David Brown faced the urinal and sighed. ‘Best-thing-worst-thing I’ve ever done,’ he announced. I nodded sagely. There is only so much emotion a man can display at a urinal. It was 2 January, a bank holiday in Scotland, and the day of David’s fourth Greenmantle Dash. The race is a mere two miles, but to get back to the Borders village of Broughton, runners must scramble over a stone wall, wade a river, wallow through a turnip field, then climb a steep funnel of grass to gain a spur of Trahenna Hill. From there, on jelly legs, they slide down the cone and charge along a road to the finish. The race is pitiless enough, but if Hogmanay was celebrated to excess, the Greenmantle Dash becomes a unique kind of punishment. David had got progressively slower in each of his four attempts, and today finished 85th in a field of 90, his time eleven minutes slower than his first race. But that was not the point.
‘You have to be mad,’ was the fifty-two-year-old’s retort when I asked him, after we had escaped the gents, why he runs in the hills, why anyone runs in the hills. ‘The other thing is the camaraderie.’ My shorthand training as part of a journalism diploma did not stretch to Borders’ colloquialisms, but as I scrawled indiscernible shapes across a pad, I got the gist. There was a woman called Kirsty who overtook David on the ascent. He caught her on the tarmac, geed her on when she said her hips hurt, and – with a competitive streak overcoming chivalry – snuck in front of her at the end. Kirsty did not mind. ‘She gave me a cuddle,’ David said. ‘What a laugh!’
Standing close by in Broughton Village Hall was Andrew Douglas. Brought up in Caithness, the Inverclyde AC runner had loftier ambitions – to represent Scotland in upcoming European and world championships of hill running. He was clutching something that would be of very little assistance in that regard: a crate of Broughton Ale, presented to him as the race winner. There is irony, I thought – like giving haggis to a vegetarian.
‘Do you drink?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘although it’ll take me a while to get through this.’ I pointed across the room to David, now cradling a bowl of soup, explaining why he was here. What about Andrew? ‘The attraction of hill running is going to different places and having fantastic scenery, but in terms of racing and the guys you race against, there’s a community spirit that you don’t really get with track running,’ Andrew explained. ‘Track running is quite intense; people are focused and don’t socialise much with each other. In hill running, you feel like you’re all in it together. You can race seriously, but afterwards or beforehand you can have good chat and banter with the other guys.’
‘Do you enjoy the view?’ I ventured, immediately regretting the inane question. During the climb to the spur, a flash of brightness had drawn my gaze from the ground to the sky. A shaft of sunlight was bursting through grey clouds. It was beautiful, but in an instant, my eyes snapped back to mud.
‘In racing, I guess I don’t,’ he said, ‘but when you’re training, you can look – and then it feels like you’ve left your normal life behind and you can just be at one with nature.’
It is dusk when we climb onto the white slopes of Mount Maw. We had left the Borders village of West Linton twenty minutes earlier, running single file on a twisting track in the woods above Baddinsgill Burn, before following a road and then farm tracks that were beginning to refreeze as night beckoned. Ross Christie leads, breaking trail, puncturing a pristine carpet with every lift of a knee. We run sporadically, until the movement is impossible. In drifting snow, we wade, thigh-deep, to a wind-hounded summit. Ross and John Ryan are running to Hillend, a further fifteen miles away. I am running home, some seventeen miles distant. The idea suddenly strikes me as preposterous: it has just taken twenty minutes to cover a single mile. The next summit, The Mount, is a further mile away, across a broad ridge laden with snow. We flail forwards into darkness and chaotic spindrift.
Spilling over the top of The Mount, the others follow me. I have no idea where I am going. I have been here once before – on a fine, clear summer’s morning when The Mount was a benign place. Right now, I could be anywhere, in any mountain range on Earth. We drop into a void, John shouting at last when he recognises the dull outline of a reservoir. It is our salvation. From the dam, we can follow a track to the main road, pause for a drink at the Allan Ramsay Hotel in Carlops, laugh about our futile attempt to run across the night-time Pentlands in a snowstorm, then jog back to West Linton. The idea must have occurred to the others. In my mind, I am already perched on a bar stool.
