I had never forgotten the uncomplicated words of Alec Keith: ‘When I get there,’ he had said. ‘I will just get on with it.’ When I needed them most, the sentence appeared as bold, capital letters in my mind. The next three words were the abstract, the metaphorical mountain: ‘And I did.’
I got ‘there’ – a layby opposite the youth hostel in Glen Nevis – in the late afternoon of a Friday after school.
‘Javi?’ I shouted from the car door.
A man sitting on a bench outside the hostel looked up, smiled and waved. Originally from Navalcarnero, a town south-west of Madrid occupying the plain between the Alberche and Guadarrama rivers, Javi was a mountain runner before he came to Scotland, exploring the peaks of the close-to-home Sierra de Gredos and Sierra de Guadarrama. The Spanish financial crisis brought Javi and his girlfriend to Inverness, where he was working as a primary school teaching assistant. Like me, his first taste of hill racing in Scotland was on Craig Dunain, but it was Cioch Mhòr that acted as a christening. ‘It was the first time I had run a race without the route being marked,’ he explained. ‘There were fences, snow and rain, a burn, a bog. I loved it.’
With a handshake and a nod, at precisely 5pm, Javi and I faced up glen and started running. The last time I had been here was with Graham Nash, creeping through the halcyon hours of a Lochaber morning. Today, the valley temperature was 28 Celsius, the wind like the midsummer sigh of the Mediterranean. ‘Warmer than Ibiza,’ the Daily Record would boast. The initial steps seemed like the first of my life: stiff, slow and tentative. Just then it was incomprehensible I could accomplish what had only been done 99 times.
As we moved through the forest, I told Javi about Alec Keith, about the bananas and the powder sachets, about getting around with ten minutes to spare, about falling out of his car at Tyndrum. ‘I know about him,’ Javi said. They had met at races, but only long enough for a snatched greeting.
Under a cerulean sky, we continued up Mullach nan Coirean, running when the gradient eased, walking the rest, carving seven minutes off a 22-and-a-half-hour schedule. ‘One hour and thirteen minutes,’ I said.
‘Thirteen or thirty?’ Javi asked.
‘Thirteen,’ I repeated.
He asked the question a second time, seemingly in disbelief, then shook his head. ‘Too fast.’
It was fast – only four minutes slower than Jasmin Paris’ record-breaking pace – but conditions, for now, were flawless: light, clear, warm, the wind placid, the ground parched. The moment was ripe for the runners’ equivalent of making hay.
For Javi and me, this was a blind date. The meeting outside the hostel two hours earlier was our first. Our profiles matched, but that was no guarantee of a union in Glen Nevis in 24 hours’ time. A week before, we had not even known of each other’s existence. I suppose I should have done: Francisco Javier Cabrera Valdes is not a forgettable name. Highland Hill Runners had posted an account of one of its members running Tranter’s Round in the snowmelt month of April. I had skim-read the article, my curiosity for the conditions, not the runner. But when that long Spanish name appeared in my inbox, it triggered a memory: was that the bloke who did a Tranter? It was – and Javi’s ambitions had since multiplied: he wanted to run Ramsay’s Round. Specialising in long, solo and unsupported mountain runs, Javi had already attempted to fulfil his aspiration. Leaving at midnight, he traversed the Mamores, aggravated a knee injury on the descent of Sgùrr Eilde Mòr, twisted an ankle on the descent of Stob Coire Sgriodain, and limped down to Loch Treig, accepting – after 14 hours – he would go no further. To accomplish the Ramsay was, as others before him had described it, a ‘dream’; he wanted to run with me, ‘as far as his legs’ would take him.
Before replying, I searched for his report of what had been a completion – Tranter’s Round. Wearing a mountain bike windstopper, Spain football shorts and box-fresh fell shoes, Javi had set out alone in drizzle at first light, not knowing then how to unlock the puzzle of the plantation on the slopes of Mullach nan Coirean, and like a latter-day Pete Simpson found himself blundering ‘among felled trees with no hint of a path’.
