‘The nature of the challenge is very severe and there is a risk of serious injury or death,’ cautions the blurb of the Glen Coe Skyline. The warning continues: ‘Our route features long and sustained sections of scrambling terrain, which is roughly equivalent to moderate standard rock climbing. Be under no illusions that a slip or trip on these serious sections of the route could result in death.’
Shane Ohly, the race director, was told it could not be done: a contest that ascended the formidable Buachaille Etive Mòr by the fabled rock climb of Curved Ridge, and then passed over the serrated edge of the Aonach Eagach, was simply not viable.
‘Is this the most dangerous race in the world?’ the Daily Mirror asked. Why were runners being hurled into the domain of climbers and mountaineers, into the jaws of unnecessary peril?
But Shane Ohly is a symbol of perseverance. The extraordinary resilience of a 30-hour Ramsay’s Round bears testament to that. The Glen Coe Skyline has echoes of that run: a kind of beautiful madness. Moments after winning the inaugural race in 2015, Joe Symonds is bent over in the car park of Glencoe ski centre, hands on his knees, shaking his head. ‘I can’t believe we thought this was a sensible thing to do,’ he says. ‘The enemy was the course, not the other competitors.’
So the race was made harder still: the distance increased to 32 miles and the required ascent and descent to 4,800 metres – equivalent to climbing Mont Blanc – by moving the headquarters to sea level in Kinlochleven. Very soon, the race seemed established, as if it had always been part of the Scottish calendar. Also very soon, the Glen Coe Skyline became a race like no other in Scotland, attracting some of the world’s best mountain runners to the Highlands.
It is hard to resist such beautiful madness.
With seconds to go before the mass start, Shane shouted across the crowd: ‘Bib three, your tracker isn’t working.’ Bib three belonged to Jonathan Albon, a twenty-seven-year-old Norway-based Londoner and champion obstacle racer. It was just as well the race paused for him.
We followed the twisting, rising curls of the West Highland Way, spilling southwards, then down the sweeping bends of the Devil’s Staircase to reach Glen Coe. It would have seemed too easy – running along a benign trail, miles vanishing beneath our feet – had I not known what was ahead.
Geographical features on Buachaille Etive Mòr are not named with irony. We would pass beneath the entrance to Great Gully; further around the mountain was The Chasm. We were here for Curved Ridge, a perilously steep and exposed ladder of rock that ascends to the 1,022-metre summit of Stob Dearg. We climbed in single file silence, nothing mattering but the next handhold, the next foothold, the next ledge. There was a runner just in front. I glanced at the face of her watch. The digits were her heart rate: 175. We were not even running; we were clasping cliff, moving directly to the clouds. For a moment, I put my back to the wall and looked across Rannoch Moor. I laughed aloud, an incredulous laugh that rang out from the cliff.
However many times I find myself in the mountains of Scotland, it is still the scale that overwhelms. It did on that sweltering May afternoon when I looked east from the summit of Mullach nan Coirean, dwelling on incalculable numbers and deeds. These places are bewilderingly vast. As we emerged from mist, a line of racers was strung out ahead, scurrying across the rubbly plateau of Buachaille Etive Mòr, engulfed by unbounded mountain and sky. Nan Shepherd would not have approved: ‘To pit oneself against the mountain is necessary for every climber: to pit oneself merely against other players, and make a race of it, is to reduce to the level of a game what is essentially an experience.’ She understood all the same. ‘Yet what a race-track for these boys to choose!’ I had watched runners here twelve months earlier. Then I had been on neighbouring Buachaille Etive Beag, waiting for people like me to appear as distant stick men and women across a gaping glen. There had been one, then two, then dozens of tiny silhouetted figures. It was one of the most beautiful things I had seen. Now I was among them.
Sporting arenas are as renowned as the teams and sportsmen and women who inhabit them: St Andrews, Aintree, Wembley, Lord’s, Wimbledon. None could be more exceptional than Glen Coe. ‘Glen Coe is no great beauty,’ W.H. Murray wrote in his 1968 Companion Guide to Scotland, arguing it was incomparable to Glen Affric or Glen Lyon. ‘It is bare and bleak, adorned by neither tree nor heather,’ he continued, offering a ‘wild and ugly majesty. When you lift your eyes from the glen to the mountains towering above, you see an array of rock peaks, packed close, trenched by ravines, of its own kind unrivalled.’
We ran into that ‘unrivalled’ place: a jumble of crags, ribbons of scree and precipitous drops, over Stob Coire Sgreamhach, along a ridge high above the Lost Valley, immersed in a screen of cloud to Bidean nam Bian. From the summit, a lean finger reached east to Stob Coire an Lochan. We went out and came back, touching the top of Bidean nam Bian for a second time, then snuck along a rocky backbone, sank into a corrie and thereafter a gully of long grass and boulders, descending abruptly to the floor of the glen. I turned my head for a moment, looking back, astounded. Then I looked forward – and up, and up.