We say nothing. Instead, we cross the dam and rise again, onto a second ridge, a place that seems darker and more confusing than the first, dwelling on the realisation that we are now committed to the course. We proceed north, onto West Kip, three beams of light piercing the abyss of a February night. The rest is a muddle: the wind gathers in ferocity; my hands are bitterly cold in soaking gloves; I fall awkwardly, triggering shuddering cramp in both thighs. Climbing Castlelaw, I glance back at the stooped figure of John a little below me, like a spider clinging to a white wall. Once over the shoulder of Allermuir, Edinburgh appears, a smudge of yellow and black seen through watering eyes. At the top of the ski slope, we split: Ross and John descend to Hillend; I scarper downhill to Swanston, along Stevenson’s Road, then onto the pavements of Morningside, stopping outside the luminous glare of a shop window. Pulling a damp £5 note from a back pocket, I smile at Nan Shepherd, and hand her over. Her words, etched on the note, had rarely seemed more appropriate: ‘It’s a great thing to get leave to live.’ Five hours after running away from West Linton, I walk up Morningside Drive, scooping haggis pie – the last remaining item on the frying racks – and chips into my mouth, feeling like the luckiest man in the world.
When Jim Savege arrives in work on a Monday morning, he cannot help but hear the conversations about other people’s weekends: trips to the beach, visits to relatives, shopping in Aberdeen. Invariably, Jim has been out in the hills. ‘I think I’m a fat little office worker,’ he says, ‘and I still manage to do the Glen Coe Skyline in 12 hours. I get a satisfaction knowing that I’m still pushing it, getting out there, and having adventures.’
Jim then heads to his office and gets on with the job of overseeing the running of Aberdeenshire Council’s £700 million business.
We speak in March, with Jim, sitting in front of a fire, preparing for the Dragon’s Back in two months’ time. I ask about his training. He does not seem to hear the question. ‘It’s just the most audacious line on a map,’ he announces.
The words quickly establish his approach to high places: like Byron or Wordsworth, he sees mountains as aesthetic pleasures that can only be experienced by physical immersion. ‘I love moving smoothly and fluidly through the hills, and time and experience in the mountains is profoundly enhanced by running,’ he says. ‘Mountains are innately inspiring and as runners we’re able to move and journey through them in a unique way, creating our own line.’
Born and brought up in Hertfordshire, Jim trained as a field studies and outdoor education teacher in Liverpool, with hill running in the Peak District and North Wales becoming part of the ‘week-by-week fabric of life’. It was what he seemed destined to do: ‘As a bairn at school I was short-sighted, but I didn’t know at the time, and I couldn’t catch a ball for toffee. What I could do was run.’
Now Jim lives among the hills, a stream at the bottom of his garden the only barrier to a forest. If he crosses the road in front of his home, another forest awaits. Scolty Hill, topped by a twenty-metre brick tower that throws views across Deeside and the Cairngorms, is less than four miles from his front door.
For the chief executive, it is the hills that provide a happy juxtaposition. ‘It’s a contrast with the job,’ he says. ‘You’re doing something on your tod, in the back of beyond, standing in a pair of shorts, and you just have to get yourself together. I like that feeling of having to keep yourself competent and look after yourself to do these things with confidence and comfort. I spend most of my days with people in meetings, in an office, wearing a shirt and tie, and talking council business. To have space for myself and to be able to push myself in an amazing environment, that’s the contrast I need. That’s why I go.’
Richie Collins has been racing uphill for 40 minutes, from the bottom car park of the Nevis Range to the café on the scarred northern slopes of Aonach Mòr that straddles the 650-metre contour. He is 31st; there are still twenty-three others to finish, including a stream of his Lochaber AC clubmates. There is nothing exceptional in that. Except Richie has cerebral palsy, a condition affecting three of his limbs. ‘Imagine,’ his father Alan explains, ‘you’re running with your hands in your pockets and a stone in your left shoe. That’s what it’s like for Richie.’
Aonach Mòr could be the spiritual home of Richie’s hill-going. It was his second racing appearance on the mountain that year, the first on New Year’s Day – a contest he had finished seven times in eight years – and the latest in April. ‘There is sometimes ice on the boardwalk on the New Year’s Day run,’ Alan says. ‘Because of Richie’s balance, it can be a bit dangerous. Other runners will help him, but as soon as he is off the boardwalk, he will leave them. The others don’t pander to him. He won’t give way either and doesn’t get frustrated.’