With the Mamores enclosed by cold fog, he made three navigational blunders, always on descents. Having only committed to the run the day before, he had not tested what he cryptically described as ‘custom-made bag arrangements to carry food and water’. They did not work. ‘Having a couple of pouches clinging and hitting my stomach wasn’t comfortable at all,’ Javi said. The fastener on the waist strap then snapped, forcing him to contrive a tangle of knots to secure the bag to his back. Martin Stone, he was not. With the travails at least offering a mental distraction, Javi crossed the Abhainn Rath and began the long haul to Stob Bàn, not knowing if his efforts would be thwarted by snow on Aonach Beag. In the Grey Corries, he asked every walker he saw if they knew of conditions ahead – no one did; they had come from different directions.
From Sgùrr Choinnich Mòr, Javi could see the approaches to Aonach Beag were painted white. With no winter gear, he dismissed the notion of Spinks Ridge, proceeding to Charlie’s Gully instead. ‘The snow was soft enough to let me nail down my hands and feet, but hard enough to hold my weight while climbing up, preventing me from sliding to the bottom of the gully,’ he said. As he neared the top, he escaped the steep snow, finding a band of rock, mud and grass to wriggle up.
If you get this far, you will probably get to the end, especially on Tranter’s Round when the demands of time are less insistent. Escaping the shadow of fog on Ben Nevis, he could see a line of lights in the glen, but an aching knee and tight iliotibial band plagued the descent to the hostel. Back on the road, Javi got in his car, changed his clothes, drove to Fort Augustus, slept for 25 minutes, then continued his journey home to Inverness.
What made me nervous about Javi also endeared him to me. He was a glorious amateur, possessing a naivety matched by a compulsion to keep going, revelling in the company of mountains. He reminded me of Alec Keith.
There is a lucidity that comes in the hills. Life in the Mamores was boiled down to its simplest constituents: the need to move, to eat and drink, to be. The task had not seemed so empirical some 48 hours earlier. I had assigned the last weekend in May as the date of my prospective attempt, with the long-range weather forecast suggesting it would fall at the end of a period of high pressure bringing clear skies, offsetting the absence of any moon. The weekend clashed with the fell race on Jura, precisely the sort of outing anyone capable of supporting a Ramsay’s Round would undertake. I persisted, clinging to the belief that benign conditions with little support was better than the reverse.
As time cascaded to the weekend, I realised I was in danger of the worst combination: scant support and rotten weather. The high pressure was to collapse sooner than initial forecasts had predicted. ‘Buffeting will become widespread, with particularly sudden, possibly ferocious gusts, even on lower slopes, passes and cols,’ read the latest bulletin. My window of opportunity was narrowing: if I set out at the scheduled 1am on Saturday, I would run into thunderstorms by early afternoon, around the time I would be on the Grey Corries. Only once had I been caught on mountains in a lightning storm. I had run a round of the five White Mounth Munros that encircle Glen Muick and was standing on Meikle Pap, admiring the cliffs of Lochnagar, when thunder reverberated from a swirl of low-hanging black cloud. The mountainside seemed to literally shake. As corpulent raindrops fell, the leaden sky was lit up by sheets of lightning, making the hills froth and fizz. The world was wicked for a moment – and I fled from it.
Faced with little alternative, I brought the attempt forward by eight hours to 5pm on Friday. The consequence would be not sleeping before the attempt, meaning by the end – if there was to be a true ‘end’ – I would have been awake for almost 36 hours. But that prospect was eminently more enticing than running along the Carn Mòr Dearg Arête in a hail of lightning bolts.
Later that evening, I asked Graham Nash about the prospect of starting with Javi. Pedigree was not the issue. Javi’s best time for the Ben Nevis Race was ten minutes faster than mine; familiarity and understanding was the quandary. The response was decisive: ‘You need to be selfish and single-minded to complete these things,’ Graham said. ‘You will have highs and lows, and they rarely coincide with the person you’re running with. Personally, I wouldn’t run with someone I haven’t run with before, but then I’m a selfish old git.’