Hill running could then have seemed utterly nonsensical. From the road that dissects Glen Coe, the summit of Sgorr nam Fiannaidh is scarcely a mile away. But this is a prodigiously steep mile, a mile of literal crawling, a mile that climbs higher than any manmade structure on Earth, and at 59 minutes, a mile that might be the slowest I ever ‘run’. Yet the climb seemed incidental, for something even more exceptional lay ahead. Looking east from the summit, out there, somewhere, was the saw-edge of the Aonach Eagach, hiding in clag.
In truth, there is little to tax the runner on the Aonach Eagach – a largely horizontal ridge that is classed as a scramble, not a climb. But the exposure . . .
The words of the race blurb seemed to murmur in the breeze: ‘one slip’ from oblivion. I could not see what was below, but I knew: wickedly-angled faces of grass and cliffs. There is reputed to be no safe line of descent to the south, even if descent was made willingly. There is no escape. Grant Macdonald, a competitor in the first Skyline race, was not being sarcastic when he summed up the significance of reaching the end of the Aonach Eagach: ‘This marks the point when you know you aren’t going home in a helicopter.’
As I progressed along the ridge, desperately clinging to wet rock, dangling cramping legs, and hoping, Jonathan Albon was back in Kinlochleven, winning the Glen Coe Skyline. It would be three hours before I reached where he was just then. Albon’s exploits belonged in this otherworldly place; his run, a little over six-and-a-half hours, resembled something fantastical.
There was a sublime horror to it all. David Brown’s words seemed fitting: ‘Best-thing-worst-thing I’ve ever done.’
The innovative brilliance of a race that includes Curved Ridge, Bidean nam Bian and the Aonach Eagach cannot be underestimated. Shane Ohly had lauded the creator’s imagination as he sought to make history on Ramsay’s Round, but here was the outcome of Shane’s imagination: an ability to bring to reality the incredible. ‘When asked what I thought of the race, I could only be honest and say it was the best course I had ever experienced,’ Albon said. ‘It truly was a fantastic combination of everything a mountain race should be and trumped every race I have done to date.’
Not everyone agrees, for if this is the trajectory of the sport, some say it is a future at odds with the longstanding tradition of hill running and racing in Scotland. The branding and corporate sponsorship is garish, opponents argue, transforming runners into expectant customers. The consequences of such an event are dire, they fear: small, club-organised and less well-off races will die out. Notably, the Two Inns, a point-to-point contest that ended at the Clachaig Inn, quietly vanished as the Glen Coe Skyline emerged. There is also a question of respect. The Skyline’s sister event, the Ring of Steall Skyrace, has clashed with a British and Scottish championship race at Merrick.
Gordon Pryde, the convener of Scottish Hill Runners from 2012 to 2016, began hill racing in the 1980s. He has stood on the start line of races held for the first time; he has stood on the start line of races that no longer exist. He fears the emergence of the Glen Coe Skyline, and its associate races, could be a watershed moment, the thin end of the wedge. ‘It has the potential to damage the sport,’ he says, ‘but I hope that’s not the case.’
So what? So what if hill racing in Scotland as we know it dies out? So what if existing races are replaced by events like the Glen Coe Skyline? Gordon looks worried. I am playing devil’s advocate, I assure him, and he continues, almost sadly: ‘There is something so simple about this sport.’
‘Simple.’ How many times had I heard that word? What does it actually mean? Certainly not the word’s mere dictionary definition. Being ‘simple’ is paradoxically a complex matter. ‘Simple’ – when it comes to hill racing – looks something like this: you can enter on the day and – crucially – cheaply; the course will not be marked; the race briefing will be brief; there will be no sponsorship and no branding; you must carry a physical map and compass; at the end, you will be fed and watered – probably with soup, cake and tea – but there will be no memento or ‘goody bag’; you will chat to the race winner without realising they were the race winner; as for the results, you might never see them.
It is a list that makes even simplicity seem contrived. This is how the sport has always been in Scotland. Even the youngest McGregor was able to enter on the day. Why should it change?
The ex-convener is not a lone voice. His fears are shared by several of the committee members of Scottish Hill Runners, notably the most prominent of them all.
Angela Mudge utters the words like a confession: ‘I am a traditionalist.’ There is a derogatory undertone to the term, as if a ‘traditionalist’ is blindly tethered to the past, unable to evolve and adapt. ‘I like the way we used to decide on a Friday, I’ll do that race tomorrow, turn up, pay £5, and run,’ she explains. ‘That’s what we love. That’s the bottom line. We love the simplicity of it.’