I cannot speak to Richie. Or, more accurately, he cannot speak to me. He can communicate verbally, but only in a way that his father and sister can really understand.
If Richie Collins had been born a generation later, he might have been a flag-bearer at the London Paralympics, a symbol of the obstacles a disabled athlete can overcome. Richie, who also has learning difficulties, was eighteen when he was nominated by his adult training centre to run a mile in the Queen’s Baton Relay ahead of the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh in 1986. When another athlete dropped out, Richie, escorted by two runners from Lochaber AC, had to cover two miles in fourteen minutes. ‘That boy can run,’ Roger Boswell, one of the escorts, told Alan. ‘Get him down to the athletics club,’ Roger implored. ‘We’ll look after him.’
In 1990, Richie competed at the Glasgow-hosted European Summer Special Olympics for athletes with learning difficulties, winning silver in the 1,500 metres. It was not until 1993 at the equivalent Scottish championships that Richie was told he was in the wrong place – he should be pitting himself against runners with physical disabilities instead.
‘That’s how bad the publicity was then. I had no idea,’ Alan says. The realisation brought opportunities Alan and Richie could never have thought possible. Richie was invited to join the Scottish squad coached by Janice Eaglesham of Red Star AC, a club for athletes with physical difficulties. Seeing the potential noted by Roger Boswell, Janice increased Richie’s training from three to ten sessions a week. The hard work soon paid off: Richie, representing Great Britain for the first time, won a silver medal in the 400 metres at the Para World Athletics Championships in Berlin in 1994. Unable to race his preferred event – the 800 metres – at the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics, he was fourth in the 100 and 200 metres, but two days later won individual bronze in the 400 metres and then team bronze as part of the 100-metre relay quartet. On his return to Scotland, he was piped through the streets of Fort William.
Richie was a full-time athlete funded by lottery money in the run-up to Sydney in 2000, continuing to train six days a week, splitting his time between Edinburgh and Glasgow, when he would live in his father’s caravan, and Lochaber. Alan had already sold his guesthouse to fund Richie’s ambitions. Despite making the finals of the 400 and 800 metres, Richie finished outside the medals. Aged 32, like every athlete at some point, Richie had to accept his fate: he had peaked. ‘He started too late,’ Alan insists.
But Richie was not finished. He stills runs five to six times a week. ‘He can’t do a job, so running gives Rich a life,’ Alan says. The racing continues too – up Aonach Mòr; along General Wade’s military road and through mud and gorse to Cruim Leacainn; into the forest of Druim Fada above Loch Eil. ‘It’s his freedom, doing something that other people can, and doing just as well,’ Alan continues. ‘Doing it in the hills magnifies that freedom.’
Moments after three Tennent’s-swilling men are seen laughing in an Edinburgh pub in that advert, their image becomes a photograph in the hands of a woman on the London Underground. She stares dismally ahead, her desires obviously faraway. The train door slides to the left, symbolically trapping her in the carriage.
The woman could be Amy Capper. Brought up in the Borders hamlet of Westruther and then a student at St Andrews, Amy ‘stuck with small’, before her career in cancer drug development took her to London. Now in her early thirties, she lives in Fulham, part of a six-square-mile borough thronging with 180,000 people. It is a far cry from the rural idyll of Westruther, but she makes the best of it: footpaths stretch along the River Thames; Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common offer relative wildness; the North Downs Way is a train journey away. As the women’s captain of Fulham Running Club, she has rejuvenated cross-country, the sport that is perhaps the closest relation to hill running. ‘Running has always been a constant,’ she says. ‘I have just had to adapt it to where I am.’
Once a month she comes to Edinburgh, staying with her boyfriend a mile from Hillend. ‘It feels like I’m coming home. It’s nice to breathe a little bit. When you are down here’ – I can hear the groan of traffic on the phone line – ‘it’s nothing like the freedom of the hills.’
I had been running in the Pentlands earlier that day, climbing Caerketton on a breezy May afternoon on paths bordered by the buttery aroma of decadent gorse. The Highland cattle turned their heads and stared – but they were not wolf-whistling builders; the rocks were cracked – but they were not pavements.
