Jasmin says. ‘For me, it’s more than a physical problem. It’s a mental thing that means I might not quite have the right race head on, but normally running a race has snapped me out of it.’ As for a record attempt on a 24-hour round: ‘I would probably not want them to collide. The way it was arranged, it wasn’t going to happen. To do the Paddy Buckley or the Ramsay, it would just be awkward. You want everything to be as easy as possible, so even if this isn’t a huge thing for you, it’s one extra thing.’
Jasmin speaks so openly about such a personal subject that she could easily be a social media influencer or a feminist flag-bearer. That is not how she sees herself. But not wanting to be a feminist does not disqualify others from seeing you as one. Her example is enough. ‘If I can challenge the idea that women can’t do what men can, then that’s great,’ she says, ‘but I don’t have a hang-up about women being mistreated.’ She recognises that increased female representation in running is not mirrored in the hills. I raise the subject as if I expect her to have an answer. ‘I honestly don’t know why,’ Jasmin says. ‘I guess women are just lacking confidence.’
Some months later, Jasmin agreed to be interviewed by the American Trail Running Association, specifically to give ‘trail running tips for women’ – a notion that could be interpreted as either helpful or deeply patronising. She spoke about having to carry a personal alarm when running in a strange city at night during a training year in Minnesota; she revealed she had bought her first ‘dedicated’ sports bra just a few months earlier; when asked what advice she would give to women who ‘might not fit the stereotypical mould of a female runner’, she unwittingly gave the answer of an indignant feminist: ‘I’m not sure what the stereotypical mould of a female runner is.’ Perhaps that is why women are ‘lacking confidence’?
Shyness – like hill running – comes instinctively to Jasmin. Earlier that day, I had watched her talk to an audience at the annual Scottish Hill Runners end-of-season buffet, reliving her rounds, and noticed it took several minutes for the flushing of her cheeks to subside. After she had finished speaking, David Scott, one of the committee members, rose to thank Jasmin. ‘Inspirational,’ he said.
‘I think it’s weird,’ Jasmin says. ‘It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with the attention; it just feels odd because I’m a normal person, like everybody else. I just go running.’
Born in Manchester in 1983 to a Czech mother and an English father, Jasmin was still in nappies when she was carried across the Andes on a four-day hike, with the toddler sleeping in a nook between her parents in a two-person sleeping bag. Her family were walkers not runners, and by the age of six, Jasmin, her parents and younger brother, Václav, were hiking and wild camping in the mountains of the freed Czech Republic in the final throes of the Cold War. ‘My mum was very much of the attitude that if the sun was shining, you shouldn’t be indoors,’ Jasmin says. ‘I still have this guilt complex when I’m inside and it’s sunny outside. My mum made a real effort for us to be outside. She’d think of treasure hunts or we would play Swallows and Amazons or make a secret garden. We would go on trips to waterfalls and spend time playing in watercourses or by the sea.’
Jasmin was nearing the end of her junior school years when her teacher lined the class up at the bottom of a playing field and encouraged the children to race to the top. ‘I was second in the year, to a boy, and I remember being slightly irked that he had beaten me.’ While she did not race competitively at school, even in her secondary years, running was unwittingly imprinted in the fabric of her life. ‘We would run with my dad as fast as we could, saying, “how fast do you think we are going?”’ Her passion then was horse riding, a pursuit that would leave the teenager with no cruciate ligament in her left knee after she fell from her mount, but unexpectedly reminded Jasmin of her junior school running prowess. Taking part in a pony club triathlon of swimming, shooting and running, she was second fastest in the running element. ‘I was surprised because I’d never done anything like that,’ she says, ‘so I guess that was an indication I could be a reasonably good runner.’
But not yet. After school, she went to Liverpool University to study veterinary science. She would jog for twenty minutes around Sefton Park to ‘keep fit’. Following graduation in 2008, Jasmin started work at a small animal practice in Glossop, on the edge of the Pennines. One of her colleagues, Richard Patton, told her about a nearby four-mile race called Wormstones. ‘You should try it,’ he had said.
