Buffeted by diagonal December rain, I prise open a wooden gate and tap on the door of a white cottage. The knock triggers a furious barking chorus. The door opens a crack. Three Jack Russell puppies squirm out, pursued by two adult dogs, and then a cat. ‘Tegan!’ a woman shouts from the doorway, then urgently to me: ‘Have you shut the gate?’ I nod furiously. ‘I’ve spent all morning looking for a dog because someone didn’t shut the gate.’ I nod again, as if to confirm my innocence. The woman – glasses, short hair, mid 40s, supported by crutches – orders the menagerie indoors. We follow them in, and with a thump, the swirling chaos of early winter in the Trossachs is shut out.
‘Tea?’ she asks. Lurching past a sofa and wood burning stove, towards a kitchen, taking large, swinging jumps, she is chased by the mob of dogs. Leaning by the sink, she begins to swill out an unwashed mug. She looks down at her crutches and the swirling pack. ‘You might have to make it yourself,’ she decides.
She is recovering from surgery. Unable to recite the precise medical terms, she hands me a letter from the doctor who recommended a dual-purpose operation: to repair a ruptured spring ligament and to ‘extend the posterior tibial tendon’, the part of the ankle that stabilises the foot when it strikes the ground. If you happen to be a hill runner, functioning posterior tibial tendons are expedient. The patient would spend six weeks in plaster, then undergo several months of rehabilitation. To what end was uncertain; recovery was not assured.
Lowering herself into an armchair, she puts her sticks to one side. She does not suit crutches. She motions for me to sit on a neighbouring sofa. A puppy claws its way up my leg and onto my lap. It is followed by another, jolting my hand, sending tea splashing across the floor. As wind and rain rattle the window panes, I skim my eyes around the room. There is an image of Suilven behind the invalid’s chair. On another wall is a picture of an Inverpolly landscape. A bookcase is lined with at least 100 worn Ordnance Survey maps. I read the letter again. The patient was a ‘fell runner of international renown’, the doctor noted.
Angela Mudge was born into adversity: her feet had been bent in the womb. ‘I had a small mother,’ she remarks, ‘and a twin.’ Her sister, Janice, had one foot ‘slightly twisted’. I grasp for an image of Angela’s feet. I had read in different accounts that ‘both her feet were pointing backwards’ or that they ‘faced the wrong way’. She handed me another piece of paper: ‘congenital talipes equinovarus,’ it said. Club foot, in layman’s terms.
Place both hands in front of you, palms down, pointing ahead, imagining they are feet. Turn both hands inwards, the right to 10 o’clock, the left to 2 o’clock, then lift the fingers two centimetres. These were Angela’s feet at birth: the feet of a ‘fell runner of international renown’.
That was 1970. Two-and-half years of hospital visits followed to straighten her feet. They were plastered and re-plastered, gradually pushing bones and tendons to where they should be, until her toes pointed the same way as her nose. Angela remembers nothing of it: ‘I was too young.’ The need to always wear orthotics would be the hangover. The memories of the beginning of her running life are clearer: ‘I played hockey and netball badly. I happened to be good at cross-country.’ Aged sixteen, she would run at school lunch times, clocking 30 miles a week, but her training hit a brick wall. In her desire for a top ten place in the English Schools cross-country – her best position was 15th – she sustained a stress fracture of the fibia. She persevered, despite her parents’ indifference. ‘Dad would sit in the car and listen to the footie while I was racing,’ Angela remembers, ‘but I think they would have been disappointed if I had given up and didn’t try to achieve what I was capable of.’
She achieved just that. Angela Mudge would become the greatest female mountain runner on the planet.
In the spring of 1996, Angela sent her training log to Martin Hyman, a Second World War refugee from Jersey who placed ninth in the 10,000 metres at the 1960 Rome Olympics. In his role as Scottish Athletics’ national coach for hill running, he replied to Angela: ‘Thank you for letting me see your log. It reflects the annals of someone with exceptional stamina, and with an overwhelming affinity for long runs in the hills. I have no doubt that if you continue to train as at present, you will achieve lots of success and fulfilment in long, tough races.’ Martin was scripting his words carefully, for a well-intentioned but was coming. ‘I happen to believe, however, that you also have the capacity to do well in any sort of hill or cross-country race, if you were prepared to train for it. Only you can judge whether that is worthwhile.’