Soon after, Ross Bannerman, knowing of my plans, sent a message: ‘Take a day off. Torrential rain will spoil it.’
I hammered out a frustrated reply: ‘I can’t take a day off.’
The next message was from Javi. The maths on my schedule was wrong. Not only had I calculated the splits incorrectly, I had come to a total without including the descent of the Ben. Perhaps he should have been the one doing the doubting?
We were climbing Binnein Mòr when I asked Javi how he felt. He shook his head. ‘Not good. It’s too early to feel like this.’ I let the doubts fly into the wind, unanswered. I understood. In the same instant, I remembered Graham’s words and knew that at some point, sooner than I had expected, I would have to be ‘selfish’. Yet I was also puzzled. Javi was not struggling with the speed; he was climbing well, even gapping me on Binnein Beag. From the top of the first Munro to the summit of the tenth, Sgùrr Eilde Mòr, took us a little over five hours, akin to 20-hour pace. There seemed little reason to doubt we could comfortably run the round within 24 hours.
At midnight, we were easing down Sgùrr Eilde Mòr, closing in on two distant beams of light: one belonging to Mark Hartree who was camped near the ruin of Luibeilt to meet us; the other on the head, I assumed, of John Busby, a Carnethy clubmate, running from Lairig Leacach. Food was lined up along the central reservation of the track, with Mark reading us a menu as we arrived. I had been here two months earlier, stumbling into the mountains from Kinlochleven on another Friday night that would spill into Saturday, when the route had been buried in melting snow and I had to cross a high, freezing Abhainn Rath, before the beam of my torch picked out the sanctuary of Meanach. The next day, four of us ran over the Grey Corries and the Aonachs on snow-banked ridges, picking out islands in the west. From Aonach Mòr, we descended into Coire Giubhsachan, the lonely saddle to the east of Carn Mòr Dearg, patiently kicking steps with crampons, not moving until the ice axe had grabbed. After bumping downhill to Steall, we tramped through the glen, hungry, weary and dumbfounded by mountains.
Mark washed my socks in a burn, then handed me a spoon and a pouch of lukewarm rice. Javi was sitting to my left, hardly moving, bathed in darkness apart from the downward glow of his torch. I realised that while I had been running to reach a moment in a different place, some 15 hours from now, Javi had been running to get here. This was his end. At the time, I imagined him suffering. That was not the case, he would insist later. Javi was guided by pragmatism: ‘I was fine, but I wasn’t going to do it, not at that moment at least. You could call it the end of our journey together; that reflects the way I felt.’
Mark went through the menu again, with Javi dismissing it all. ‘Just eat some food,’ I heard Mark mutter. He tried again: ‘Come on. Eat some food. You’ll feel better.’ Javi relented, swallowing some granola with water. ‘Whatever you do, you can’t stay here,’ Mark said finally, ‘you’re going to have to get moving.’
Our ‘journey together’ was not quite over. Javi got to his feet and followed John and me across the boggy ground that runs down to the river, aiming for a fence line that is obvious by day, invisible by night. Mark shouted after us: ‘Come back. I forgot to take a photo.’ We forded the Abhainn Rath too far west, with the water lapping our waists, and proceeded into a mild early morning. I led, running and occasionally walking when overwhelmed with waves of ominous nausea, to the bridge by Creaguaineach Lodge. Javi, always a few steps behind, announced he would make for Fersit along the five miles of train track on the eastern shoulder of Loch Treig. He slipped back and when I turned to check on him, the light of his torch was gone.
‘When did you know?’ I asked Javi a week later.
‘Before I even started,’ he admitted. ‘I was sure I wasn’t ready.’
The difference between us was wafer-thin, a divergence in belief, not a physical distinction, I told him. He agreed: ‘It didn’t matter too much to me; to you, I knew it was everything.’