‘Do I need anything?’ Jasmin asked.
‘No, you’ll be fine,’ he insisted.
She was ‘fine’, finishing the race in a state of ‘exhausted delight’.
‘I had only road trainers,’ Jasmin remembers. ‘I spent a lot of that run on my bottom, and I finished sixth lady and fairly low down the field, but I really enjoyed it. I thought, this is great: everybody racing around the hills.’
A year in Glossop was followed by a twelve-month internship at the University of Minnesota, where Jasmin’s running was stymied by American geography: ‘I wanted to run and do outdoor stuff, but there were not many trails and I didn’t want to run on the road. Getting a bus out of the city was just impossible.’ After a three-week post-internship break, Jasmin moved to Scotland, a country she had only twice visited as a child for hiking holidays with her family. She came to work at the University of Edinburgh veterinary school that had rejected her undergraduate application eight years earlier. ‘I didn’t even get an interview,’ she says, shaking her head.
Jasmin was soon in the Pentlands, linking together the summits and paths of what would become her training ground. She was running a reverse Pentland Skyline when she met John Blair-Fish, who was stravaiging the same route in the opposite direction. Blair-Fish was an Englishman in Scotland, known for his long-standing antipathy to the Scottish breakaway from the Fell Runners Association. A forthright man and an undoubtedly accomplished hill runner, he told Suse Coon, who approached him for an interview for her 1987 book Race You To The Top, that the ‘place for discussing races is the pub, not a book’. Jasmin asked Blair-Fish if he ran for a club. ‘Carnethy,’ he told her, before bluntly explaining she was running the ‘wrong way’.
Ever prepared, Jasmin was readying herself for her first Scottish hill race. Blair-Fish had not put her off. Wearing the red and yellow of Carnethy, she would finish 56th at the Pentland Skyline that October. ‘I wasn’t very good at the start,’ Jasmin admits. Her result was by no means unremarkable, but like her running at the end of 2010 and the start of 2011, the performance was tinged with an inexplicable lethargy. Her solution was to try harder, sometimes too hard. Having arranged to stay overnight at a friend’s home in the Edinburgh suburb of Bonaly, she ran five miles over the Pentlands that evening from work, and intended to run back early the next day. Long before sunrise, Jasmin quietly let herself out, careful not to wake anyone. The door locked behind her, with the runner’s shoes – left outside by Jasmin the night before, but subsequently moved inside by her friend – on the wrong side. Not wanting to cause a fuss, in case they thought her ‘mad’, she did something madder. She could do without shoes, she reasoned. She also had no head torch. ‘The outcome of this venture was that I kicked a hefty rock at some point on the climb, and broke my big toe,’ Jasmin recalls. ‘On the plus side, my feet were so numb by then that I didn’t realise there was anything amiss, and I made it to work in good time.’
The toe would mend but the tiredness remained. The reason would emerge at Stùc a’ Chroin, a 13-mile race that climbs to the eponymous Munro above Loch Lubnaig. ‘I remember it being really, really hard,’ she says. ‘One of these old fell running geezers said, “you’ve been overtraining, you’re working too hard.” I thought, I haven’t been overtraining because I am right at the back of the field. I was second to last going up Stùc and was just hanging on. I made time up on the descent, but I had been rubbish on the climb. It was much more effort than it should have been.’ Someone else was suffering that day: Konrad would finish 96th – 12 places behind Jasmin. If any good was to come of their mutual misfortune, it was the first meeting of a pair who would marry six years later.
Convinced she was anaemic, Jasmin asked her doctor to give her a blood test. Diagnosed with an iron deficiency, within a fortnight of starting a course of tablets, the change was staggering. ‘It was like being given a magic bullet. I had a huge boost,’ she says. Racing again, three weeks after Stùc a’ Chroin, Jasmin won at Slioch.