The entire route of the Salomon-sponsored Glen Coe Skyline is marked by orange flags with such regularity it should really be impossible to get lost, while the particularly technical sections on the Aonach Eagach are flagged with lines of tape running around and across bands of rock. Even in the thickest cloak on Bidean nam Bian, I had no cause to look at a map. I had challenged some of the leading British runners – Jasmin Paris, Jon Ascroft, Jim Mann – on the course marking. The consensus was it was ‘fine because it’s different’: this is ‘skyrunning’, not hill running. The former emerged in Italy in the early 1990s as a hybrid of mountaineering and running, featuring various prerequisites: an altitude of more than 2,000 metres, a climbing difficulty up to Grade Two, and slopes of at least 30 per cent. Altitude aside, Scotland just about qualifies, even if the motto of the International Skyrunning Federation, ‘less cloud, more sky,’ was clearly not inspired by a Highland summer. Cynics would say the difference between the sports is marginal, that skyrunning is a sexed-up, glossy version of hill running, the made-up sister to a dowdy sibling, and that skyrunning is a brand as much as a standalone sport.
‘Different is good,’ Angela says, ‘but does this difference now mean there’s going to be a lot more difference? On its own, it’s fine. But it won’t stay on its own.’
They were prophetic words. Early in 2016, it was announced that two other linked events would be held on the same weekend as the Glen Coe Skyline: a vertical kilometre race – the first to be staged in the UK – to Na Gruagaichean on Friday, and the Ring of Steall Skyrace on Saturday, ahead of the original Skyline on Sunday. When entries opened, 100 people registered for the Skyline in the first seven minutes; the number peaked at 349, each prepared to pay £80, when entries closed. The 2017 ‘Skyline Scotland’ weekend of events then included a fourth race – the Ben Nevis Ultra, costing £150. Ultra Trail Scotland emerged in the same year, offering a programme of three races on Arran that mirrored the format: a ‘gruelling’ 47-mile headline ultramarathon featuring 5,600 metres of ascent; a shorter, more accessible secondary race; and The Goat, a ‘quick dash’ to the summit of Goatfell. Entry for The Goat was £25, double the price of the traditional Goatfell race already established in the hill running calendar. If the format succeeded, Casey Morgan, the owner of the Ultra Trail Scotland brand, hoped to ‘possibly grow to other islands’.
Traditional races organised by clubs cannot hope to compete, Angela argues. ‘Stùc a’ Chroin is never going to get media attention because no-one is being paid to stick it on Twitter and Facebook. Big companies aren’t going to be behind little hill races, but they will get behind these big corporate events.’
Gordon Pryde tells me he has spent the previous days tangled in the ‘bureaucracy’ of ensuring a race scheduled to take place in Falkland goes ahead. ‘It’s a village race; the winner will be done in 20 minutes,’ he says. Organisation should be straightforward, but Scottish Hill Runners were having to negotiate a fee with the estate the course passes through.
Landowners are beginning to realise there is money to be made in the hosting of such events, Gordon explains. ‘Perhaps there is a feeling that because someone can make a buck out it, they feel entitled to do so.’ Can small races compete in such a market? In the long term, probably not, but surely there is hope?
This is not the end of the hill running world. Salomon might be the name on the branding of the Glen Coe Skyline, but Shane Ohly, a man schooled in the motifs of hill running simplicity and tradition – mountain marathons, classic races, 24-hour rounds – is the catalyst of the change. Shane and Jim Mann would spend 21 hours in the Cairngorms, running a Rigby Round in rain and 80mph gusts, soon after we spoke. Hill running does not get much more classic or traditional than that.
‘I love doing that £3 fell race on a Wednesday night; they are brilliant, low-key, community-supported events,’ Shane tells me. ‘There is also a place in the sports calendar for highly-credible, rich experience events. That is where the Glen Coe Skyline sits.’
I paint a picture of the future – a network of branded races across north-west Scotland: the An Teallach Skyline, the Cuillin Skyline, the Torridon Skyline. Shane admits to having similar thoughts. They would make outstanding races, as ‘special and unique’ as Glen Coe, he says, but attempting to turn any of the three, or something similar, into a workable race would be fraught with complexity. Not only would there be inevitable opposition to racing in sacrosanct mountains like the Cuillin, the events would need to turn a profit – that is the bottom line. If Skyline Scotland is ‘hardly commercially viable’ and creates ‘eye-watering costs’, as Shane admits, it suggests that the prospect of replicating the Skyline model elsewhere in the Highlands and islands would be unachievable. Shane is pragmatic too. While a race that included the Cuillin traverse would be the ‘ultimate challenge of ridge running’ in Britain, he knows such an event would have to be closed to all but the elite. ‘How many people could do it safely? It would be a tiny group – less than 100,’ he says.
High profile, high price races also need a high level of logistics. When Skyline Scotland was let down by a company providing crowd control barriers, from where in the Highlands could such things be sourced at late notice? The prospect seemed unlikely, before another supplier was tracked down at a cost of £800.