John and I said little, despite it being the first time we had seen each other for 18 months. When we were last together, after running legs of the Devil’s Burdens relays, he had been on the cusp of spending a year studying in the Netherlands. We had spoken then about the ground we were now treading. ‘If you go to the Highlands,’ he had said, ‘the landscape is different, but you don’t appreciate how different it is until you feel it with your feet. You can look at mountains from a distance, but running allows you to not just see them, but feel them.’ John would not race again in Scotland that year. ‘I have an idea of what the Dutch landscape may be like.’ A pause. ‘It’s going to be flat,’ he said solemnly.
Beinn na Lap is the antithesis of Amsterdam. While there is little to note about a mountain considered one of the easiest Munros due to its modest altitude and an elevation of 400 metres from typical staring points at Corrour or Loch Ossian, Beinn na Lap is to the summer Ramsayist what Chno Dearg is to the winter contender, and perhaps what Yewbarrow represents to those undertaking the Bob Graham. The slope of long grass rises interminably, a frustrating march from a bridge that carries the West Highland Line. I had tried to prepare myself for this moment: this is where Jasmin Paris had felt unwell; this is where Charlie Ramsay had struggled; this is where a deflated Bill Johnson had phoned Anne Stentiford.
The reality was worse than I could have imagined. In the darkness, the silhouette of the summit plateau seemed to rise in perpetuity and for the first time in nine hours I was stopping, taking micro-pauses, trying to suppress the realisation that I had not even reached the eastern limit of the round. The calorific content of my midnight meal had long expired. I was not hungry, but dizziness told me I needed food. When I tried to eat – pizza or tortilla – I chewed and chewed, driven mad by mastication, the food becoming an insipid paste that I could not swallow. Single jelly babies, carried off with a gulp of water, became my limit. I carried on, motivated only by the conviction that climbing Beinn na Lap now was better than ever having to ascend it again.
The relief in finding the top was tempered by what I knew was ahead: a grim nosedive through rampant gorse to gain the quietest of dells, then the infamous climb of the concave approach to Chno Dearg. As we gained the crooked line of the summit ridge, hearing the faintest murmur of birdsong, I knew at least the worst of the night was over. Those hours, even on reflection, had been dreadful. But, as if I needed reminding of this sport’s juxtaposition, they were also exceptional – to run through a Scottish night, to be befuddled by the sun’s movements: way out west five hours earlier, now adrift in the east. ‘How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!’ John Muir wrote in The Mountains of California. How glorious a greeting the sun also gives the mountain runner, for as I watched the illuminations drip deeper, like the wax on a melting candle, I was happy. Perhaps this is what John Busby had meant? Such happiness is hard-won, but it can only be gained by profound immersion in mountains. To only look cannot be enough.
The Ramsay has a habit of snatching such moments from you, for the need to concentrate, to fixate on heather and rock, to not fall over, quickly overwhelms romantic notions. The descent of Stob Coire Sgriodain is such a place, tendering an abrupt, pathless plunge to Loch Treig. The discomfort is countered by the final third of a mile: a high step through a broken fence that only the Ramsayist would know about; a passage through a ribbon of crowded forest branches to reach the train line; a run between the tracks to a flight of steps down to the dam; from there, a jog across the wall as someone bellows encouragement from the far side. It feels like a finish line – for some, all too soon, it is.
This is no story of heroism. I was not a pioneer. I was not chasing records. I was not the first; I was not the last. This is no account of particular boldness. Nor is this the narrative of a by-the-seat-of-your-pants contender on the edge of being tipped into a second day. This is the story of someone trying to remember the words of another: ‘When I get there, I will just get on with it.’ There is little allure in just getting on with things, in putting one foot in front of the other, but I persisted in doing just that. Besides, I had no excuse not to. That I was fatigued, struggling to eat, light-headed, convinced I was going to vomit, and sleep-deprived, was inevitable. In the normal world, I would have phoned work and made my apologies, or been sent home sick. Today was not normal: when I started running 13 hours earlier, I knew my fate was to suffer. That really is the only way it can be done.