What is of note is that Martin considered the effort very much ‘worthwhile’, for Angela was far from the finished article, physically and emotionally. In 1995, she had come second in the British fell running championships, but only 46th in the women’s race at the sport’s flagship international event, the World Mountain Running Trophy. ‘When you write off a result as not good enough because “the course was too flat”,’ Martin continued, ‘you are in effect saying, “I know that I can do well if the course is long and tough, but not if it is short and fast.” This may be true and certainly tends to be self-fulfilling. But you could turn it around if you wanted, by a process called training. By training I mean not just going for runs, but following a strategy which is planned to bring about a desired adaptive response.’
Angela describes a Wuthering Heights-esque upbringing on Dartmoor: playing, running, exploring. ‘I was brought up on the moor, and being in the hills is what I have always done, what I have always loved,’ she says. ‘I’m one of three and my big sister absolutely hated going to Dartmoor and was dragged, whereas if mum said we were going to the moors, me and my twin would be the first to get in the car. In the environment I was brought up, I was exposed to little hills. In my late teens, I went to the Lake District on a school holiday and didn’t appreciate how hills could be that steep or that long. I loved it. I have always liked going uphill. They go on and on forever, don’t they?’ There is not even a hint of sarcasm in Angela’s voice.
Hers was a childhood that would heavily influence later life. After growing up in the west Devonian town of Tavistock, Angela gradually emigrated north: first to Leicester to study chemistry, then to Stirling for a MSc in environmental management. She joined Ochil Hill Runners soon after moving from England and raced in her first Scottish event, Dumyat, in 1992. ‘I was the first university student; apart from that, I wasn’t very good,’ she declares. Theoretically, her talent should have been harnessed at Leicester. Her time in the East Midlands coincided with the emergence of a crop of young cross-country runners who trained with Angela at Leicester Coritanian and would go on to represent Great Britain in the sport. ‘I was at the back,’ says Angela. ‘Compared to them, I was rubbish.’ What could have been an opportunity, propelling Angela onto the treadmill of top-level athletics, was lost. She blames the coaches: ‘They did not see potential in me.’
Once in Scotland, her penchant became long, hard days in the hills, exploring high and wild places – a yearning forged in those early, innocent wanderings on Dartmoor. Her fix was gained from simply being there. Gently, initially, then increasingly with more force, Martin pointed out this was not enough to maximise what Angela could potentially accomplish. He recommended she organise her training to include flat repetitions of between 800 and 1,500 metres, short hill repeats, and a weekly ‘thrash’ of 8 to 15 minutes on more technical, hilly terrain.
I visited Martin, aged eighty-three when we met, at his home in Livingston with a principal question: Did he think then – in 1996 – that Angela Mudge could be a world champion? ‘I didn’t know she would be the best in the world,’ he said deliberately, ‘but people are often limited by their own view of themselves. I encourage people to think in a different way.’
Angela does not know herself. ‘He is a scientist and very analytical,’ she says of Martin. ‘He must have seen something.’
Martin would never formally coach Angela; his role was to mentor from afar, to involve himself as much or as little as the athlete desired. He proposed she ‘build in a reasonable proportion of high intensity training, but with the minimum intrusion in your need for spontaneity, and enjoyment of running in the hills’. His message lay between the lines: you have great potential; it is up to you whether you want to fulfil it; if you do, I will help.
‘Did she take your advice?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘She quietly got on with it.’
At the start of 1997, Martin wrote to Angela again, offering to review her latest training log. ‘Your future is as bright as you are prepared to make it,’ he noted. After scrutinising the diaries, he wrote back: ‘I approve without reservation what you did when injured and what you have done since! I expect that you will even come around to thinking that tough disciplines like interval training and hill reps are enjoyable. Not in a ha-ha sort of way, but in the satisfaction you get from feeling that you are using your fitness to produce a quality session.’ By July, Angela had secured her first British and Scottish championships, and finished fourth in the European Mountain Running Trophy in the Austrian Alps. After winning the women’s race at the final British championship counter at Donard-Commedagh in the Mourne mountains of Northern Ireland, Angela told Athletics Weekly’s fell reporter Gareth Webb, ‘I haven’t really thought about what it means to be British champion. You do the races and then see what happens, basically. Having said that, it’s obviously very pleasing because it’s there in the history books for all time, isn’t it?’