Absence makes the heart beat stronger. When Amy watched runners compete at Stùc a’ Chroin, she was mesmerised: ‘The line of tiny ants slowly moving up the mountain in the distance was a fabulous sight and I couldn’t help thinking that one day one of those moving ants might be me.’ She might have been describing runners on the slopes of Ben Lomond, Goatfell or the Paps of Jura, those other quintessential duels of May that form the spine of the hill racing calendar in Scotland. It just happened to be Stùc a’ Chroin.
There is no sequel to the Tennent’s advert. If there was, the woman on the Underground would surely do the same as the man, abandoning London for an Edinburgh hostelry. Or perhaps the Pentlands? Maybe Amy Capper can play the heroine? The plan is to ‘come home’, she assures me, and to one day be among that train of ‘moving ants’ inching up a Scottish mountainside.
Cock Rig revels in obscurity. Protected by bog, heather and tussock, there is little reason to come here. Adrift in the pathless heart of the Pentlands, I doubt anyone else has visited today, probably not all week. Why would they?
I am close to leaving. I have waited twenty minutes, gazing south at the line of descent from East Cairn Hill, desperate to catch a glimpse of runners, becoming increasingly convinced that I have somehow missed them. I look again and see movement, a red streak giving them up. I run down to meet the group. Mick James seems lopsided, one shoulder lower than the other; Jamie Thin moves as if his legs are made of wood. I let them off: Mick and Jamie have been running for 17 hours. To celebrate their 50th birthdays, they are going for a run – a very long run.
What remains for two men who inhale the rarefied air of those who have completed the three classic rounds? They invent their own round, that’s what. Cock Rig is summit 45 on a 50-hill, 60-mile circuit of peaks south of Edinburgh in what would become the James-Thin Round.
We press on, down the heathery slopes of Cock Rig before meeting a drove road, where we join the western margin of the Pentland Skyline. It is 11pm when we climb Bell’s Hill. The schedule has been ripped up; they should have finished nearly two hours ago. Even the long light of mid-June will not save them from darkness. Jamie is walking behind, head bowed, holding a torch in his hand, while I am level with Mick on his ‘least favourite climb’. He started running after his children were born, he tells me. He still wanted to go to the hills – running was the most efficient way. ‘That’s how I got into it,’ Mick says, ‘but then you find you’re liking it, and then you find it gets easier, and then you find you get addicted, particularly to the rush you get, the way it makes you feel, and you hook up with people who have got plans, and their plans are often pushing the envelope. You start off, you run 10k; somebody says, “let’s go and run 20.” Then you do. “Let’s do 40” – and on it goes. And you just fall in with a bad crowd: those bad boys. There’s always someone badder than you. The extraordinary becomes, not achievable; it becomes aspirational. Or maybe not aspirational, it just changes in your head. When people say they run for 24 hours, you start out thinking, that’s nuts. But if you’ve got friends who are doing that, you think: they have done it, why can’t I?’
For Mick, the ‘extraordinary’ was the big three. ‘You get to a point where you know you have got it in you to finish,’ he says, ‘but your body’s broken and your mind is just pushing you on. A big part of the experience for me is working out where my body breaks. I have broken myself twice in my ultrarunning career and that’s an interesting experience.’ It was not ‘interesting’ at the time – firstly, on the 180-mile La Petite Trotte à Léon in the Alps when overwhelmed by food poisoning; secondly, on Snowdon during a doomed Paddy Buckley. ‘It’s not normal or very good for you,’ he continues. ‘But I have been intrigued by this for a long time – you know when you see refugees who have walked hundreds of miles just in the clothes they are wearing, nothing else. The reason they can do that is because humans can. Of course, you must be so far out of your comfort zone to have that experience. This is like a first-world version of that. You have just got to push yourself as far as you can, and see what that feels like. It’s a bizarre experience.’
My mother-in-law hands me a pile of books and pamphlets that belonged to Fi’s grandfather. Tom Lea was an Englishman in love with Scotland – or, more accurately (if such a word existed) – a Skyeophile. He visited the island twice annually for four decades, almost always staying at the Sligachan Hotel, his base for climbing and walking in the Black Cuillin, mountains that held him transfixed.