But it is in the doing that ‘clarity of perception’ is found. From Loch Treig, the Ramsayist must re-ascend close to 900 metres to gain Stob a’ Choire Mheadhoin, yet the peak might have been Craig Dunain, for it seemed I was back where this had all started. With me were three contemporaries from Inverness; two of them, David Gallie and Gordie Taylor, were the pair who had contrived to mock my Englishness above Loch Ness.
‘If you finish this,’ David said, ‘I’ll never call you a soft lad again.’
He pulled out a cylinder of blue plastic, no more than an inch long, from his bag and held it towards me, a thumb and index finger on each end. It was a peg from Frustration, the board game his brother played constantly. When David went to see Iain at his nursing home in Nairn, he would hear the ping of the game’s perspex dome before he even reached his room. Iain insisted on playing with the blue pieces. Since his death the previous year, David had carried a blue barrel with him every time he stepped onto the hills. He has hidden pieces on Ben Wyvis, Craig Dunain – the hill the brothers last ran together before Iain’s accident – and the highest point of the Great Glen Way.
David gestured ahead to Karen Lyons, the fourth member of our early morning quartet, and Gordie. ‘They are carrying them too. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but my mother does. When she’s on the bus on Bridge Street in Inverness, she looks up at Ben Wyvis, knowing a blue Frustration piece is up there, and smiles. She no longer thinks of Iain stuck in a room in a nursing home.’ David was running a step ahead of me. He might have mistaken my heave for a grunt of effort, but as I looked across a mountainside wearing a beret of mist, tears were gathering.
Joy – a strange, miraculous joy – erupted from the hollowness of sorrow. Mountains had rarely seemed so marvellous. To be here was to be on the crest of existence, rising on a great travelator to the sky. We might have brushed the fingertips of Iain Gallie. As we descended to the high pass beneath Stob Coire Easain, our brocken spectres, haloed in the cloud, waved back at us.
I knew too much to not know what would happen next. As David and I trudged up the grassy wing of Stob Bàn, Gordie and Karen were already circling back to Fersit. Gone was the cooling sheen of mist; gone were the brocken spectres. We climbed in the glare of sunshine, my head fuggy, unsure we were on the right line until the cone of Stob Bàn emerged from behind a shoulder, still a long way off. I was fixated on locating a track I had found here previously. That I could not gain it was maddening, as if this somehow counted as failure. What was of far greater concern was my inability to eat. Like on Beinn na Lap: minutes of chewing, a revolting gunge forming in my mouth. David encouraged, cajoled and eventually insisted – until I just wanted him to leave me alone. Why does the body reject food when the need is greatest?
The length of my pauses grew longer – a second or two before David tapped my back, urging progress – and more frequent. Seconds might seem insignificant, but they were symbolic of a mounting malaise, a deepening slump. For the first time, I found no pleasure or relief in reaching a summit, and cagily descended the loose scree of the north-west ridge, scarcely faster than a walking pace that I knew was too slow to succeed. Arriving at the lochan in Coire Rath, my face was the colour of dust.
‘Sit down,’ a voice instructed. I had not expected to see Mark Hartree, who had walked here in the dawn when sleep eluded him. I lowered myself to the grass with a grimace. Just then I looked like Javi had at midnight: a runner in agonising conflict, physically browbeaten, mentally denuded. The finish – at least six hours away – seemed as distant as ever, too distant to be real. To dress this up in colourful prose is difficult. The words I expressed at the time are the most effective synthesis: ‘I feel like crap.’
The statement was indisputably true, but then I dared utter poisonous half-truths, words that had been teetering on the edge of my consciousness since I had stepped onto the ramp of Beinn na Lap, even with that moment of enchantment on Stob a’ Choire Mheadhoin: ‘I can’t do this.’
I was flooded with regret; I did not mean what I uttered, but the act of speaking aloud my thoughts was cathartic.
Mark turned on me. ‘You feel bloody awful? I should hope you do.’ He handed me rice again, then a watery porridge. The words seemed to have cleared the blockage in my throat. I could swallow. ‘You’re going to eat this, then we’re going to run up that big hill,’ Mark explained, gesticulating to Stob Choire Claurigh over his shoulder.
