RUNNING AND OH SO MUCH MOOR
Trip to haunting English terrain a chance to bond and bask, writes Brodie Ramin.
We had been running along the moor, through darkness, for about 50 minutes when I found myself completely alone. We had started the day running through thick fog, picking our way through the gorse bushes, the jagged rocks and the pools of water. We were ending the day with a night run through thick sheets of falling snow. The other runners had teased me as we set out. “Your friends in Canada will ask why’d you have to go all the way to England to run in the snow?”
But there were no other runners now. Ceri, our guide, had surged ahead and rounded a corner. The stragglers were so far behind I could see just points of light through the streaking lines of snow. I followed the bend of the ridge to the left ducking at the last second as some low-hanging thorns loomed toward my face. The tight beam of my headlight illuminated the uneven ground as I accelerated. I rounded the ridge and after a few more minutes marked by a faint but rising feeling of panic, I saw Ceri’s tiny outline a few minutes ahead of me in the darkness.
For the next 30 minutes I stayed with Ceri as we completed a loop of the moor and began descending back to our starting point. How he navigated that night, through blinding snow and featureless terrain, I will never know.
“This is epic, it’s like Christmas,” exclaimed Stuart, another runner who had driven down from Manchester, as we climbed over the fence leading back to our house.
“Did you expect this when you signed up?” he asked me.
For three nights, a group of runners from around the U.K. and me, the lone Canadian, enrolled in a running camp organized by the bestselling English author Adharanand Finn. Finn rose to prominence in recent years for two books about the Kenyan and Japanese running cultures and he tells us he is finishing up his latest book, an account of the global subculture of ultra-running. He chose to base the camp in Blackslade Manor, which backs onto Dartmoor, a national park in the South of England formed from a vast expanse of moorland. For him, it is simply his backyard as he lives only a 10-mile drive from the Manor.
But to outsiders such as me, Dartmoor is cloaked in literary and geological lore. This is the moor from Sherlock Holmes’ The Hound of the Baskervilles, which Conan Doyle described as “the wild and empty moor,” “the bleak, cold, and shelterless moor,” where rolling clouds “rise now and then to show the dreary curves of the moor, with thin, silver veins upon the sides of the hills, and the distant boulders gleaming where the light strikes upon their wet faces.” At the beginning of the story, Sir Henry Baskerville receives an anonymous note that reads “As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.”
Finn warned us on our arrival that it was so easy to get lost that we were only to venture out as a group. An hour later, he marshalled us together and we ran briskly down the driveway onto a narrow English country lane. After a mile, we turned off the road and entered the moor.
We were immediately clambering up muddy trails, leaping over streams and running along the ridge of the hilly terrain. To me, accustomed to the paved trails lining Ottawa’s Rideau Canal, this did not feel like a gentle warm-up; this was trail running at breakneck speed. This was almost fell-running, a uniquely British type of racing that occurs up and down hills and mountains across the country as immortalized in Richard Askwith’s book Feet in the Clouds. Askwith describes his own love affair with fell-running, which began on a “grey, blood-chilling Saturday — the kind of day with which, oddly, many a love affair between man and mountain has begun.”
The next day is just such a British grey, blood-chilling Saturday. Finn has explained to us that elite Kenyan runners do not eat prior to their morning runs. This prolonged aerobic exercise on an empty stomach may be one of their running secrets and we are encouraged to fast like a Kenyan. I cheat and scarf down a slice of bread I had hidden in my suitcase. We drive through thick mist to the starting point and once again, with no warning, Finn, fit from a year of ultrarunning, shoots across the moor, urging us to stay close together. We race after him, leaping over streams and brushing against the inch-long thorns of the yellowflowered gorse bushes that cover the moorland.
I lurch up hills then plummet down, watching Phil’s feet as he picks through the uneven terrain with incredible speed and alacrity. Phil is himself a running coach from Derbyshire who had read Finn’s work and joined the group looking for wisdom and inspiration.
Afterwards we drank endless cups of tea. Finn showed us photos from his running travels and we sat and discussed running technique and strategy, feeling that we had found kindred spirits who shared our pedantic passion for racing, for fitness, for shoes and tights and articles about Kenyan running. One reason I had made the trek was to talk shop with Finn about a manuscript I had written about my own love of running and my experience as a doctor delving into the science and medicine of the sport. We sat together under the low-hanging wooden beams of the manor with a fire glowing in the grate. He told me about his idea to write a mystery novel set among the running community of Kenya. A few hours later, we headed out for our night-run through the snow.
The next morning I had to leave precipitously. Another and more powerful snowstorm threatened to cut off the house and the region. I calculated that if I left within two hours, I could just get out in time. I had a plane to catch and a full clinic to get back to. As the rest of the group prepared for a three-hour slog across the frozen moor, I put on my warmest clothes, my Canadaproof winter boots and walked down the road to find a taxi. My driver told me it was the first time he had seen this much snow in 20 years. We passed gingerly out of the moor and just as the snowfall began in earnest my train glided along frozen rails out of the storm and on to London’s Paddington train station.
As I watched the frozen landscape rush by, I thought of the people I had met. The writer, the sports psychologist, the running coach, the farmer, the IT manager, the civil servant husband and wife in their late 50s, the artist who told me he came looking for the spark to rekindle his talent. They would just be getting back to the house, cold and ravenous. Would they be stuck in the manor, running low on supplies, cut off from the world like characters in an Agatha Christie novel? If they were, I almost envied them. They could look out from the huge windows and watch the wild ponies roam the moor. They were among other runners, comparing battle wounds and strategizing for the next marathon or ultra-marathon. I was back in the outside world, a world indifferent to running, a flat world of pavement and bustling crowds. As soon as I get home, I thought, I’ll knock the moorland mud off my shoes, slip on some breathable fabric, and head out for a run.
We were immediately clambering up muddy trails, leaping over streams and running along the ridge of the hilly terrain.