SUMMITS UP

At its outer limits, London doesn’t feel very much like London at all. Large parts of the night route were testament to this. We ran across muddy fields, forest tracks and empty roads: the stuff of the countryside, not the city. But to run to London’s summits is to be continually surprised. Who knew, for example, that someone has constructed a tree fort at the highest point in Croydon? Or that it’s possible to climb the Alps without leaving the M25 or venturing higher than 35m? (That’s the Beckton Alps, in case you’re wondering, the highest point in the borough of Newham).

Just ahead of the runners trundled our state-of-the-art support vehicle – a minibus borrowed from a south London Methodist church – which was stocked with the latest in performance sports nutrition: cold Co-op pizzas and a multipack of crisps. Powered by such attention to marginal gains, we bagged Bromley, Croydon, Sutton, Kingston, Merton and Richmond before sunrise and were five minutes ahead of schedule. However, with Horsenden Hill next to come, followed by the highlands of Hillingdon and Harrow, keeping on track would be a test of our runners’ endurance and navigational skills.

Not that this was a clock-watching exercise. On the contrary, focusing your run on a geographical feature – in this case, a summit – forces you to truly engage with the landscape in a way you don’t when your only concerns are distance and time. Small changes in elevation are registered; innocuous high points become places of celebration.

To Barnet and Enfield next, following the northern fringes of Monken Hadley Common, before the baton was handed over at the summit of Pole Hill, the highest point in Waltham Forest (91m). Now on the outskirts of Epping Forest – former hunting ground of highwayman Dick Turpin – the route became even more rural, causing one runner to almost lose a shoe in the muddy foothills of Havering.

From the hills to the tunnels, as our runners crossed under the Thames via the Greenwich foot tunnel, re-emerging south of the river to summit Shooters Hill. At this point we were scheduled for a 10:45pm finish, but with the packed pavements of the inner London boroughs to come, there was a good chance our pace would drop. But it did not. In fact, by the time our runners had reached the crest of Crystal Palace and then the high ground of Haringey, we were 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Excitement began to build at our race HQ, The Washington pub, with many forced to calm their nerves by imbibing that ancient medicinal combination of a pint and a Jägerbomb. Tracking the dot on Strava Beacon, we knew our runners had left Kensington & Chelsea and were headed to the final peak, in the City of Westminster. A sudden bout of altitude sickness notwithstanding, they would surely get the baton home on time, wouldn’t they?

Then we saw them, charging up the final hill to the pub door. I glanced at the time on the iphone: 22:35:36. We’d done it! Cue huge celebrations, a few more pints and the unbeatable feeling that we had, in our own small way, made history.

So, what has the London Peaks Relay proved? Certainly it proved that a lot can be accomplished in 24 hours, if you have a wonderful group of people and industrial amounts of caffeine. But, more than that, we hope it shows that adventure is really just a state of mind. If you can reimagine London as a mountain range, you can do something similar in any UK city. It needn’t be based around peaks, either: you could just as easily theme an event around following rivers, forgotten pathways or favourite pubs. Or you could, of course, try to beat our time…

Alison Hamlett and John Carroll set off from Horsenden Hill; James Poole and David Smyth cross the M11