And we did – or at least walked, but a walk without pauses, a walk of conviction, a walk of rediscovered belief.
On the summit, as I looked up to see a meandering line of shimmering quartzite, I was imbued with absolute certainty: there was no way I could not do this. I ran downhill, my legs moving with the freedom they had on the descent of Mullach nan Coirean. The phoney mental war was over. For hours, I had been debating a choice. Now there was no choice. There could only be one outcome: getting back to Glen Nevis within 24 hours.
At the time, it felt like a verdict was made there – as my hand felt for a loose rock on yet another highest point. The reality was far more complex than I could appreciate at that moment. The choice had been made long ago, in the days and weeks and years before, even as far back as the moment a twelve-year-old boy told a hockey teacher he wanted to do cross-country instead. I had been unwittingly readying myself for these precious hours my whole life, but even then, inadvertent preparation did not mean I was capable of running Ramsay’s Round. I could not have contemplated the idea without the six months of obsession that had led to today, but then nor was it conceivable without the years that had preceded those six months.
Having taken a three-week break from running, I had started again the previous November, returning gradually at first, compulsively strengthening back and hips to ease the burden on my right ankle. When I was staying on the horizontal Fylde coast at Christmas, I concocted a 30-rep session of 20 minutes up and down the mound of a sand dune. On the stretch of beach between St Annes-on-the-Sea and Blackpool, I overruled instinct, seeking out the line of greatest resistance – the dry sand, the loose rocks, the rolling dunes.
Gradually, in the new year, I increased distance until I was averaging 50 to 60 miles a week and climbing at least 10,000 metres a month. I ran variations of the Pentland Skyline on five occasions in eight weeks, creating extensions to raise the time to five hours and adding pathless routes to lose and then regain the eastern ridge. On an anticlockwise trip, the moon was haloed by millions of ice crystals; going the other direction, eating cheese sandwiches on Black Hill, I toiled as John Ryan moved at a pace that seemed pre-determined to drop me. I ran repetitions on the Craiglockhart hills; I went to Arthur’s Seat after work for Martin Hyman-style thrashes or to climb the Lion’s Haunch by its steep western flank; I took the Road to Swanston. Every Tuesday, I ran intervals alone in The Meadows – watching the seasons change even there: sleet and snow in January, frenzied wind in March, blossom in April – immersed in a bubble of hurt. As I had in London, I lived by the numbers on my watch, but when I looked up to Arthur’s Seat there was always a human shape breaking the silhouette of the hill. I was down here so I could be up there. After, I would jog to school, passing dozens of students unsure how to respond to the sight of their teacher lacking a suit and tie, and climb the stairs to my classroom, counting the forty-five steps, calculating the height gain, however insignificant. The same two or three girls would glance up, then look straight back down, as I pushed open the door, breathless and sweating, wearing shorts on a cold February morning. In the gents, I would splash my face, pat myself dry with paper towels, change hurriedly in a cubicle, spray myself with aftershave, then walk back up those 45 steps, pretending nothing had happened.
I raced sparingly, seeing such efforts as the path to injury. I was right. I tweaked a calf at Feel the Burns, a half-marathon on mist-smothered, snow-streaked moorland above Selkirk, in January, and badly blistered a heel at a 42-mile race in the Lake District in April that took three weeks to recover. In between came that brilliant three-day reconnaissance in the Ramsay hills: a scary, dark, bitterly cold run to Meanach, the light of my torch catching the fiendish glances of deer; a 10-hour expedition the next day; an ascent of the steepest side of Sgùrr Eilde Mòr – a 700-metre climb of a triangle of grass, heather and rock from the eponymous loch – to simply ‘have a look’ at a descent I would never take, as I ran out to Kinlochleven.
