Words: Damian Hall
Photos: Summit Fever Media (www.summitfevermedia.com)
Yes, I cried on my first Spine Race. I wasn’t the only one. Eight grown men cried at Hawes, the second checkpoint, 106 miles and two days into the race... Emotion and shellshock spilling out everywhere.
The Spine Race calls itself “Britain’s most brutal race” for good reason. It’s a continuous foot race along the 268-mile Pennine Way, England’s oldest and toughest National Trail, in January. It’s a right hoot. You know, if you don’t die or anything.
Hypothermia, trench foot and broken bones are common DNF causes. Hallucinations, tears (guilty) and levels of sleep deprivation so extreme you might run into the rear end of a cow (as one experienced runner did in 2015) are all but guaranteed. As 2015 women’s winner Beth Pascall says in the stirring Montane Spine Race Film, “It was awful… but it was amazing”. Here’s what two Spine Races have taught me…
People are amazing
It goes without saying that many of the competitors are inspirational. Especially Czech two-time winner Pavel Paloncý, who tends not to bother with minor inconveniences such as sleeping (for at least the first two nights), wearing waterproof trousers or more than one glove (he lost one early in the 2015 race - unless it was a Luke Skywalker homage? He sometimes carries a towel on his pack as a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference).
Beth, too, looks ludicrously fresh, like she’s just finished a two-hour Sunday afternoon bimble on a canal path, when interviewed at the race end in the film – while us men cower in the background barely able to prevent our bottom lips from quivering uncontrollably.
Ben Taylor, the youngest Spine finisher at just 21 years old, is another inspiration. In fact, everyone who gets to Kirk Yetholm’s Border Hotel is a ruddy hero.
Some people are even more amazing
If the screwloose Spiners are amazing, the madcap staff and volunteers are doubly so. They give up their week to clean our rotting feet, fetch endless teas at 4am and (Nici Griffin apart) show Herculean levels of restrain in not saying, “Stop your selfpitying whinging and get the eff back out there you pathetic whip,” and mostly without pay. I couldn’t have completed the race without them.
But it’s also people who have nothing to do with the race who surprise. Acts of kindness from strangers are random and very gratefully received, especially from a lady who approached Tim Laney and I in the snow one morning north of Hadrian’s Wall, offering us sausage sandwiches, tea and a place on a sofa – and refusing our money. I think I offered to marry her. Andrew Burton’s mobile tuck shop has become someone of a Spine legend too. You’ll never be so happy to see a bearded man in the middle of snowy nowhere at 3am.
Hallucinations are funny (sometimes)
As it’s a continuous race, the clock is always ticking and the temptation to skip sleep and continue ever onwards is big. Towards the end of my first Spine Race, I dodged a night’s rest and in the big lonely Cheviots I saw two large – almost small hot air balloon-size – red Chinese lanterns being lit and slowly set off nearby. I felt so very grateful that people had come to the middle of nowhere at 5am to guide me into the finish at Kirk Yetholm. I had been a little bit topographically befuddled, so this was such a welcome help, especially in my fatigued state. So I shouted my thanks at them and followed the lanterns for a while. But then it got light. And I realised there weren’t any Chinese lanterns. They had been in my warped and deranged mind only. And I was now lost.
For the rest of that last long – oh, so long – day, rocks continually turned into people. It was never sinister, always amusingly mysterious, like my mind was playing pranks on, er, my mind. Though I did leg it uphill for about 50 metres at one point when I thought I was being caught. Which was annoying. Because it hurt. And I felt annoyed. Because I realised I could actually still run.
I’ve grown so paranoid with sleep deprivation that I’ve accused a friend of – wait for the irony – trying to leave a checkpoint without me. Even though we had no agreement to leave together. And he was merely nipping to the toilet.
Boys do cry
Robert Smith was wrong. Ultramarathons and in particular the Spine Race turn tough-as-nails folk – or at least people who think they’re tough as nails – into juddering, sobbing, teddy-cuddling wrecks. So let’s get this one over with. Yes, I cried on my first Spine Race. I wasn’t the only one. Eight grown men cried at Hawes, the second checkpoint, 106 miles and two days into the race. It was like a first-world refugee centre, with emotion and shellshock spilling out everywhere. I didn’t cry then, though I wasn’t far off, but I cried in the Cheviots, at the end, and not because of those phantom lanterns.
Having plummeted to a state of emotional rawness I haven’t been to before or since, I was desperately missing my two-year-old daughter, feeling guilty about being away for so long and fearing she wouldn’t even recognise me when I got home (I had lost some weight). I’d hastily told myself I’d be finished that day and get back to see her. By the afternoon I realised that was a foolish think to have thunk and I felt very sad about it. So I cried a bit. And I don’t care that you know it. (I do a bit.)
Worst side
The Spine Race is a place of extremes. I’ve had some of the very best moments on my life on it. But also some of my lowest. The race brings out the best in people. And the worst. Or at least it does me. I’ve three times agreed to leave a checkpoint with someone, then left on my own – sometimes with their best wishes, sometimes, impatiently, not (sorry Javed!). I’ve grown so paranoid with sleep deprivation that I’ve accused a friend of – wait for the irony – trying to leave a checkpoint without me. Even though we had no agreement to leave together. And he was merely nipping to the toilet. Worse still, I’ve also accused a local, who kindly stopped to give me directions, of trying to sabotage my race. I’d became convinced he was someone else’s support crew trying to send me the wrong way. All things I’m ashamed of. But those are the unusual states of minds, the challenges to your temperament and morals, that the Spine Race puts you through.
The simple life
The Spine Race has taught me many things. Some of them I’d rather not have known about myself. But one last thing is that during the races I spent a lot of time feeling very lucky and happy. Lucky I can run all day, and that we have such spectacular scenery here in Britain; accessible wildness such as the Pennines which can feel genuinely and gloriously remote, right in the middle of England. And happy, I think, because of all that scenery, those endorphins, perhaps a few too many gallons of strong tea, but also an immense sense of freedom and powerful sense of mission. I’ve swapped screens, bleeping technology and incessant irrelevant emails, for a whole magnificent week or moody moorlands, enigmatic rock formations and melodramatic skies. Each day is magnificently, meditatively simple: just keeping moving north. If only life were always so simple.
Damian Hall is an outdoor journalist who’s happiest when running or hiking long distances on lumpy places. This tea-loving hillbilly has completed the Spine Race twice and authored the official Pennine Way guide. There’s more of his self-aggrandising hogwash at damianhall. info and on Twitter: @damo-hall.
Matt Green runs Summit Fever Media with Ellie West. The two were crewing on an incredible multi-day ultra race in the Himalayas, then quit their day jobs and dedicated themselves to a life outdoors filming extreme endurance events. Buy or download the Montane Spine Race Film from their website at summitfevermedia.com