She had only just begun. At the end of the season, Martin wrote a rallying cry: ‘From your rate of progress over the last two years, it must be very obvious to you that you have a very good chance of progressing further still. But you can never be sure, and there is only one way to find out!’
At the time, Martin spelled it out more explicitly. ‘Martin Hyman told me I would win a medal at a championship event “in the next few years”,’ Angela says. A medallist on the international stage? She thought he was joking.
His tone changed, however, a few months later. Writing on a postcard early in 1998, Martin questioned Angela’s ‘decision to race all over the place this year because you won’t have time next. Sounds like trying to eat everything on the menu, cos it’s your last free meal. Or use a scattergun to shoot at everything in target, rather than taking careful aim at a selected target.’ In a final plea, he called on Angela to ‘structure your life thoughtfully’.
What had he meant? ‘She was doing long races all over the world,’ Martin said. ‘I believe you should plan races that include optimal preparation and recovery.’
As she began to know Martin better, Angela could guess at his responses to her logs and racing plans. ‘I was quivering in fear about what I was going to read,’ she says, ‘but he hit the nail on the head. He got me doing quality, not more miles.’ Regardless of Martin’s warning, over the next two years, Angela’s racing – and winning – would span continents. Once again, in 1998, she committed to racing in the British and Scottish championships, and won both. Then, in 1999, she did the hat-trick, clinching a third consecutive British crown, as well as winning the senior women’s race at the Inter-Counties cross-country championships in Nottingham. She was victorious too at the Mount Kinabalu International Climbathon in Malaysia, a race that ascends 2,200 metres on a six-mile course of rainforest and naked granite. On the same mountain, she would finish seventh in the World Mountain Running Trophy. She had come a long way since 1995. Coming seventh was now seen as a poor return, a disappointment only offset by success in the European equivalent, with Angela finishing runner-up. Martin was right: Angela was an international medallist.
A new century dawned. The little girl born with club feet, the overtraining teenager who induced a stress fracture, the fledgling athlete whose early progress was hampered by anaemia, the runner who was overlooked by her university coaches, the woman whose future was as ‘bright’ as she was prepared to make it, stood on a precipice. That year, she would complete a PhD on mass spectrometry, win a fourth British title, and finish fifth best in Europe.
Although she went to Bergen in the Bavarian Alps for the World Mountain Running Trophy hoping for a medal, the prospect of gold seemed fantastical. A German runner, Birgit Sonntag, had been unassailable all season, notably finishing ahead of Angela in the European championships in Poland earlier in the year. ‘She had come from nowhere and was beating all of us in the grand prix races,’ Angela remembers. She did not even think to pack a recording of Flower of Scotland in case the unimaginable happened.
Turning up to the race just minutes ahead of the start, Angela started cautiously, running in around 20th place, before beginning to move through the field. The uphill-only course rose through woodland and emerged onto open hillside, with the track featuring numerous steps. Unevenly spaced, the steps broke the natural rhythm of the runner. It was Angela’s ‘kind of climb’. She could have been on Jura or Stùc a’ Chroin or Ben Wyvis, such were its hallmarks as a classic ‘grind’: a little piece of Scotland in the Alps. Those who went off too fast inevitably fell off the pace, as the route climbed almost 1,100 metres in five miles. With around a mile to go, Angela pulled clear of the rest. ‘I was surprised to be there,’ she says. ‘It’s the fear that somebody is going to go past that keeps you going.’ The race culminated on the uphill slope of a downhill piste. ‘It would be a bit embarrassing to win a world championship walking. I can’t remember if I was running or walking, but I can’t remember running fast.’ It is not Angela’s style to look back, but had she glanced over a shoulder, she would have seen Sonntag, some 20 seconds behind, grimacing on the final climb, overwhelmed by the pressure of trying to win on her home soil. Victory, Angela says, ‘took a long time to sink in.’
The Scottish Hill Runners calendar dropped through my letterbox in February. The racing year started and finished in Lochaber: Aonach Mòr on 1 January, Cruim Leacainn on 26 December. The bottom line of each race entry revealed the incumbent male and female course record holder. I looked for ‘Angela Mudge’, imagining the editor of the calendar furiously cutting and pasting, for the name was everywhere: Carnethy 5, Chapelgill, Criffel, Deuchary, Stùc a’ Chroin, Dumyat, Scottish Islands Peaks Race, Goatfell, Kilpatricks, Cort-ma Law, Glas Tulaichean, Durisdeer, Traprain Law, Seven Hills of Edinburgh . . . It went on. I had not even reached July. Eventually, I counted 29.
