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With no ultra-running experience, unable to read a map, and having never pitched a tent alone, Elise Downing wasn’t a likely candidate to become the first woman and youngest person to run the coast of Britain with her kit on her back. But over the course of just 10 months she discovered that you don’t have to be superhuman to do something incredible (spoiler alert: she did it).
Mine is a story about muddling through a big adventure without any experience or expertise. It’s about having an idea and then setting about making it happen, even when you don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re doing. For the most part, I think this is a good attitude to have. I’m not sure anybody really knows what they’re doing, at least not as much as it probably looks like they do from the outside.
I recently listened to an episode of the Real Talk Radio podcast where the guest was talking about their journey to sobriety. They said that “You don’t have to be strong enough on day one to get to year ten”, and it’s a line that really stuck with me. I think we can apply that mentality to a lot of things. You only really need to know enough to get through the first day, or even just to take the first step. The rest of it you can work out along the way, most of the time. If you always waited until you felt 100% ready, I don’t think you would ever end up doing anything.
However, my caveat to this is that if you want to spend a lot of time outdoors, then I really would recommend learning how to read a map properly. Not as a nice-to-have, but as an absolute essential – especially if you’re going to be alone, in remote places, in bad weather conditions. There are lots of stories in my book Coasting that reference my inability to read a map, and not only did this make my journey a lot more difficult than it needed to be, it was downright stupid. It all worked out okay for me in the end, and admittedly was the source of a few funny stories along the way, but it so easily could have been disastrous.
Buy a map and a compass and learn how to use them. It’s not as hard as you think it’ll be. And carry a torch with you at all times too, if there’s even the slightest chance that you might end up out after dark.
Safety briefing over. Time to get on with the story.
Seed of an idea
It was a nondescript Tuesday in early March and I was at work, looking at a road map of Great Britain and trying to work out if we could deliver something to a customer in the Scottish Highlands. I was working for a small company in London, my first job after university, and I had a secret: I hated it.
I loved my colleagues. I loved desk beers at 5pm on a Friday. I loved telling people that I worked for a cool, young startup. But the actual getting up every morning and going to work bit? The thought of doing that every single day forever more? I feel awkward saying it because it’s such a glaring cliché, but the idea of that felt completely devastating and, frankly, intolerable.
Sitting at my desk that afternoon, my mind started to wander. I found myself wondering if anybody had ever been around the whole coast of Britain before. Not ran it, necessarily, just been around by any means – by bike, by car, on foot. I placed that customer’s order, finished my shift, took the night bus home to my flat-share and went to bed. When I woke up in the morning, that thought was still there. Had anybody circumnavigated our whole island before? Had they done it in one go? Had they done it alone?
I thought about the coast of Britain for a few more days after that first inkling of an idea before discussing it with anybody. I did some research and learned that quite a few people had walked and cycled and sailed around, but I couldn’t find much about anybody running it at that point. Interesting, I thought. There planted a tiny seed: perhaps it could be me.
No obligation
It’s so easy to think that everybody you follow online has it all figured out. Trust me, they don’t. Sometimes I meet people and they’re still surprised to hear I have a day job, that I’m not a ‘full-time adventurer’. But the truth is that while I love running and being outside and exploring and occasionally tiring myself out on stupidly long challenges, I actually have no desire whatsoever to go on another ten-month long adventure. Never say never, but I like having a home, and friends, and being able to go and see my family without feeling wracked with guilt that I’m ‘cheating’ at something.
And that’s okay. I wasted so much time trying to reconcile all the parts of me that felt contradictory, but I didn’t need to. You can do something completely new, a total U-turn from anything you’ve enjoyed before, and decide that you love it and to carry on doing it for the rest of your life. Or you can try something once and then never do it again. Or you can do a bit of both. You can run around a country then decide you’re happy just being a weekend-and-holidays runner.
It’s all fine. You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.
If you do decide you want to try something new that you-of-five-minutesago wouldn’t have, then I can highly recommend planning an adventure here in the UK, even if just for a day or a weekend. There’s so much to discover on our own doorsteps. As I write this, we’re coming to the end (hopefully) of the coronavirus pandemic, and I’m sure this is something we’ve all learnt to some extent over the past year. How many different 3-mile loops can you walk from your front door? More than we ever could have imagined. Britain has so much to offer – you can climb up mountains, hike across moors, run along coast paths, or you can just walk around the block a few hundred times.
And more than the incredible landscapes, there are all the people who live on this island, the ones who were happy to throw their doors wide open for a total stranger covered in mud. Experiencing this sort of kindness seems to be the universal story of travel all over the world and I can certainly vouch for it here in the UK. I consider it a huge privilege to have been able to spend so much time becoming intimately acquainted with the country I call home (or the edges of it, at least)...