Kinlochleven – with its relative proximity to Fort William – is positively metropolitan compared to Sligachan or Torridon. Could Shane ‘deliver excellence’ to customers who expect a significant return for their financial outlay? Can he even guarantee a reliable internet connection? Possibly, but possibly is not adequate – and that alone is probably enough to insulate Scotland from rampant commercialism. An army of midges can be stood down for now.
Shane argues that any negativity towards Skyline Scotland deflects attention from the pressing matter of raising participation in hill running, particularly among young runners. ‘Look at the Glen Coe Skyline,’ he says. ‘How many people are there in their twenties? Very, very few. Young people need a pathway to get into racing, something exciting and challenging. Your average £3 race, where your car gets stuck in a field and there are midges everywhere, does not appeal as it does to the hardened hill runner. Young people need something aspirational.’
Sasha Chepelin is the face of the future: ambitious, talented and intelligent. The twenty-year-old will win a hill race – Clachnaben, by a staggering 12 minutes – in the days after we meet, but Sasha’s real excellence is in the discipline of orienteering. A third-year mechanical engineer at the University of Edinburgh, Sasha – wearing a British Talent Squad polo shirt – is part of a golden generation of Scotland-based orienteers, a group of athletes who were also taking hill runners on at their own game, and beating them. Orienteers had won four of the previous five Scottish championship races: Alasdair McLeod at Creag Dhubh, Rhys Findlay-Robinson at Merrick, Kris Jones at the Pentland Skyline, and Graham Gristwood at Criffel. Finlay Wild would break the streak at Stùc a’ Chroin, only for Murray Strain, the coordinator of the Scottish senior orienteering team, to overcome Finlay in the next championship race at Goatfell.
Sasha shares a university home in Edinburgh with Jacob Adkin, a two-time Scottish junior hill running champion. When they run uphill in training, Jacob is ‘out of sight’, but Sasha finds himself waiting for his housemate at the bottom, ‘especially if it’s a technical descent’.
Jacob, another third-year engineer, laughs when I repeat Sasha’s words. ‘He’s about right. Orienteers are used to bashing over hardcore terrain. They are just fine going through a big load of bracken.’
The secret is little more than practice. The orienteer is schooled in the punishing terrain of the forest floor, evidenced by the grazes and scratches on Sasha’s arms. Orienteers must think swiftly and operate flexibly, utilising a high knee lift to clear debris, continually adapting stride length. The best orienteers have, therefore, phenomenal cardiac strength. Compare that to the hill runner who in training will typically run on paths and trails, deskilling themselves for the rigours of crude, direct and pathless descents that often feature in races.
Murray Strain does not mince his words. Orienteers are simply working harder than hill runners, he insists. Orienteering, Murray explains, is a global sport: essentially, it is the same in every country, every continent. Hill running is not. Nowhere is quite like the Highlands. In Europe, they call what we know to be hill running ‘mountain running’, but they are utterly different sports. As fell running lives within the parochial borders of northern England, so hill running exists within the national boundary of Scotland; orienteers, meanwhile, look to the world. ‘At training camps, orienteers are told how to train, how to recover, how to be fit and fast,’ Murray adds. ‘Orienteers take their sport that bit more seriously.’
I think of Finlay Wild and Jasmin Paris, the male and female emblems of hill running in Scotland, two uncoached athletes who admit there is ‘no plan’. I find it hard to disagree with Murray.
And what of the future of a sport that is dominated – certainly in racing terms – by over-40s?
‘Every year there seems to be a new strategy to get kids involved in orienteering,’ Sasha says. Schools like the cognitive element of orienteering, with the sport promoting a sense of independence and encouraging decision-making. ‘My old school in Banchory has a huge group and they send teams to the World Schools,’ he continues. ‘I’m not saying orienteering is perfect. Some would say it’s not doing enough, but when you compare the two, orienteering has the advantage in terms of what’s being done to recruit in primary and secondary schools. It’s becoming more and more common.’
What are Scottish Hill Runners doing in schools? ‘That’s not the sort of thing we talk about at meetings,’ Angela Mudge concedes. Hill running would, admittedly, be a harder sell. Should the organisation be encouraging schoolchildren – or anyone for that matter? The brief of Scottish Hill Runners is not to ‘actively promote’ the sport. That responsibility falls on Scottish Athletics, the governing body. While Scottish Athletics supports ‘competitive opportunities’ for school-age athletes through junior hill running championships, participation rates are unimpressive. In the first event of 2017, held in conjunction with Cioch Mhòr, there were eight finishers, with just one of those a girl. There was a greater turnout at the individual championships at the more conveniently-located Lomonds of Fife, where 62 runners raced in eight age categories, albeit with race numbers dwindling in the older years.