The bundle reeks of age: stale, dusty, a hint of cigarette smoke. There is a scramblers’ guide to the Cuillin, a programme from the 1961 Glenfinnan Gathering, cuttings from a Scottish Mountaineering Club guidebook, headed notepaper from the Sligachan, a 1970 Scottish Youth Hostel Association handbook, a MacBraynes timetable from 1960, and, at the very back, a 20-page booklet, The Cuillins of Skye, written by Herbert T. Coles, a Kirkcudbright-born man of God. Reverend Coles’ ‘hills of infancy’ were the Galloway peaks, his ‘hills of boyhood’ the Pentlands and the Nilgiri of southern India. Then it was the Selkirk Range in the US and India’s Western Ghats. ‘Yet their magnificence pales before the older and homely Pentland Hills,’ he wrote. ‘No hills in the world can hold deeper associations for me, and yet, here in middle life, I have come across a new order in the build-up of mountains and a new spell has cast itself upon me. I refer to the Cuillins of Skye.’
The Cuillins of Skye is a sermon and a metaphor: nowhere did Coles feel closer to God than the ‘vast temple’ of the Cuillin. Coles lambasts those who do not ‘really see the hills’ – those, for instance, who step off a boat at Loch Coruisk and remark: ‘There I have seen them. Oh yes, lovely.’
To find God and to find mountains, we must climb into them, he asserted. ‘Some use binoculars,’ Coles continued. ‘This is merely an indication of getting something on the cheap (however expensive the glasses). It may be akin to rudeness, and can be an indication of spiritual blindness. It may be an unlawful attempt at intimacy.’
I am reading these words in Wales. It is early July. Finlay Wild has won the Triple Hirple, a trio of races over two days in Lochaber; John Hammond is second at Dollar, his local race; in-form Jill Stephen finishes 23 minutes ahead of the second woman in dreadful weather at Arrochar Alps. From the garden of a hotel on the coastline of the Llŷn Peninsula, the peaks of Snowdonia ring the sweep of Cardigan Bay. I take a photograph. The result is horrifying: trampled and washed out mountains. To understand them, I must go there, step on them. ‘Some try to paint the scene on canvas,’ Coles wrote. ‘This is better, but even a painting by a genius can give only one phase of the scene. For the Cuillins never appear still, even as seen against a cloudless sky. They are never the same for they appear to be moving in a countless pageantry of colour, design, mood and rhythm.’
Perhaps fittingly, Coles concluded with poetry: ‘Here is the turmoil of a craggy waste, / Men find their souls and cast off haste, / In patience do they now possess The Word, / And find themselves the prophets of the Lord.’
I had not been to the Pentlands for almost a month. After ten days in Galicia, we had embarked on a lengthy road trip north from Gatwick to Edinburgh. Spain had been hot; England – riding on an August heatwave – was hotter. The ‘hills of home’, at last, offered refuge. I was among a group of four Carnethy runners, at first climbing the broad back of Blackford Hill, then turning south to our objective. Once over the bypass, the view of the Pentlands was unbroken, with the evening light sharpening every dimple and crack, and clouds raced over the tops. We gained Capelaw, the final half-mile across long grass and tussocks, and turned to face Allermuir. From there, the ridge to Caerketton inevitably summoned. Pausing by the pile of stones on the summit, we gazed down at Edinburgh, struck silent at the marvellousness of the summer evening – an evening we wished could last forever, the type of evening we knew would soon evaporate.
Manuel Zeller, an engineer from the Black Forest region of south-western Germany, stood on my right. His first taste of life as a Carnethy athlete was a Thursday hill session on Arthur’s Seat, a weekly fixture known fondly as Wintervals. It was raining and dark when he arrived at Holyrood Park. After a short warm-up, the runners climbed onto the inky slopes of the Seat.
‘I didn’t have hill running shoes, only my road running shoes,’ Manuel said. ‘I was slipping. I hated the downhill. It was still fun and friendly though. “You should get proper running shoes and come back next week,” they said.’ ‘They’ were Iain Whiteside, the then club captain who was leading the group, Liam Braby and Konrad Rawlik. There was a woman too. ‘I saw her and thought, at least there’s a girl, I won’t be last. And then she kicked my ass on the first rep. I thought, even the girls are super-fast here.’ Manuel had made the acquaintance of Jasmin Paris.
Manuel was not daunted. He raced in Scotland for the first time at Glamaig, having hitch-hiked from the mainland when his car broke down. ‘At the top, I noticed the scree was super-dangerous. I saw two guys with open knees. I said, “are you okay?” and they were like, “yeah, yeah, just go for it!”’