Her prolificity extends far beyond the confines of Scotland, however. In 2001, she finished fifth in her defence of her world crown in Italy. ‘Because I won in 2000, many people assumed I would win a medal in 2001, not taking into account the course profile. The race in 2000 was uphill-only, not up and down – a completely different race, and I had over-raced by mid-September,’ she later said. Her aim in 2001 had instead been to win the 19-mile Sierre-Zinal in the Swiss Alps, starting in Sierre at 585 metres, topping out at 2,425 metres, and finishing in Zinal at 1,680 metres. With significantly more up than down, the race – like the Bergen course – suited Angela’s style. She delivered. ‘I ran through a corridor of people. It had an atmosphere like a world championship and I was the first woman to break three hours. I was proud of that.’
She seemed unconquerable, able to turn her legs to anything. She even contemplated attempting to represent Scotland in the marathon at the Commonwealth Games in 2002. ‘I thought it would go on for years,’ she says. ‘I didn’t see an injury around the corner. When you’re young and feeling well, you don’t think things will go wrong.’ The cause of a sore knee in 2004 was identified. It was very bad news, a potentially career-wrecking revelation: the cartilage in her femur had worn away. But like Angela had done before, and would again, she recovered, first from surgery, then through rehabilitation. She spent a year away from running and returned triumphantly, celebrating her veteran status as a thirty-five-year-old by winning the World Masters Mountain Running Championship in 2005. She spent the next three years dominating the Buff Skyrunner series, winning races in Japan, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Andorra and – in the 2008 series – Scotland, at Ben Nevis. Excellence continued into her late thirties and early forties: she won the Everest Marathon (finishing eighth overall and breaking the course record) in 2007, and was runner-up in the women’s race at the Commonwealth Ultra Trail Running Championships in North Wales in 2011. Even as a forty-four-year-old in 2013, she was breaking records, at Meall nan Tarmachan (where she was fourth overall), and winning, notably at Carnethy 5 and Ben Nevis. It was imperious form that would see Angela win her fourth senior Scottish championship, despite her age, 16 years after her first.
While Angela has no memory of the adversity that dogged her first years of life, the unwitting consequence of overcoming that misfortune had set a pattern for life: to fight, fight, fight. ‘You either have it or you don’t,’ she says. ‘I’m very competitive. You have to want something to be driven to get it. It’s built into my nature. I’m a born pessimist, but when it comes to running, I don’t look at the negative side. I don’t think about what can go wrong.’
Angela’s talent, even if it went unnoticed at Leicester, is undoubted. But breaking records and winning races is merely a consequence – a consequence of an instinctive craving for the mountains of Scotland, the country she adopted despite being born an Englishwoman. Her living room is significant for the absence of running memorabilia. A medal for Sierre-Zinal hangs discreetly and a sculpted prize for finishing first woman at the Highland Cross duathlon stands on the mantelpiece, merely because she ‘liked that one’. There is little else. What dominates are the pictures: Inverpolly, Suilven, Quinag, a now-gone Jack Russell on the Brothers of Kintail. It is clear what matters.
After becoming world champion, Angela was nominated among five British sportspeople for the Laureus World Sports Award. The other nominees were global superstars: David Beckham, Jonathan Edwards, Lennox Lewis and Steve Redgrave. She did not attend; she had already booked a holiday to New Zealand. ‘I’m not one for posh dos and the thought of wearing a frock frightened me away,’ she says. ‘It’s not my kind of thing.’ While black tie events may not be her ‘thing’, the recognition alongside symbols of sporting greatness showed that Angela too could rise above her sport – a feat achieved by very few hill or fell runners. Joss Naylor has done it in England. Angela Mudge did it in Scotland.
‘Do you think you transcended the sport at that point?’ I asked Angela several months later, knowing the answer she would give.
‘No,’ she said emphatically. I could have scripted her response: ‘The only people who know about hill running are hill runners. We all know about Kilian Jornet, but that’s a marketing thing.’