Success followed in a tidal wave. In 2014, she became Scottish hill running champion and set the women’s record for Tranter’s Round, running every step with Jon Ascroft. In 2015, she reclaimed her Scottish crown and added British fell running champion to her résumé. That year she also won her fourth Scottish Long Classics series, excelling in longer races over rougher ground – a precursor of what was to come. She set women’s records at two of those races, Jura and Two Inns, while a third victory came at Stùc a’ Chroin, 43 minutes faster than her cursed first attempt in 2011.
At the end of 2015, the double hill running champion ‘didn’t do much at all’. She spent November and December running according to mood, rather than to order, as motivation waned. In her own words, she was a ‘horse put out to pasture’. There was no need to forge on with training when the mind was reluctant. Crucially, having overcome anaemia and a succession of lower leg injuries – she listed the maladies: iliotibial band syndrome, tibialis posterior tendinitis, Achilles tendinitis in both ankles – she was in an injury-free cycle. At the end of November, writing in the quarterly Carnethy Journal, Jasmin made no secret of her intentions: ‘I’m going to have a go at the three classic 24-hour rounds and hopefully test the records.’
When she was ready to resume training again, she set her alarm for 5am.
Quietly, with no fanfare, Jasmin and Konrad completed a winter Bob Graham in February, before returning a month later to re-run parts of the route, moving at 17 to 18-hour pace. That was the warm-up. A proposed mid-April effort at a fast round was postponed as Jasmin was recovering from the aftermath of food poisoning – the outcome of a dodgy salad eaten on the journey home from the Sierra Nevada mountains in southern Spain a few days earlier. The attempt was pushed back a week. Jasmin left Keswick with the splits of a 17-hour round in her head. In planning her schedule, she had either been cautious or modest. By Skiddaw, she was 10 minutes up, then 26 minutes at Threlkeld, growing to 51 minutes at Dunmail Raise. The support crew was an embarrassment of riches: Shane Ohly, Jon Ascroft, Jim Mann, Jon Gay, Iain Whiteside, Rhys Findlay-Robinson, Steve Birkinshaw. By the time she reached Wasdale, she was running splits that were akin to 15-hour pace. Unable to stomach food, she gorged on Haribo and Pepsi. As she was hurtling along the roads to Keswick, unbeknown to Jasmin, a 200-strong crowd had gathered by the Moot Hall. Although they were there for a charity event, not Jasmin, they formed an impromptu welcoming committee, creating a cheering funnel as she tore up the high street, pressed her hands to the doors, stopped her watch, and turned to embrace Konrad. The time was astonishing: 15 hours and 24 minutes.
The round had been a secret – and hill runners are good at keeping secrets. That is also the Jasmin Paris way. When she was planning her attempt on the Paddy Buckley later in the year, her chosen date clashed with the high-profile Hodgson Brothers Mountain Relay in the Lake District. Knowing that several of her would-be round supporters were committed to the race, she sent an email to the 425 members of Carnethy pleading for people to volunteer to replace the relay runners, thereby freeing up her support. She asked club members not to reveal her plans on social media. The subject of the email might have been labelled ‘top secret’. In a sign of respect for the sport, and more for Jasmin, no-one uttered a word.
When Jasmin touched the green doors of the Moot Hall, the secret was out. For all the victories, records and championships, she had not transcended the sport. Outside the fell and hill running community, she was unknown. Even the average road runner would have shaken their head at the mention of the name Jasmin Paris. A simple combination piqued the interest of the public – the gender, of course, and the time on a hill running event that had singularly also transcended the sport. That the round had been kept quiet further imbued the achievement with a romantic spontaneity. Jasmin was flooded with messages of congratulation and adulation on social media. The same words were repeatedly tossed around: ‘amazing’, ‘inspirational’, ‘phenomenal’.