I shout the question over the skirl of pipes. Steph Provan nods. She has just won the hill race at the Braemar Gathering. ‘I run because I love it,’ she explains. ‘I just absolutely love it, but also because I need exercise. When I don’t get enough exercise, I feel miserable and depressed, and exercise makes me feel great.’
Steph’s words carry the evangelical zeal of the converted. Hers is not the story of a lifelong runner. She describes what is, unfortunately, a clichéd upbringing: active as a child with endless family walks and permanently trying to keep up with two older brothers; late teenage years characterised by dwindling participation; university life when she did ‘nothing’. Steph was unhappy but did not know why – she could not then make the link between exercise and mental wellbeing. ‘After university, I really got into cycling,’ she says, ‘finally realising that consistent exercise is a great anti-depressant.’
Running seemed a step too far, requiring a level of fitness Steph did not possess, she recalls. But when children came along, mountain biking was not compatible with this new way of living. ‘Trying to fit in long rides when you have kids isn’t easy,’ she says. But nor was doing ‘nothing’.
‘I soon felt depressed if I didn’t get my exercise fix. I remember cycling when I was heavily pregnant with my daughter while I had my two-year-old son in the child seat at the back. I’m sure people thought I was mad, but I just needed some exercise.’
Her daughter was one when Steph went for the first run in her adult life. ‘I started to run on my own in the dark around Aboyne when nobody could see me. I found I got a buzz from a short run that I couldn’t get from a short cycle. I adored my children when they were babies, but when they are little, it’s 24/7, and it’s hard trying to find time for yourself. Running was a lifeline.’
As Steph gradually worked out a balance between being a mother and a runner, she found the sport came instinctively. ‘I realised I was halfway decent and it spiralled from there.’ Being ‘halfway decent’ mushroomed to Steph being a Scottish hill running champion. ‘I’m not very good on the flat – and I don’t find the flat much fun – but a few hours of running in the hills I just love.’
Steph will always be a mother, but running is her expression of independence. The two are inter-dependent. ‘I’m no good as a mum if I’m not happy – and I know that I’ll be depressed if I don’t exercise, and for me there is no better exercise than running in the hills.’
Dumyat stands at the western edge of the Ochil Hills. Languishing in the great plain to the south is the Forth valley, a bold flatness seemingly elevating the Ochils to greater heights than the range’s literal altitude. Beyond the estuary lies an arc of mountains: the Pentlands, the dome of Broad Law and – on a very clear day – the heights of Galloway. There are few finer views from one of Scotland’s little hills.
There is an easy way to get up there – and a hard way. The hill runner chooses the latter, a contouring climb across rubble on the southern slopes, then an ascent of a grassy gully, emerging on Castle Law, the remnants of an ancient hill fort, built some 500 metres south-west of the true summit. Today there are no Pentland summits, no Broad Law, and certainly no Merrick. Even the thrusting tower of the Wallace Monument, rearing from a Stirling hillside to the west, is blurred in mist. I stop on Castle Law, confused by the pall, then see a runner descending below and instinctively follow.
‘Hill running is a challenge of navigation and survival,’ Ewan Paterson would tell me an hour later. We meet on the street in Menstrie, the Clackmannanshire village that squats beneath Dumyat. He has not raced today, but is here to pick up the accolade for the men’s over-60 champion at the Scottish Hill Runners end of season prize-giving, traditionally held in October. It has become his prize; Ewan has won it for five consecutive years, every year since he entered a seventh decade. It is an age category that could easily be dismissed as non-competitive. After all, who runs up hills in their sixties? Plenty of people, men and women, it seems. Thirteen of the 89 finishers at the Dumyat Dash are aged sixty or over; the first two, David Scott and Les Turnbull, place narrowly outside the top-third. A further nineteen are in their fifties.
Longevity is often attributed to runners who find the sport later in life, a notion that buys into the terrifying inevitability that the lifespan of an athlete’s ‘running gear’ – to use Glyn Jones’ term – is finite.