The Scottish Sports Hall of Fame, conceived in 2002, ‘celebrates and pays tribute to Scotland’s iconic sportsmen and women from the past 100 years, and inspires future generations.’ The aims are noble and – as it is led by sportscotland, the national agency for sport – it has credibility. In total, 28 sports are represented, from the more obvious pursuits of football, golf and rugby, to the minority sports of shooting, table tennis and water polo. The list also recognises the sports that define what it is to be Scottish and to live in Scotland: curling, Highland Games, mountaineering and hillwalking, and shinty. Hill running, however, is a puzzling anomaly. For a pursuit that has existed in Scotland since the eleventh century and is practised across the country, from the Highlands and islands, to the city centre of Edinburgh and the Borders, this is a sport, like the 100-metre sprint in athletics, that very many people can empathise with. I would pity the child who has not run up or down a hill, feeling the burning breathlessness of an ascent and the joyful freedom of a descent. Such exertion is a rite of passage. Arguably, hill running is the nation’s minority sport.
When I contacted sportscotland for an explanation, a response was immediate and emphatic. Hill runners had not been nominated, and since the process of adding names to the Hall of Fame is done by nomination, there were no hill runners on the list.
Angela is not prone to outbursts of raw emotion. As I prepare to leave, I ask if we might have missed anything. ‘You’ll have to ask me directly,’ she admits. ‘I’m not very good at volunteering information.’ She has a reputation for disliking interviews. Reputations tend to be inaccurate. Angela is straightforward, that is all. She does not suffer fools; she rises above nonsense. Despite her transcendence, however much she rails against it, she is cultured in a time-honoured hill and fell running tradition, crafted in the Lake District, of diversion and understatement, where self-promotion borders on the grotesque. That, presumably, explains the absence of hill runners from the Hall of Fame.
Ultimately, standing shoulder to shoulder with Scotland’s greatest sportspeople is of little interest to Angela. We talk again about what matters most – the mountains – and she seems to glow. As she speaks, staring in the direction of the wood burner, a smile touching her lips, she is somewhere else, somewhere elevated and remote and windswept. I look down at her crutches, momentarily overcome by the disaster that was upon her.
‘When I’m in the hills, it’s about being there, and seeing and experiencing what the elements are doing to you – if you’re fighting the wind or getting soaking wet. You can start off in fine weather, but you climb halfway up and it closes in. You’re now going to have completely different experiences in the ascent and descent. You’re eventually going to go back to calm again. If you run around the streets, you don’t get that, do you? It’s just the same – the weather pattern is going to be the same for the whole run. I love Sutherland the best. The terrain is rough. Bog and heather make me happy. I would stay there at Christmas and go for a long, steady run over rubbish terrain.’
Lacking that fix, she admits, is the personal tragedy of injury. ‘As I’ve always loved running in the hills and being out and about, this has definitely brought it home. When I’ve gone back to the hills after injury, I’m only walking, not running, but I realise what I’ve really missed is just being there. If it was a choice between, you can’t go to the hills, but you can run, I think I’d go to the hills and not run. For me, to run is to be able to run in the hills. If I could only run on a confined athletics track, I’d probably say, “no thanks, I’d rather walk in the hills.” It’s the same if it’s a gorgeous day in the summer. I think, I could go for a two-hour hill run or I could spend all day walking – and I would spend all day walking.’
Angela completed a first round of the Munros in 2002, with Slioch on a January morning the final summit. Like many others, she went on to complete the list of Corbetts. Surprisingly, for a hill runner, the peaks were predominately hiked not run, for Angela frequently went to the mountains with Janice, whose long-term injury prevented movement faster than walking pace. Slowing down did Angela good; it is part of the reason for her prolonged distinction and stamina. ‘Walking is great for endurance. I don’t think people appreciate that,’ she says. ‘I was once hillwalking in the Glenfinnan hills when I met Roger Boswell who was running. It was me, Janice, and a friend, Adam, and we walked up a hill, met Roger, walked down, walked up the next hill, and beat Roger to the top. He said, “how did you do that?” I said, “us walking uphill is a lot quicker than you running uphill, Roger!”’
I had been talking to Angela for nearly two hours. The rain continued to thrash the windows. ‘The dogs need to pee,’ she says, instructing everyone outside. We pause on an oblong of grass at the front of the cottage, arms folded against the cold. Standing next to a world champion, a woman who was once one of the greatest athletes on the planet, I watch three puppies squat on the lawn.