When I ran – whether it was on The Meadows, the Pentlands or the Grey Corries – I thought of what was to come: the small pile of stones that marks the start of the east ridge descent of the Mamores’ Stob Bàn; the target island in the Allt Feith na h-Ealaidh when leaving Beinn na Lap; the trod that traverses Sgùrr Choinnich Beag, avoiding the unnecessary addition of 50 metres of climbing. I imagined myself there: steadily progressing over Devil’s Ridge, then back again; lunging between boulders on the Carn Mòr Dearg Arête; touching the youth hostel signpost at the end.
A fortnight before my attempt, I parked at Swanston and ran directly to Caerketton, a climb of 300 metres, and down to Hillend. I returned by the same route, then repeated the entire course again, summiting Caerketton four times in two hours, earning the equivalent height of Aonach Beag from sea level. It was on the final descent, as I gazed down on the village, that I committed to an imminent assault on Ramsay’s Round. Looking back, my assurance astounds me. What made me think I was ready? Why now? Why not wait until the longer days of the spring, or the summer, or even the following year? But then, why wait? I might be faster, fitter and stronger at another time, but I might not. This seemed to be my moment – and if there was one thing worse than failing, it was not trying in the first place.
When I showed Jasmin Paris a draft of Pizza, Prosecco and Ice Cream, she queried a reference to her morning training. ‘She makes a mental tick,’ I had written.
‘It’s what I want to do,’ Jasmin had explained in an email. ‘Running is to a large extent just a by-product of the many happy hours spent outdoors.’ I deleted the sentence, realising I was transferring my motivation to another, for it was me who found reassuring logic in training and knowing precisely how I had prepared, not Jasmin. It is what leant me surety when I made my ruling on Caerketton. Every run, every repetition, every rung on the stone staircase at school, was a literal step towards achieving Ramsay’s Round. It was these thousands of choices across three decades that enabled me to make this choice right now: I will persevere; I will finish this.
I would not be the hundredth though.
Andy Fallas and Helen Bonsor, who we met on Stob Choire Claurigh, had encountered a patched-up Pete Duggan earlier that morning at Corriechoille. With Tim Ripper, he had helped pace Alicia Hudelson, an American ultrarunner and climber who purchased a map of Ramsay’s Round the day after she completed a Bob Graham, from Lairig Leacach to Glen Nevis, in a successful round at the second attempt. It had taken 38 years and 10 months, but at last a century of rounds had been accomplished.
Alicia had started at 5am – 12 hours before me – running through the balmy heat of day. Where we were now, Alicia had been in the minutes around midnight. It was the light of her head torch Javi and I had seen from Sgùrr Eilde Mòr, not John Busby’s. Reassuring her as they left the summit of the Ben that 1 hour and 15 minutes was ample time to descend, Pete fell while trying to bypass the only remaining snow patch on the tourist path, with his head striking a rock. ‘Alicia stopped running,’ Pete said, ‘but Tim called for her to carry on. After checking I wasn’t dead – we both agreed that, not being dizzy or queasy, the quickest way off the hill was just to keep running – I set off after her.’ Later, at Belford Hospital, Pete’s head wound was glued and an x-ray revealed a fractured metacarpal on his four-fingered left hand. Because he broke the third metacarpal – a finger naturally splinted to the fourth – the doctors could do little else to secure it.
‘I think 101 sounds better, the first of the second hundred,’ Helen said, as we went our separate ways: David and I faithful to the way of the Ramsay; Andy and Helen to Corriechoille. Helen had seen what she needed. Not long after, she would forge her own glory, setting a new women’s record for Tranter’s Round.
The rest seemed to belong in a slow-moving dream: meeting a waiting Chris Busby in the pass beneath Aonach Beag, as he had once paused for Jez Bragg; forging up Spinks Ridge; sinking to the ground as the world seemed to sway on Aonach Mòr; taking a biscuit from Chris, a smear of hummus from David; climbing the kinking ringlet of ridge to Carn Mòr Dearg, reaching out for the cairn; advancing along the arête; crawling through the Ben’s waterfall of boulders. There was no stopping now. Alicia had found a similar fluidity. ‘I would love to be specific about how I managed to go from a semi-zombie state to making fairly good time,’ she said. ‘Sadly, I’ve got no idea. It certainly wasn’t more food, and I didn’t have any caffeine. I suppose the lesson is that sometimes even the boring approach of simply trying harder can work.’