‘I’ve run all my life,’ Ewan says reassuringly. ‘I did 800 and 1,500 metres as a kid, and a lot of road racing as I got older.’ Ewan was running ten kilometres in 31 minutes in the 1980s, but discovered hill running in the same decade. ‘I was third in a Pentland Skyline in the mid-1980s and I thought, hey, maybe this is something that suits me. Being lightweight meant that on the uphill sections I felt pretty good. I always saw myself as a runner, rather than a racer, and as I’ve aged, I just enjoy getting out into the hills and doing long distances.’
Running on athletics tracks and roads was a consequence of being able; running in the mountains was a choice. ‘A run in the hills can be life-affirming: enjoying the experience of quiet mountain glens, ridges that are so windswept you’re almost blown off your feet. It gives me meaning, bringing something to my life that nothing else does – very much a sense of satisfaction in the atmosphere of mountains. People worship cathedrals and there are a bunch of us who look at mountains as cathedrals. We have some sort of connection with Mother Earth, not that it’s a religious experience, but it certainly brings something of that to mind.’
Living in Aviemore, the Cairngorms, as if painted in a blue and white saltire, are the hills that call Ewan. ‘I can be running through glens considering the Highland clearances or going over mountaintops where you know there were battles fought. I’m a Scot and I see myself as belonging to the country, and that is affirmed through my connection with the mountains. Running on the roads is about racing, putting yourself through the mill in terms of pain and hurt. It’s not that the mountains don’t do that; it just feels different. Mountains bring the challenge of navigation and survival, and that is a more satisfying experience.’
It was one of those dreary weekends in November between the bangs of fireworks and the lights of Christmas when time and motivation drifts. Racing seems to grind to a near-halt, with only Knockfarrel and Tinto interrupting the month. The latter offers a one-mile race for eight to twelve-year-olds, the Tinto Tiptoe, with entry costing a princely ten pence.
Having taken three weeks off after racing at Dumyat, I took the Road to Swanston on day 22. The Pentlands were sheathed in mist, coating the ground in a white froth. As I jogged upward, an outline of a runner emerged through the murk. She moved slowly but steadily, tapping out a fluent rhythm on the wet ground. Gradually, I caught her and passed with a nod, continuing to Allermuir. I waited for her there, watching her ghostly form emerge from the greyness as it had first appeared on the lower bank.
The runner was Joanne Anderson, a champion in her own right, having won the over-40 category in the Scottish Long Classics series in 2012, eight years after she was a member of the Carnethy group that did the double, winning the British and Scottish team championships. Tinto had been Joanne’s last race, where she finished eighth woman irrespective of age.
I ask her why she is here and, having put her on the spot, sense a runner who has raced across the Paps of Jura, up and down the jewels of Glamaig and Slioch, over the summits on the Glen Rosa Horseshoe and the Scottish Islands Peaks Race, and battled repeated Carnethy 5 races, in a running career spanning two decades, clawing for words. ‘You’re free, I suppose,’ she finally says. ‘Running is a different way to explore the hills, moving at a faster pace. It’s doing something different to the masses. I could run around a park, but I would always choose this option.’ Joanne is merely passing time. She is meeting a friend in an hour for a hill walk. Until then, she might as well go for a run.
As Joanne slips through the gate on the summit of Allermuir, she pauses to look back at me. ‘You asked me why I run. Well, why wouldn’t I?’
‘You caught me by surprise,’ she would later tell me. ‘What I meant is that I couldn’t imagine not getting to the hills.’
She closes the gate behind her and begins to descend. In a moment, she is gone, swallowed by the haar.
‘There are a lot of great runners in Scotland, but I’m still brushed off as just a hill runner. Running a road marathon will show them that I’m actually an athlete, not just a guy who can run up and down hills where there’s no competition.’ Robbie Simpson was talking to Emmie Collinge and Phil Gale for an article published by Tracksmith, shortly before clocking a time a shade over 2 hours and 15 minutes at the London Marathon in 2016. It was not good enough. Three Scots would run the Olympic marathon in Rio. Robbie would not be among them. He is ‘just a hill runner’, after all.
It is 23 December when we speak. I read the quote he gave to Collinge and Gale back to him. ‘It’s not so much about recognition,’ he says. ‘You get a lot of people saying hill runners have no speed or it’s an easy event and they do it for the vest, to make the team. I turned up to a 10k a few weeks ago and there was a guy I know who does a lot of track running who said, “you’d be fine if there was Ben Nevis in the middle of this race or it was uphill for a thousand metres.” I was thinking, no, we’ll see. In the end, he was quite a bit behind me. He didn’t expect that. I want to show that it’s possible to do a bit of everything.’