I ruminated on that word in the months that followed: greatest, Scotland’s greatest. I would not ask Angela outright. That would be a futile exercise. Greatness is subjective, of course, but it can be measured by success, by records, by longevity, by the esteem of your contemporaries. ‘It has to be Angela,’ Malcolm Patterson would tell me. ‘World champion, British champion, all the records she’s got. It would have to be her. Colin Donnelly would come quite close. Jack Maitland would come close. But it’s Angela.’
Yet greatness can also be gauged by what people hand back to their sport. A single anecdote will suffice. In the spring of 2001, Angela was still the reigning world champion when she offered to help set up Glas Tulaichean, an uphill race to the crest of the 1,051-metre Munro above Spittal of Glenshee. In pouring rain, she taped the final 400 metres, from where the race route left the safety of the path. Angela was back the next day, on the start line. She was, inevitably, first woman to the top, and tenth overall, setting a course record that remained untouched 16 races later. Back at the start, Angela accepted a lift over the Cairnwell Pass and was dropped off in Braemar. From there, with a tent and sleeping bag on her back, alone and in drizzle, she ran into the hills. She would not be seen again for days.
Nominating her for an athletics award in 2004, Martin Hyman captured the essence of a world champion who just wanted to be on her own in the mountains. ‘I have no doubt that, had she chosen to compete in a higher profile televised sport, she would be a publicly recognised sports celebrity,’ he wrote. ‘Angela’s exploits are so well recognised within our sport that a new word has come into our vocabulary: to be “Mudged” describes the situation when a male star finishes behind Angela in a race.
‘Having followed Angela’s career closely over the past ten years, I am bound to be in awe of her prowess. Nevertheless, I find her personal qualities to be uniquely admirable. In fifty years of close involvement with international athletes, I have never met anyone with less interest in personal publicity or in financial gain. Other athletes, many of whom have achieved less than Angela, aspire to earn large sums in grants, in sponsorship and in prize money. For warm weather training and for competition they stay in expensive hotels, attended by a supporting entourage, sometimes separate from their teammates. Angela runs in the mountains because she loves the mountain environment and is fulfilled when she challenges the physical limits of her prowess. She has sometimes received modest funding from Sports Aid or Lottery support and has used it to travel to the Alps, where she lives frugally for weeks on end, with only a tiny tent and a little gear, which is limited by what she can carry on her bicycle.’
The relationship between coach and athlete is complex; the relationship between Martin Hyman and Angela Mudge is even more intricate. Even now, more than twenty years after reviewing her diaries for the first time, to Martin, Angela remains an enigma. ‘It was easy to discern that she loved being in wild places and lacked any trace of materialism,’ he said, ‘but I found it almost impossible to penetrate her inner thoughts.’
After a winter of discontent, the crutches were finally put to one side. Angela would go to the hills again. Ben Ledi, in the company of Prasad Prasad, would be her first outing some five months after we spoke.
‘Did you go to the top?’
Sitting at home with the phone pressed to her ear, I imagine Angela wrinkling her nose at my question. ‘I wouldn’t go if I couldn’t get to the top,’ she says, as if the suggestion was ludicrous. ‘I couldn’t run downhill because I’d lost the proprioception on rough ground, but it was just good to be out in the hills. That’s what I had missed the most.’
Her racing comeback arrived in the autumn, running a leg of the British relay championships at Luss. ‘It wasn’t great for a dodgy ankle in deep mud,’ she admits. Angela then tweaked a hamstring at the Devil’s Burdens relays in Fife in January, an injury that indicated she would be forced to miss the Carnethy 5 three weeks later. The forecast was atrocious, with fierce winds and whiteout conditions predicted, worse even than the circumstances in the year I had repeatedly wondered what the hell are we doing here? What was anathema to others – 120 paid-up, pre-registered entrants failed to show – was a source of revelry to Angela. What a way for her to run her seventeenth Carnethy 5. ‘I can’t miss this, I thought. You’ll never get this set of conditions again,’ she says. With the wind gusting to 45mph, causing a windchill of -15 Celsius on the summits, in a field led home by Finlay Wild, Angela finished 119th, some 16 minutes slower than her course record. Nine other women beat a world champion that day.
‘Do you think you’ll recover – fully recover?’ I ask tentatively.
‘I should hope so,’ Angela replies immediately, ‘once my left leg realises it needs to be the same size as my right.’ She ends on a question masquerading as a statement, an epitaph even: ‘You don’t think I’d give up, do you?’