She was propelled into public consciousness and would feature in spreads in running magazines, offering advice on training and racing. Interviewed in the Guardian, she was asked what was the ‘best thing’ about running. ‘The feeling of being fit,’ she said, ‘the feeling that you could run forever.’ Sports companies began to get in touch, offering sponsorship deals. She politely turned everything down, unwilling to ‘muddy the waters’ of a sport she calls ‘pure’. Since 2015, Jasmin had been ‘supported’ – as opposed to the more committing term of ‘sponsored’ – by Inov-8, a sportswear company that makes the shoes that many hill and fell runners wear. Her fellow runners treated her with reverence. ‘Was that Jasmin?’ I heard a woman utter excitedly after spotting her marshalling on South Black Hill in a Pentland Skyline. ‘Jasmin.’ She joined the ranks of the greats. Like Billy, Joss and Finlay, a surname is superfluous.
Speculation comes with being public property. Could Jasmin go quicker? Could she have challenged Billy Bland’s record had she set her mind to running faster at the start? She answered the questions conclusively in the aftermath: ‘Some things are better left as they are, and I have a feeling this is one of them.’ She met Bland for tea and bacon butties shortly after the round. ‘“This will give the men a kick up the arse,” he told me. He thinks he has been placed on a pedestal that he perhaps should not have been.’ Like Bland, Jasmin is uneasy with her heroine status. ‘I just go running.’ Those words again. ‘For these long rounds, part of me just thinks, go out and try it, and you could do it as well.’
The pattern for Jasmin’s season was set: race, recover, race, recover, and so on. There was little time for training. But, in the darkness of those Moorfoot mornings, the hard work had been done.
Jasmin came to Fort William in mid-June, a fortnight before the anniversary of the 17 hours in which Jon Ascroft recalibrated Ramsay’s Round. Jasmin arrived with the same intention. Her basis was simple. She was Jon’s equal in her fastest Tranter; she was his equal in hill racing in Scotland; she should, therefore, be his equal in the Lochaber mountains. But she hoped to be more than equal.
As she did in the lead-up to the Bob Graham, Jasmin delayed for a week, knowing that ‘a record round was impossible without perfect conditions’. She checked the weather relentlessly, noting hopefully that conditions began to look increasingly favourable. ‘Game on,’ she wrote in a message to her support crew.
At 3am on a mild Saturday, under the light of a full moon with the midges biting, she set off. Jasmin summited Mullach nan Coirean, already three minutes up on Jon’s split, moving at a pace that felt ‘fairly comfortable’. Running towards Stob Bàn, the sky blazed pink, then orange, then purple. Clouds of fog cascaded over the Aonachs and Grey Corries like a vast waterfall. The mist jumped ridges, shrouding Binnein Beag, with Graham Nash leading a descent across loose rock, supplementing Jasmin with homemade carrot cake. Up and over Sgùrr Eilde Mòr, the runners headed directly to the glen and followed the Abhainn Rath in rising heat to Loch Treig. Every burn Jasmin came to, she lay down ‘like a sheepdog in summer’, submerging herself. As they climbed away from the loch to meet the West Highland Line, Charlie Ramsay and his wife Mary were waiting. More cake was distributed. Nearing the summit of Chno Dearg, a lone runner appeared in the distance. The athlete was Joe Williams, midway through what would be the then eleventh fastest completion of the round, albeit four hours slower than a woman in identical conditions. They embraced and continued in their respective directions.
At the dam, Jasmin was 49 minutes up on Jon’s time. ‘The record was looking distinctly achievable,’ she realised. ‘That said, I had been with Jon on the last leg of his round, and I knew how fast he’d been going. I was expecting to lose some of the buffer I’d accumulated. The question was how much, if any, I’d have left at the end.’ Under an unblemished blue sky, she proceeded up Stob a’ Choire Mheadhoin with Jon Gay and Finlay Wild. Jon Ascroft would join the trio at the start of the Grey Corries, the first of which – Stob Bàn – was topped with a celebratory last Munro party. The runners swept over the shimmering quartz, climbed Aonach Beag, took the chicken run route beneath the ridge line of the Carn Mòr Dearg Arête, and began the ascent of Ben Nevis.