Perhaps the numbers confirm hill running has no place in schools’ games programmes and will forever be marginalised in favour of easier-to-manage athletics and cross-country. But while I would pity the person writing the risk assessment form to take a group of fourteen-year-olds for a run in the mountains, it can be done.
A ‘Mini Stùc’ race was held the day before Stùc a’ Chroin, featuring 51 children from a cluster of schools in the Strathyre area. Off they went, along a forestry track, up a hill, and back down. Eve Hatton, a Primary 7 pupil at Strathyre Primary, might not have appreciated her extended metaphor: ‘I set off and it was very steep at first, but it got better. It was harder than I thought. When I crossed the finishing line I was relieved and proud of myself.’
Libby Brydie in Primary 6, meanwhile, already sounds like a hill runner: ‘After the race we got sandwiches.’
Where hill running goes from here – like a lot of things in the twenty-first century – ultimately depends on its image, something that might just keep Eve and Libby going to the mountains.
‘The viewpoint that hill running is a bit crazy has always been there,’ Sasha explains. ‘You don’t get a parkrun going up a hill; if you get a parkrun with 50 metres of climb it’s seen as being “hilly”. If there was an equivalent, like racing up and down Arthur’s Seat every Saturday morning, maybe it would be different? When I say I run, some people are like, “that’s cool, I go running too,” but their definition of running is half an hour once a week. Other people ask, “why would you do that? Why not go to the gym and run on a treadmill?”’ At least the treadmill runners have some comprehension. ‘There’s a large group of people who wouldn’t consider running, let alone running on hills,’ Sasha says.
Jacob agrees. Even he was put off the sport when, in a ‘baptism of fire’, he ran the Scald Law junior race attached to the Carnethy 5 in deep snow as a twelve-year-old. He did not race in the hills again until he was fourteen. ‘People think hill running is a bit weird. Outside the running community, people ask, “why do you do it?” They are shocked you might spend your time running up a hill for pleasure.’
As editor of Athletics Weekly, Jason Henderson has an overview of an entire, incomparably varied sport. ‘Track athletics has glamour and appeal,’ he says. ‘Some events are just more popular than others, but hill running isn’t some tiny sport at the bottom of the pecking order.’ Hill and mountain runners have occasionally featured on Athletics Weekly’s coveted front page: Kilian Jornet, unsurprisingly; Jessica Augusto; Lizzy Hawker. ‘I reckon we probably had some well-known fell and hill runners from the 1970s and 80s on our covers during that period,’ Jason adds. He likens the sport to cross-country, a pursuit that is also ‘basic’ and ‘pure’, but they have together been overtaken by more fashionable and marketable pursuits. Perhaps this makes hill running and cross-country stronger? These are sports built on deep, firm foundations that do not need continual reinforcement.
Even then, no sport can stand still. Running is now a marketplace, subject to fads and driven by trends, and the sport is booming. The UK’s running population is apparently more than 10 million. Even in Scotland, a country overwhelmed by an obesity epidemic – 67 per cent of the population are overweight, according to a UK Government report – and where children are derided as sedentary social media addicts, adult participation rates are up.
The amateur sport seems to be developing along two lines – the first, accessibility; the second, extremity. The parkrun movement is largely responsible for the former, with some 500 events in the UK, giving people who might never have run a stepping stone into the sport. While some are stepping, others are taking giant leaps. Ultrarunning – be it on road, track or trail – began as a secretive, niche discipline of, according to Jason, ‘anoraks plodding around by themselves’. Not now. The anoraks at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc cost hundreds of pounds; the event is ‘trendy and cool’, the Formula 1 of trail running. Like the Glen Coe Skyline, it is a race unafraid to look in the mirror and pout: ‘You are the fairest of them all.’ The images that accompany the action are spectacular: runners moving across narrow ridges, framed on a background of serrated mountains or – in the case of the Skyline – the wildscape of Rannoch Moor. The photographs and videos, with drone footage heightening the spectacle, are better than the real thing, for when you race along a hairline ridge, you do not pause to look behind. The rhetoric too is crafted to enthral. Shane Ohly has described the Skyline as ‘the pinnacle mountain running event in the world’; the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc is characterised as ‘mythical’. The words carry a swagger that does not exist in traditional hill racing, a sport that defers to gritty pragmatism. ‘Direct descent to lochans impossible due to sheer precipice on north side of Beinn Shiantaidh,’ reads one of the typically robust instructions to competitors in the Isle of Jura fell race.
In Britain, ultra races have become harder and longer; interest in events like the Dragon’s Back or the Spine Race along the Pennine Way is unprecedented. ‘Is 100 miles the new marathon?’ Runner’s World asked in 2015. As the appetite for more extreme undertakings grows, what will be the ‘new’ 100 miles? What is next?
