The high life: memories of a fell-running obsessive
For three decades, Richard Askwith has enjoyed running up and down rocky mountainsides in all weathers.
With the lockdown now keeping him from his beloved Lake District, he looks back on a peculiar passion
I’m running on a scree-strewn path in the Lake District, at the northern end of the broad, undulating ridge that zigzags from Great Dodd’s grassy dome to the rocky heights of Helvellyn. It’s 5:30am. I’ve been running through the fells for half the night, and the long hours of darkness have left me cold and empty. Yet now, just as I was giving up hope of morning, the horizon to my left has burst into flame.
Forty miles to the east, shards of blinding sunrise flash through the spine of the Pennines. The Cumbrian fells soak up the daylight greedily. The dark turf beyond the path glows deep pink, then shades in a few breaths through grey to green. Each rough clump has its own sharp shadow, each rock its intricately polychrome dusting of lichen.
I keep jogging southwards, stumbling occasionally on the loose stones. On my left, the dawn has revealed a vast, sleeping panorama of northern England. It looks like the promised land. There are valleys, villages, woods, tiny but distinct, all freshly bathed in the peace of a spring morning, with webs of mist clinging to dark treetops. Somehow I force myself to focus on where I am putting my feet, but I can’t stop thinking about that shocking glimpse of loveliness. Then I notice, between one leftward glance and the next, that the last traces of mist have been burnt away. The night’s self-pity vanishes with them. I can’t remember the darkness. I can barely remember unhappiness. I can feel the warmth on my sweat-drenched back, and the world seems so beautiful, I think my heart may break...
OK, I’m not really writing this in the Lake District. How could I be? I’m locked down at home in Northamptonshire, while Cumbrians plead with tourists to stay away. I’m lucky, however: a whole circuit of fells above Keswick and Derwentwater is downloaded in my brain, in such detail I can take myself there at will.
It’s a long story: too long to tell here. It goes back to the 1990s, when my legs and lungs were young, and I began a love affair – still smouldering – with fell-running. It’s an unusual passion, I admit; but it isn’t, as some suggest, a mad one. Running up and down rocky mountainsides in all weathers is indeed hazardous and exhausting. It’s also exhilarating. Its finest practitioners combine the stamina, speed and agility of the Olympic elite with the boldness, mountaincraft and resilience of heroic adventurers. Also-rans like me stagger clumsily in their wake, yet even we experience the satisfaction that comes from testing your whole self – body, mind, soul – against the raw challenges of the fells.
It’s a friendly sport, with local roots, whose pleasures are enhanced by being shared. It does result in occasional injuries, but if you’ve once enjoyed it, you tend to stay hooked for life. That’s mostly because it’s a mountain-lovers’ sport, whose richest gift is the need to give the fells your complete attention. You must interrogate your surroundings, constantly, or bad things happen. Is that rock loose? Is that mud deep? How safe is that scree slope? The more you ask, the more the landscape seeps into your being.
You don’t, to be honest, see many glorious views. My fell-running memory-bank is dominated by scenes in which I’m lost in cloud, or cold, wet, frightened or injured – or, as often as not, several of these at once. Somehow, like the ups and downs of a long marriage, this makes the relationship deeper. If I long for the fells despite everything, it must be love.
My biggest fell-running obsession was a particular challenge involving 42 of the Lake District’s highest peaks which, strung together, form a 66-mile circuit, with 26,900ft of ascent and descent. The circuit starts and finishes at Keswick’s Moot Hall, and for the past 88 years has been known as the Bob Graham Round. The challenge, which for most is even harder than it sounds, is to complete it, on foot, with witnesses, in less than 24 hours. My attempts to do so dominated five years of my life; and, I think, made me the person I am today. As a bonus, I remember almost every detail of the route.
“My memory-bank is dominated by scenes in which I’m lost, cold, wet, frightened or injured – or, as often as not, several of these at once”
I also remember the lore of the “BG” tradition, imbibed during long days on the hills and long recuperative evenings in friendly Cumbrian pubs. Bob Graham, a Keswick guesthouse-keeper, completed the circuit for the first time in June 1932, wearing plimsolls and baggy shorts and fuelling himself with hard-boiled eggs. His Round’s mystique developed when others tried to replicate it, especially during the renaissance of outdoor adventure that followed the Second World War. By the 1950s, the BG had developed an aura of near-impossibility, like Everest or a four-minute mile: grails of endurance which, for some, overlapped.
The BG is a very British tradition, created by hardier generations than mine. The feats of its heroes are usually expressed in numbers – so many peaks, so many miles, so many hours – but the romance is in the texture: the weather, the threadbare clothes,
the aching joints, the indomitable resolve. Bob Graham’s successors included Joss Naylor, a Wasdale shepherd who completed several extended Bob Graham circuits – one of them during one of the worst storms of the 1970s – and ran all 214 peaks in Alfred Wainwright’s
in a seven-day epic of bloody-minded, bloodyfooted willpower that coincided with one of the fiercest heatwaves of the 1980s. His records have been superseded but still resonate because of their rugged reliance on stoicism and guts. Naylor (now 84) was a hill farmer first and a runner second. He ran, initially, in work boots and long trousers cut off at the knee; he fuelled himself with cake and Guinness; he trained by covering long distances on foot in pursuit of his work. More importantly: he never gave up. Fell-runners speak with awe about the time he finished a run with two (unnoticed) broken feet; or when all ten of his toenails fell off; or when ill-fitting shoes rubbed his ankles so badly that the ligaments were showing. No list of great British athletes of the 20th century should be considered complete without his name.
Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells
It’s the same with other giants of the fells, such as Billy Bland, the Borrowdale stonemason whose 1982 record for the fastest Bob Graham Round stood for 36 years; or his rival Kenny Stuart, the Threlkeld gardener who “ran on scree as if it was Axminster” (as one rival put it), and set still-unbroken records for Ben Nevis and Snowdon. Their achievements were fitted around hard manual work and won them neither fame (except locally) nor fortune.
When I retrace Bob Graham’s circuit – in real life or imagination – I feel humbled by the knowledge that I’m following the studded footsteps of better men and women than me: runners made of the same flesh and blood, faced by the same challenges, who were somehow able to summon reserves of spirit beyond ordinary imaginings. If I’m heading up Skiddaw from Keswick, I think of Ernest Dalzell, an Ormathwaite gamekeeper whose suicidal descents at Grasmere and Burnsall made him a local legend in the years before the First World War. A little further out, on Great Calva, it’s Bill Teasdale who comes to mind: an impossibly durable Caldbeck farmer and gamekeeper who dominated the sport from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Neither Dalzell nor Teasdale had any direct connection with Bob Graham, yet the circuit takes you through and past their patches, just as it later takes you through Stuart’s Threlkeld and (much later) Bland’s Borrowdale. Such landmarks remind me that the mountains are great levellers, capable of humbling any one of us; yet also capable of inspiring astonishing courage and defiance.
Cumbria’s hills often feel wild and desolate, but no one who explores them is an isolated adventurer. You always sense traces of others who immersed themselves in the landscape before you. Which ones you sense – poets or painters, storytellers or naturalists, climbers or athletes – depends on taste and temperament. When I run down Scafell towards Wasdale Head and see the steep side of Yewbarrow bristling with bracken beyond, I imagine the sufferings of Chris Brasher, who (Olympic gold medal notwithstanding) threw up and gave up there in 1977, on his first BG attempt. Others associate this same slope with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who ascended Scafell from Wasdale in August 1802 before famously flirting with death climbing down via Broad Stand on the other side, on his way to Scafell Pike.
Today’s young mountain athletes are typically inspired by figures such as Jasmin Paris (an Edinburgh vet who holds the record for the fastest-ever BG by a woman, and was overall winner of last year’s 268-mile Montane Spine Race through the Pennines) or
Aurum Press at £9.99.
Nicky Spinks (a Yorkshire farmer who in 2016 completed two BGs, back to back, in 45 hours 30 minutes). Others see Kilian Jornet, a Catalan athlete who in 2018 ran the fastest BG of them all (an incomprehensible 12 hours 52 minutes), as the ultimate role model. These runners are far removed from my shepherds and gamekeepers: they have kit sponsors and share their adventures on social media. But they, too, take strength from their kinship with the mountains: no one would put themselves through such agonies if they didn’t.
The guardians of the Bob Graham tradition distrust the encroachments of modernity, shunning both publicity and money. Runners who complete the Round win nothing more lucrative than a certificate. Even so, the sport’s creeping popularity has led some to fear that the BG, like Everest, may become the kind of challenge that the rich “conquer” by throwing money at it. Earlier this year, the Bob Graham 24 Hour Club announced it would “no longer accept applications for membership where paid-for or professional guided services have been used”. A few hardliners grumble that southern incomers are overrunning “their” hills. It’s a familiar complaint. Even Wordsworth, who claimed to have found the “Wisdom and Spirit of the universe” in the Lakes and their hills, campaigned grumpily against plans for a railway to open them to the masses.
You can see their point. Few mountain experiences are improved by a crowd of tourists. But although we southern fell-runners can understand the resentment of those who consider the fells their own back yard, we also know that they need us. Tourism is the main source of income for the Lake District economy. One day, for all our faults, they’ll want us back. But not today. For more than a month, the fells have been empty. Even local fell-runners are avoiding the higher ground when taking their socially distanced exercise, for fear of making demands on the NHS or Mountain Rescue. Bob Graham Rounds attempted this year will not be ratified. Yet a landscape so rich in memory can never be wholly uninhabited.
“Fell-runners speak with awe about the time Joss Naylor finished a run with
two (unnoticed) broken feet”
When I run my remembered routes in my head, there are always ghosts, just as there were when I ran them in real life. I don’t mean spooky apparitions, like the phantom soldiers that allegedly manifest themselves from time to time on the side of Blencathra. My ghosts represent the spirits of the hill-farmers, gamekeepers and foresters who helped make the landscape; the locals who lived, loved and died there; the poets and painters, and ordinary tourists, who sensed the sublime here; and, not least, the runners.
There was, I imagine, a breathtaking view from the Helvellyn ridge when dawn broke this morning. In my head, as I write this, I can see that same dawn exploding. At least one runner is there to witness it, picking his way carefully along the ridge. He is exhausted, cold and hungry, and his mind is mostly occupied with finding safe places to put his feet. He winces occasionally when a misjudged step jars a bruised joint. Yet he also snatches a glance, every now and then, at the bright world revealing itself around him. When he does so, he senses, like Coleridge, “the Invisible... like some sweet beguiling melody, so sweet, we know not we are listening to it”. And as he staggers on towards the next peak, he gives thanks from the depths of his heart. He knows how privileged he is to be out there.
A longer version of this article appeared in the Financial Times. © Financial Times Limited 2020. Richard Askwith’s
is published by
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