She paused for a photo on the summit of the Ben, throwing her arms delightedly in the air. Moments later, she was descending: swerving day-trippers, kicking up dust, sliding down scree. With Finlay leading the way, the sound of bagpipes rose from the valley to meet the runners. ‘I was scarcely conscious of it at first, but as the sound started to sink in, so did the realisation of what I’d achieved. That final run-in along the bridge, getting sprayed with champagne, hugging Jon . . .’
Jon’s presence was symbolic. ‘Not many record-holders turn out to see their record broken,’ Willie Gibson, Carnethy president and Ramsayist, would tell the club’s AGM later that year. Not only had Jon seen his record taken away, he had willingly promoted its obliteration.
‘It was all a bit surreal and simultaneously wonderful,’ Jasmin remembers. ‘I staggered around for a bit on unsteady legs. We drank bubbly, took some photos, and then headed to the pub to recount the day’s adventures over burgers, beers and chips.’
Moss, the Paris-Rawlik’s puppy sheepdog, was savaging a Salomon trainer in the front room. He had already destroyed a stuffed pheasant, depositing shredded white fluff about the cottage. Jasmin has shoes to spare. I counted fifteen pairs at her back door, while she had hurriedly closed another door that led to a room swamped with running paraphernalia. Half-Czech she may be, but she gave a typically British apology for the ‘state’ of the house as she showed me in.
‘There is no “typical week”,’ Jasmin explains as she attempts to describe her training. As well as running rounds in 2016, she was continuing her work towards a PhD, with her research focused on the treatment of leukaemia. As Colin Donnelly found to his cost, the unending challenge for the non-professional is to fit running into the rhythm of a complicated life. ‘It might be at nine at night or five in the morning; it might be a lunchtime at work,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t tell you my weekly mileage or ascent, and I rarely know what I intend to do in training more than a day ahead.’ She was running ‘most days’ in the build-up to the first of the rounds, before work on weekday mornings for at least an hour, plus longer runs at the weekend, typically up to four hours. ‘Always in the hills,’ she stresses. Once a week, she and Konrad went ‘somewhere pretty steep’ to attempt hill reps. A tempo run around the reservoir was another weekly fixture, with Jasmin running one way, Konrad the other. ‘Where you cross is a sign of how you’re doing,’ she says. ‘It makes it a bit more exciting. I guess that’s my speed session.’ She has no desire to be coached. ‘I run how I feel. I don’t go out thinking, I’m going to beast myself.’
Sacrifice is a word bandied about to describe the things a successful athlete must apparently forgo: family time, friends, a social life. Jasmin would not use the word. There is no sacrifice if you are living your life in the way you want. Pre-dawn hill runs in the Moorfoots, wild swims in the Gladhouse Reservoir, 20-mile bicycle commutes to work at Easter Bush. This is how she chooses to live her life. Success is merely a consequence. On top of running, she includes hiking. The trip to the Sierra Nevada was planned deliberately with the Bob Graham in mind. ‘The aim was to not meet anyone for ten days, so we were carrying all our food in a big rucksack,’ Jasmin says. There was a little running, she admits: ‘I would run at higher altitude, maybe half the days, maybe 40 minutes.’ Jasmin had earlier told the Scottish Hill Runners assembly that she did ‘a lot of walking’ in her three rounds. ‘It’s like a long hike in the hills,’ she had joked. It may be, but Jasmin is still moving faster than most.