The ground visibly flattened ahead. ‘You’re going to like this,’ Chris called back. A moment later the plateau was laid bare: that rubble-strewn wasteland and its ruined observatory, the triangulation pillar on its rock plinth. I could go no higher.
As Glyn Jones descended the Ben, the poetry died. He had returned from the realm of his soul. He was a ‘white-haired one’ again. I came down in convoy, initially with David and Chris, following the concertina of the tourist track, and from Red Burn, joined by Gordie, Karen and Javi. After arriving in midge-infested Fersit shortly before dawn, I imagined Javi would be crushed with disappointment. After all, I represented what he might have been. But that is not how he sees the world. ‘When we finally parted,’ Javi said, ‘I felt happy – happy because I love being on my own, especially in the wild; happy because of the incredible night we were lucky to have.’ Like Angela Mudge, Finlay Wild or Jasmin Paris, Javi’s joy comes from the fundamental pleasure of being among mountains. For him, Ramsay’s Round was merely a conduit to an emotional state.
In a gentle rain, I was guided down, along the gravel tracks that bypassed the steps, through packs of tourists. ‘Show offs,’ one walker sneered. It would take more than an hour to get down from the summit, but time was no longer a concern. At last, the track split: one way heading to the walkers’ car park at Achintee, the other swinging left to the hostel on a path that eventually levelled in the floor of the glen. The others had dropped back. I cleared the final boulder and stepped onto the wooden bridge over the River Nevis.
I remember hearing a rising cheer. I remember tasting champagne. I remember lurching backwards, as if my body could not comprehend the idea of ceasing motion. I remember running my hand over the black back of Sparky, Mark Hartree’s Labrador. I remember shaking my head. I remember thinking that I should feel something – anything, but there was only crushing relief: relief that compulsion had not given way to that devastatingly human trait of weakness. That was it. I did not know then that I would recall these moments forever.
A few hours later, I would be on the list, the 101st Ramsayist. In the days that followed, hundreds of people congratulated me, many of them strangers, many of them non-runners. I was assailed by questions. What did I eat? When did I sleep? Was it hard? What about – you know – going to the toilet? People had tracked my journey through the night. John Busby and I had not been alone on Beinn na Lap.
On the Friday morning of my first week as a Ramsayist, Andrew Ramage, a biology teacher and a hillwalker who had ‘compleated’ the Munros and Corbetts, addressed the school at morning assembly. He was talking about ‘achievement’. Andrew introduced the Munros, then Ramsay’s Round, and I knew where this was going. ‘Last Friday, at 5pm, one of your teachers set off on Ramsay’s Round. Please can we all give Mr Muir of the English Department a huge round of applause for completing Ramsay’s Round in 22 hours and eight minutes. Unbelievable.’
I was sitting on the end of a row, next to a teenager in my National 5 English class, a student who had listened to me talk about the poetry of Jackie Kay and the drama of Tennessee Williams for the previous nine months. I sensed her start when Andrew uttered my name. As she glanced to her right, I empathised with her contemplation: Him? That?
There was glory, but not in the having done. The adulation was tendered with a genuine warmth that I could only compare to my wedding day or the birth of my children, but, however well-intended, the praise did not seem worthy now it was all over. That person on those mountains on that day was not the person who now stood in front of a classroom of students, or that person who now read bedtime stories to his children. I was a ‘white-haired one’ too.
From the wall of the hostel, I had looked up at the Ben. The glory was up there, high up there, in the scree and the boulders, in the grass and the heather, in the darkness of Beinn na Lap, in the dawn of Stob Coire Sgriodain, in a blue Frustration barrel, in a hand on a back, in 22 hours and eight minutes of a life, in the mountains that touch the sky, in the mountains that had called, but had now, finally, fallen silent.