Even though an astonishing 380,000 people entered the ballot to run the 2018 London Marathon, ‘running around a city centre is probably something runners want to do a little less,’ says Jason Henderson. ‘The pioneers of marathon running in the 1970s couldn’t have imagined the London Marathon would come along, then be the huge spectacle it is today.’
It is a view shared by Kilian Jornet. ‘More people are living in cities and I think they have a greater need to get out into natural surroundings,’ he said in an interview with Athletics Weekly.
Could hill running be next? Does the sport hold the untapped potential that marathon running possessed 40 years ago? Does the sport linger at the same junction that faced triathlon and ultrarunning in the early years of the century?
Scottish Hill Runners will not seek to market the sport. That they are happy with the status quo is clear. Nor will the Fell Runners Association. When the organisation asked its members whether its ‘passive stance in publicising fell running’ should be maintained, the clear majority of more than 2,000 people responded overwhelmingly – only 16 per cent believed the association should ‘be more proactive’. There is logic in that. Surely it would be irresponsible to encourage those to the hills who may be ill-equipped and unprepared for the rigours of high, unpredictable British mountains? But it is a view that is merely the tip of a very complex iceberg.
‘Where does the sport go from here?’ I posed the question on the Fell Runners UK Facebook group, a fast-expanding crowd with numbers of members in five figures. Two themes quickly emerged: hill runners care passionately about the future of their sport; as a result, they will fight to preserve what they perceive to be its culture and tradition. That should not come as a surprise. Running up and down hills is not a pursuit you can afford to be lukewarm about. An only half-joking response from David Johnson epitomised the hands-off-our-sport-at-all-costs sentiment that characterised many of the comments. ‘New FRA rule: To be classified as a fell race an event must not provide a T-shirt or medal or goody bag for just finishing or entering. Only pies, cakes, chocolate and alcohol should be provided at the organiser’s discretion.’
What else does the future hold? Access to land will become an increasing problem; National Parks will begin to impose tighter restrictions on land use – the Lake District notably became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017; race organisers will need to be determined to cut through the red tape faced by Gordon Pryde and many others; inexperienced runners attracted to the idea of hill running will put themselves at risk; the cost of racing will go up. There are some who even envisage hill running becoming an underground sport, with secret races occurring at night. ‘The best raves were low-key, word of mouth and illegal,’ wrote Gavin Stewart. ‘Fell running can follow suit.’
I will stop there, for this is thoroughly depressing.
Of this there is no doubt: hill running will become more popular; there will be more races in the style of Skyline Scotland and Ultra Trail Scotland; there will be more races billed as ‘ultra’ or ‘tough’ or ‘trail’ that feature elements of running on hills; outdoor companies will increasingly see the sport as a lucrative market; the brilliance of the mountains will have to be shared.
Can hill running ever ‘boom’? Can the sport be the ‘new’ 100 miles? The ‘simple’ version of hill running could not, for it surely lacks the necessary infrastructure or accessibility. What about trail and ultrarunning that crosses over into hill running? Possibly. The consequences of that growth are what threatens the sport – or at least what is perceived as threatening.
Hill running has been here before. While it is easy to see commercialisation as a vulgar, modern trait, cynics would argue otherwise: fell running was turned into a commercial enterprise as early as the late nineteenth century by guides racers competing for money, while the treeless landscape of the Lake District is a product – to use the words of the environmental activist George Monbiot – of the ‘great damage farming has inflicted’.
Nor are we powerless in this. People inspire people, and whatever the brave new world of hill running is, it can be led by us: the runners.
It is already happening. Let us call it the Donnie Campbell effect.
What riled people about that ‘winter’ Ramsay was Donnie’s apparent self-promotion, initially on Facebook and Twitter, and then on the news channels that picked up the story. Traditionalists were appalled by the glorification. Stuff tradition, Donnie seemed to say. Let’s not keep these things quiet. Let’s shout about them. Let’s celebrate them. To some, it is an attitude that tarnishes the sport in the same way as the symbolic orange flags of the Glen Coe Skyline on the Aonach Eagach. But Donnie did no harm. To borrow a sentiment written about Skye, his place of birth, Donnie merely brought ‘to the notice of the world the glories of these grand mountains’.
Donnie was also at work, representing Salomon, and is one of an increasing number of hill and fell runners sponsored or supported by companies seeking to raid the purses of hill runners. Being a capable athlete is a pre-requisite, but so is the desire to sell. What use is a runner living in a social media black hole? He or she needs to share a photograph of their sponsor-branded socks received in the morning post. There is no shortage of volunteers: runners are willingly being turned into marketers. Take Ben Mounsey, a Yorkshire schoolteacher and fell running champion who flies the flag for Inov-8, Mountain Fuel and Suunto. ‘Social media platforms have allowed information, photos, results and videos to be shared more freely, and people are beginning to take a bigger interest in the sport,’ he says. That is partly down to him. With Ben’s followers across three social media platforms numbering several thousands, he is a potentially powerful influence. His words and actions matter.