Perhaps the lack of a television – and the mind-numbing trap it can offer – is the secret? As for what they eat, the couple’s diet is unremarkable. Instant mashed potato is a mountain marathon essential. To my right, I consciously count the number of Green and Black’s chocolate bars stacked on the table: eight. There is a video clip of Jasmin at a checkpoint on the Glen Coe Skyline. With the traverse of the Aonach Eagach to come, she drinks a plastic cup of Coke from her right hand, then another held in the left, strokes Moss on the head, picks up two further cups, right, left, and she’s running again. The episode took less than 15 seconds. She could be downing shots in an Edinburgh nightclub. Pragmatism again. After 22 miles of mountain running over five hours, with a 900-metre climb to the Aonach Eagach imminent, what do I need? A colossal injection of sugar. Asked at the end of the race about her prolific Coke-drinking, she said: ‘I guess it was university days that taught me to do that.’
As with her training, common sense controls what she eats and drinks. ‘I love fruit and vegetables. I would choose brown bread over white. We cook fresh meals every night, but there’s no nutritional diary,’ she says. ‘I don’t avoid anything, especially soup, cake and tea; they are part of the joy of fell running. Every time we go away,’ Jasmin adds, ‘when we come back on a Sunday evening and it’s late and we don’t want to cook, we buy pizza, Prosecco and ice cream.’ Jasmin breaks off as Moss becomes over-familiar with his bed. ‘Moss,’ she berates while laughing. ‘Konrad,’ she screams. ‘Have you seen what Moss is doing? And in company . . .’
The setting was a dark, empty car park in North Wales in the early hours of an October morning. Jasmin shook hands with two men she had never met. The first was Chris Near; the second Tim Higginbottom. The trio started running, following twisting quarry tracks to gain the foggy slopes of Elidir Fawr. Jasmin’s Paddy Buckley had begun.
That the round would prove the hardest of the three was little wonder. After the Ramsay, she had raced four times in two summer months, winning the Tromsø Skyrace and the Glen Coe Skyline, finishing third in the Skyrunning World Championships in the Pyrenees, and running through a field of the best ultrarunners on the planet to place sixth in the women’s rankings at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc.
The manicured trails of the Alps were a world away from the boggy trods of Snowdonia. Nor was there an easy rhythm like there had been in the previous two rounds and by the start of the third of the five sections, as Jasmin climbed Moel Siabod above Betws-y-Coed, she was struggling. The terrain was coarse and heathery, the ground waterlogged. At the next changeover point, at the sight of Konrad, Jasmin ‘for a moment fell apart’.
‘I don’t think I ever contemplated stopping,’ she says, ‘although that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to.’ Forcing herself up the next hill, Bryn Banog, Jasmin was conscious that she was now losing ground on Nicky Spinks’ fastest time. Gradually, in the darkness, Jasmin – in unfamiliar territory of not having time in hand – started to claw back minutes. In a year of superlatives, perhaps it was this recovery, when character and desire were called into question, that was the greatest achievement of all? ‘Things took on a surreal, dream-like quality,’ she says. ‘My world narrowed to the pool of light around my feet.’ She fled off the final hill, Moel Eilio, delighting at last in a grassy slope, descending under a sky bursting with stars, surpassing Spinks’ time. The overall record of Higginbottom, Jasmin’s leg one supporter, was safe for now.
Martin Stone knows better than most how to re-write mountain running history. He has the final word on Jasmin: ‘I have always felt that the very best records are not always the current records, but those that come out of the blue and represent a really significant improvement on what has gone before. Often they are achieved where there is no yardstick to measure them against and a great performance or achievement is something of its time. Just because folk come along years later and keep shaving a few minutes off the record, it doesn’t lessen the original achievement. Jasmin is a force of nature with such an amazing gift for running long and fast in the mountains. Her resilience, consistency, determination and fearlessness have allowed her to complete a set of rounds in a way that is quite unlike anything that has ever gone before.’
The ‘force of nature’ had her own retort: ‘For now, it’s over to you, lads.’