Scottish hill running is what it is, but for Robbie that was not enough. It is not that he finds hill racing in Scotland ‘easy’; it is just that he is prodigiously good at it. ‘Some people want to win races, which is fine, but I want to be as good as I can possibly be, pushing myself to the max. I find it difficult to do that some of the time (in Scotland). I’d much prefer to race somewhere and come 15th than win a race by several minutes.’
Winning races by almost embarrassing margins was precisely what he was doing. When he won Stùc a’ Chroin aged eighteen in 2010, he was seven minutes ahead of Brian Marshall, effectively eclipsing the runner-up by around 30 seconds per mile. When he broke the course record at Ben Rinnes in 2012, he was almost ten minutes ahead of Jethro Lennox – a Shettleston runner who had won his fourth Scottish championship the previous year – in second. The presence of Finlay Wild meant Robbie would not become the youngest winner of the Ben Nevis Race, but he was one of the few who could take on the monarch of the glen in his own backyard, beating him at Aonach Mòr on New Year’s Day in 2014.
Robbie and Finlay were already destined for different things. By then, Robbie was a full-time athlete, training in Austria, running more than 100 miles a week, and testing himself against elite trail and mountain runners in Europe.
For ten days over Christmas he is home in the Deeside village of Finzean. His family used to live in Banchory, but now he can see the granite tor of Clachnaben and neighbouring Mount Shade from his bedroom window. When he first visited his parents’ new home, he headed straight for the hills behind the glass. ‘I found a way up, a direct way, through the trees, over the river and straight up, through the bogs.’ He laughs, seemingly talking to himself. ‘Yeah, it was good.’
I ask him what training he will do over Christmas. He has been ill, he says, but a 20-mile tempo run is slated on his schedule for the next day, Christmas Eve. If he is not up to it, he will delay for 24 hours to Christmas Day.
‘If you are well and you could run anywhere tomorrow,’ I ask, ‘where would you go?’
‘The Cairngorms,’ he says immediately. ‘I would like to go and run the 4,000s, starting in Aviemore or Braemar, and run really hard, as fast as I could around all the tops. It’s good up there, really wild. In the Cairngorms, you’re far from the nearest road. In the Alps, you’re always close to a road or a ski resort.’
Seeking an alternative to track running, Robbie ran his first hill race as a thirteen-year-old at Banchory, realising quickly he could descend ‘quite fast’. Aged fifteen, he won the selection race for the Scottish junior squad on Scolty Hill for a race in Italy. ‘With track running, I got to go to Aberdeen and Grangemouth. From fifteen, I thought, this is what I want to do. Hill running is what I always come back to. It’s what interested me in running and training hard. I race in Europe and everything is about sponsorship and advertising and selling things, expensive entries, wearing expensive gear. Hill running in Scotland is just simple. You turn up, get a number and run: up the hill, get to the checkpoints, back. It is the ultimate experience.’
Four months later, I am watching the end of the 2017 London Marathon. The first Briton, Josh Griffiths, has crossed the line, but there, close behind, is Robbie. ‘Come on, Robbie!’ I shout at the television, suddenly overwhelmed by emotion.
I remember him telling me about ‘hard work’. ‘If it was easy,’ Robbie had said, ‘everybody would do it – if it was sunny every day, nice dry hills, soft grass paths. Sometimes it’s miserable weather, pouring with rain, snowing, and I’m running up a mountain, and I can’t see a thing and the wind is blowing me over; sometimes it’s running on the roads doing horrible double sessions. But that’s what I like – pushing myself to the limit.’ I had checked his festive training after we had spoken. The tempo run had been delayed until Christmas Day – a bewildering 19 miles, running each mile at an average pace of five minutes and 20 seconds.
He crosses the line in The Mall, running only marginally quicker – 34 seconds – than a year earlier, but at this level fine differences open chasms of opportunity. He would be selected for the world marathon championships; he had met the qualifying standard to wear a Scotland vest in the Commonwealth Games in 2018. Not bad for ‘just a hill runner’ – but, right now, that is how I see him: a hill runner again, tramping through bog and heather, the wind ruffling his hair on Clachnaben, laughing.