‘Hill running has maintained its traditional values and stayed true to its roots,’ Ben says. ‘It still remains a very specialist activity, popular only with hardened athletes in the northern parts of Britain. It appeals to those who love it for what it is – a tough, simple and honest sport. The reasons to compete are purely intrinsic.’
Those who already go to the hills will nod furiously in agreement at such statements, but can someone promote ‘traditional values’ when they are effectively in the pay of corporate enterprises? I would not know; I have never been a sponsored athlete. What I do know is that if I was as accomplished in the mountains as Ben Mounsey, there is no way I could fund myself: the race entries, the shoes, the kit, the travel. Even ‘the greatest’, Angela Mudge, received sponsorship from Salomon. How else does a top-class runner in an amateur sport do just that – be a top-class runner in an amateur sport? In that context, who can begrudge Ben Mounsey the occasional free pair of shoes from Inov-8? Guides racers expected payment; Ben would probably do it all for nothing.
In their tweets and updates, Donnie and Ben do not need to preach to the converted. As salesmen for their brands and sport, their message is distilled to a wider audience – to those people who might one day be hill runners, those people who have at times been characterised as ill-prepared, disrespecting incomers. These intruders will pour uncontrollably into the mountains, spook the sheep, kick down stone walls, discard gel sachets in bogs, get lost and hypothermic.
We all start somewhere. We cannot all grow up on a sheep farm in a remote Lakeland valley. Where should incomers start? Perhaps that is the role of ‘trail’ events and the more accessible races of the Skyline Scotland and Ultra Trail Scotland packages: to offer a springboard to pure hill and fell running, a kind of parkrun-on-steroids. Some of those considering the Ultra Trail Scotland races have come from an obstacle racing background, Casey Morgan tells me. ‘Our races are a safe middle ground between things like Tough Mudder and traditional hill racing, albeit in a very real and challenging environment.’ The runners will soon work out if they belong, for competing in the Ring of Steall Skyrace on a marked course with dozens of others is utterly different from running it alone in clag.
I was a southern intruder. I did not put my spare clothes in a waterproof bag; I blindly relied on others for navigation; I got very cold indeed.
I did all right in the end.
The Bob Graham was thrust into public consciousness as never before, when, within the space of three weeks, Jasmin Paris broke the women’s record, and Nicky Spinks became only the second person to run a continuous double round within 48 hours. People suddenly began to get excited about a niche aspect of hill running that is the equivalent of cricket’s five-day test match. Nonetheless, with a door left ajar, the masses peeped in.
I was once running with my brother-in-law and two of his university friends on the paths of Delamere Forest when one of them told me he ‘fancied doing the Bob Graham’. To his face, I encouraged. Secretly, I was incredulous. Deano might have watched Salomon Running TV’s episode featuring the Bob Graham, starring firefighter-cum-fell runner Ricky Lightfoot that morning. Lightfoot runs across wind-blasted fells, falls in bogs and completes the round in archetypal January weather. It is inspiring, stirring stuff. Or Deano might have seen Run Forever, the Inov-8 film of Spinks’ extraordinary back-to-back rounds. There is no dialogue for the first 60 seconds, just footage of Spinks trudging up a fell. Then she speaks: ‘I’m probably going to push my body to a stage where it just goes enough is enough, and I sit down on the floor. I just want to know what I can do.’
Minutes later, as we climb out of the trees, I could tell Deano – red-faced, breathing hard, taking baby steps – is at his limit, even though the incline is moderate. I try to imagine him on Yewbarrow. Deano will probably never stand at the Moot Hall in the early hours, before hopefully scampering down a Keswick ginnel, torch light showing the way to Skiddaw. That is not the point; sometimes it is enough to dream. Good for Deano. To use Shane Ohly’s word, here was ‘aspiration’ – aspiration inspired by hills and mountains, and by the terribly simple act of running among them.
‘I like her because she seems normal,’ Fi said after hearing about Jasmin Paris’ 15-hour Bob Graham. And that was the point. If a vet from Edinburgh can run faster than any man on Ramsay’s Round, and if a farmer who survived breast cancer can run non-stop over 84 fells for 45 hours, surely I can do something, goes the thinking. More and more people, from Deano to Nicky Spinks, want to work out what they ‘can do’, and there are few better places than mountains to find out what exactly that is.
Should that not be the role of our sport. To inspire? To give people a reason to aspire?
Thank goodness then for a personal trainer, a teacher, a sheep farmer, a vet and a firefighter, telling it like it is. Here is a sport like no other: thrilling, bold, life-affirming, and – dare I say it – ‘simple’. These people, these real and in many respects thoroughly normal heroes, inspire ordinary people to do astonishing things, and those examples are infinitely more powerful than a selfie with a shiny medal.
