COAST RUNNER
With little prior training, Elise Downing set off to run 5,000 miles around the coast of Great Britain. What did she learn about our coastline – and about herself?
Despite little training, Elise
Downing set off to run around Britain’s coast. After 5,000 miles, 301 days and seven pairs of trainers, she tells her tale.
It was early February, and I was the best part of 1,000 miles into my journey. More than three months after leaving London, I found myself running along the coast path that hugs the edge of Exmoor National Park, and all was well. Yet in a moment’s time I would face a neardeath experience.
The day had begun in the pretty seaside town of Lynmouth in Devon. Now I was just a few miles from the Somerset border, where, as for so much of the South West Coast Path, the trail sits right at the edge of the land, snaking around the cliffs. The sky was grey, heavy clouds hanging low and opening periodically. Around lunchtime, as I neared Porlock, the sun broke out for a few moments and as it did, a herd of Exmoor ponies rounded the corner and ran towards me.
The track suddenly felt impossibly narrow. I looked from side to side, where the cliff dropped away to my left and rose up sharply to my right. There was nowhere to go. This was it, I thought.
I was about to get trampled. I contemplated my certain death.
Then, half a second later, the herd parted like the red sea and swept around me, somehow staying upright on those near-vertical slopes. I’m sure I felt the bristle of their coats against my arms. While I had panicked, the ponies had known exactly where to go, dancing over the steep drops. It was a stark contrast to my own feelings of incompetence, which I was battling with daily.
NOVICE RUNNER
When I tell people I’ve been on a 5,000-mile run, they tend to get the wrong idea about my athletic abilities. That’s understandable – it does sound like a long way. But I wasn’t much of a runner before I set off in November 2015. At the point when I decided to run around the coast of Britain, my running CV had been made up of little more than one disastrous marathon dressed as a purple crayon, where I suffered for a solid eight miles and a child heckled me as “the crying crayon”.
Yet despite my lack of experience, there was something about longdistance running that appealed to me. I avidly read blogs of people running long distances. One day as I sat at work, the idea to run around the country came from nowhere. I thought: well, if these other people can do it, then surely so could I.
This logic was misguided. The people I was following were slightly more experienced. Anna McNuff, for instance, who was then running the length of New Zealand, was an ex-GB rower and the daughter of two Olympians.
Meanwhile, my own sporting history had involved sitting in the car outside the athletics track while my brother trained, begging my mum to take me to McDonald’s.
But the thing about a 5,000-mile run is that, while it sounds impressive, it is actually the sum of lots of manageable parts. At the start of my journey, I was regularly running less than 10 miles per day. Link up lots of fairly modest runs in one long chain and, eventually, you will find you have done something – like run around a country. And I truly believe that if I can run around a country, then almost anyone can.
STARTING LINE
I set off carrying a tent and sleeping bag on my back, intending to camp for the whole journey. There was no way I could afford to do it otherwise. But along the way, I experienced a domino effect of hospitality – friends of friends, people following my video diaries, running clubs, hostels and B&Bs during off-peak months – all getting in touch to offer me a bed. In the end I stayed with more than 200 strangers, pitching my tent for less than a third of the time.
I worried that I was cheating. Surely, a real adventurer would be camping in ditches, foraging for dinner and slaying bears? But the dictionary definition of adventure is “an unusual and exciting or daring experience” and I can confirm that being welcomed into so many people’s homes felt both unusual and exciting – and sometimes daring, too (the day I was served caramelised new potatoes and peaches as a dessert option, for instance).
No matter where I was sleeping, one thing was always the same. However grim a day had been or how many hours I’d been rained on, I knew there would come a point where I was sheltered, wearing a pair of dry socks and drinking tea. That made it all worth it.
“The days of storms, knee-deep bogs and 4pm sunsets were replaced by hot, dry spring days”
Of course, there were good moments on the trail too. Feeling like I was flying down a hill I’d just slogged up from the other side. The relief of winter finally ending and the days of storms, kneedeep bogs and 4pm sunsets being replaced by hot, dry spring days full of endless hours of daylight. The days when somebody came to run with me and I would spend a few hours chatting and laughing and eating ice creams rather than just being in my own head worrying about whether I was doing things ‘properly’.
Yet, by then, I was also growing more content in my own company. I realised that I could have an idea and set about making it happen and that, ultimately, it was my own two legs and nobody else’s that could get me to the end.
COMPLETING THE COAST
The finish line was back in London and I made it there 301 days after starting, somehow relatively unscathed injury-wise (with the exception of the backpack chafing, a daily battle from which I still have the scars) and having worn out seven pairs of running shoes.
I was excited to finish, ready to get back to some sense of normality, to see my friends and my family again, have a choice of more than two T-shirts and eat some vegetables after the endless cake and pasta I had lived on.
The weeks and months that followed were difficult. I went from such a singular focus – just one more mile – to feeling aimless. People kept saying nice things to me, but I felt a bit of a fraud. As I’ve said, I truly believe that anybody could do what I did, and so surely I didn’t deserve the praise I was getting. But the simple truth is that hardly anybody else has done it, and that’s all that ever sets apart somebody who could do something from somebody who has. You don’t have to be the best, I found, you just have to have a go.
‘Having a go’ doesn’t need to mean a huge, months-long adventure, though.
Now, I’m happiest just squeezing in as much time outside as I can around my day-to-day life. Whether that’s cycling to the pub, running 5km with friends after work, wild camping on the weekend or a week of annual leave spent ticking off a long-distance trail. In a way that I struggle to explain, everything just feels a bit better when I’m outside, and that’s true on any scale.
That said, if you are looking for a big adventure – whether for days, weeks or months – I can wholeheartedly recommend the British coastline as the perfect place to find one. It’s equal parts accessible and wild, from picture-perfect sandy beaches to rugged cliffs and rocky outcrops. I spent 301 days of my life exploring the British coast and I’m certain that I could spend another 3,000 days running our coast paths and still find something new to see.
Read the full story in Elise Downing’s book, Coasting: Running Around the Coast of Britain – Life, Love and (Very) Loose Plans, published by Summersdale on 8 July. summersdale.com/sd-book/coasting Find out more about Elise at elisedowning.com