I think our sport is in safe hands.
Ultimately, the future belongs to the young – people like Jacob Adkin. The twenty-one-year-old has raced in Europe, marvelling at mountains four times the height of Munros, buoyed by the roaring enthusiasm of spectators lining the trails. He has trained with the Salomon Running Academy in the Bavarian Alps. He has written – in language young people can understand – about his joy in meeting Kilian Jornet and Emilie Forsberg in the French Pyrenees: ‘OMG! Gobsmacked. We were completely speechless! They had seemed to exist only on videos and in pictures through social media, and yet here they were, in the flesh!’
Does Jacob want to move to the Alps, to attempt to ‘make it’ like Robbie Simpson? Quite simply, no. He wants to live and work and run in Scotland. Running in the Alps or Pyrenees is ‘amazing’, he says, but so too is running in the Pentlands or the Highlands – in a ‘quieter, different way’. And that is the way it should be. Scotland has no need for imitation: hill running is already something special and unique.
After speaking to Jacob, I watched a series of short films posted on his blog. One features himself and Sasha as they ventured across Devil’s Ridge to Sgùrr a’ Mhaim. The soundtrack is appropriately called Uplifting. This sport does not look ‘weird’; all I see is beautiful madness.
Richard Askwith’s seminal book on fell running, Feet in the Clouds, was an attempt to explain the sport to outsiders. It became a classic, inspiring a generation of hill runners and would-be Bob Graham contenders. Capturing a sport that is defined by character and fortitude, not races and records, it ends nonetheless on a pessimistic note. In a book that was published in 2004, the author predicted the near-demise of fell running, envisaging a ‘far more marginal’ sport, and that it would be ‘hard to imagine very many young people being capable of running in the mountains in twenty years’ time’.
Twenty years are not yet up, but Richard does not need to wait until 2024 to reassess his view. ‘I was completely wrong, wasn’t I? It hasn’t worked out like that at all.’ Richard can be forgiven for not predicting the future. We are speaking on the day after the 2017 general election, after all.
‘I wrote that partly because that’s what was being said: it’s dying out.’ Young people at the turn of the century seemed to be more interested in the emerging, trendier sports of triathlon and adventure racing, he says. Similarly, Richard could not have predicted the impact of technology – from what runners wear on their feet and wrists, to the gadgets that have made hill-going far more accessible – or that there would be an influx of people to the sport able to afford such luxuries. Richard was writing in the era of map and compass, when hill running was primarily about ‘getting to know mountains’.
‘For the people winning a lot of hill and ultra races now, it’s really about being a great athlete, rather than being a mountain person.’ He tells me about Marcus Scotney, the winner of the 2017 Dragon’s Back, who Richard had met a few weeks earlier at the Buxton Mountain Festival. ‘Marcus says he goes around with a blue arrow on his wrist and just follows it. The whole idea of, where am I, am I going to get lost? has gone out of the window. It’s a question of whose legs and lungs are the strongest. It’s still awe-inspiring, but in a different way.’
Does he think the sport has lost its moral compass? ‘Not necessarily, but it’s changed,’ Richard says. ‘The thing that impressed me back then was how these guys were just so hard, so tough, really just human beings against the mountains and the elements, and I couldn’t understand how people could be that tough because I certainly wasn’t.’
He asked me what I thought. I thought of Sasha Chepelin running efforts on Arthur’s Seat, 30 seconds hard, 30 seconds easy – for an hour. I thought of Steph Provan stepping out of her front door after putting her children to bed. I thought of Colin Donnelly moving up Craig Varr, his nose to the floor. I thought of Alan Smith jumping off a cliff.
‘I think they are still hard,’ I say.
Hill running will always be defined by hard men and women. How could it not? Technology and social media cannot make running up a hill easier.
In a world of change, the greatest obstacle will always be geography, but let’s not overcomplicate ‘simple’ things. Find a hill, do your best to run up, stay high for as long as you can, run down, call yourself a hill runner, and one day, like the monarch of the glen, you might know what it is to fly.
‘Why do you run?’ I ask Jacob. That question again.
‘It’s a cliché,’ he says. ‘It’s a massive sense of freedom. Running up a hill, getting to the top, running along a ridge, seeing what you have accomplished. I have gone to places I would never have been.’
This is no cliché. Hill running is a metaphor for human existence. Even an eleven-year-old girl from Strathyre gets that. Dress it up as you will – call it the Glen Coe Skyline, or the Pentland Skyline, or that £3-to-enter race on a weekday evening, or maybe just you, on your own, in the mountains – the sensation, the thrill of being high, is perpetual. That can never, ever change. There is something of Dennisbell McGregor of Ballochbuie in us all – that insatiable desire to touch the sky. There always will be. The future will unravel in ways we could not have foreseen, but there can never be a day when we no longer answer the call of the mountains.