The Spine (Part 4 of 7)

Ice Goes Better With Whisky: Hawes CP2 to Langdon Beck CP3

This post follows Part 3: Razor Fields

After such a long stretch of peace & solitude over the remote moors, Hawes checkpoint hit me like a bus. I stalled in the doorway, paralysed by the cacophony of noise and commotion. Runners were sorting out their kit, medics were patching people up, volunteers were dashing back and forth with food and water. It was a basically a cross between a MASH ward and Piccadilly Circus. I took a deep breath, and stepped in.

There’d be no dumb checklists this time around. My priority was to assess these potentially race-ending blisters, and form a treatment plan. So I found a seat beside my drop bag, placed a food order, and began to remove my shoes and socks.

I’d only just made a start when my vegan chilli arrived. Unable to prioritise between eating and sorting out these blisters, I settled on doing both simultaneously. Hygiene is often said to be the first casualty of ultras. In between mouthfuls, I peeled off my socks to expose the blisters beneath. I didn’t want to look (especially while I was eating), but I had to.

The blisters were… I raised an eyebrow, then set down my bowl of chilli on the ledge behind me. I took a longer, closer look at my feet, first at the left foot, and then the right. I shook my head in disbelief. Where the bloody hell were my blisters?

All I could see was a patch of whiter-coloured skin under the ball of my left foot, and a smaller patch under my right big toe. I deployed all my powers of medical diagnosis by prodding at the white bits. They felt harder than usual. What on earth was going on? I kept prodding, hoping I’d have some sort of eureka moment… or perhaps the blisters would magically materialise from wherever they were hiding?

Seeing me looking rather confused, a volunteer asked whether I’d like a medic. I’d never troubled a race medic before in my life. It felt a bit radical, almost like a bucket list item. I enthusiastically agreed.

It wasn’t long before James introduced himself and dropped to his knees, bringing his face within centimetres of my feet. Seemingly unperturbed by their stench, he eyed them closely, and performed his own prodding assessment. “It’s the frozen ground”, he explained. “Everybody’s got the same thing”.

That really knocked the wind out of my sails. You mean to tell me everyone’s going through this, and I’m the only one complaining about it?

We discussed potential mitigations, and after I declined to have padding taped around my foot (why is tape always the answer with feet?), we agreed that wearing a liner sock might help to reduce the impact forces. With that decided, I packed away my gear, and headed to the bunkrooms for what I’d decided would be a full 90 minute sleep.

Lying on the bed, I couldn’t decide how I felt about my no-blister situation. It was surely a good thing that I didn’t have any, but I’d seriously considered DNF’ing earlier. Had I made a massive deal out of absolutely nothing? Maybe it hadn’t been that bad after all? Or was I now rewriting history and downplaying it? Whatever the case, it really didn’t matter, because in a few minutes I was fast asleep.

Some time later…

My alarm woke me up. I lay there feeling confused yet again, but this time I was confused about time itself. How long had I been asleep? When had I arrived? I wasn’t sure of anything any more. I also wasn’t sure whether I cared. I spotted I had some phone signal, and decided to console myself by catching up with the outside world.

There were more notifications than I’d seen in my life, and my social media seemed to have gone haywire. I scrolled through some of the messages of support. The number of people following my progress was overwhelming, and the attention to detail I could see some were paying was really incredible. While I won’t call out individuals here, I have to mention my running club Fairlands Valley Spartans – I mean, it was as if they’d all taken the week off work to track my progress. I was deeply touched.

I switched to my Spine Mail, and found that too was overflowing. So many people willing me on, with so much heartfelt support. And here I was, lying in a bed, like I was at some sort of spa retreat. How hopeless was I? I couldn’t even work out how long I’d slept for.

I had a sudden flash of inspiration, and checked the race tracker to see where Damo was. I did a double-take. He was already at High Cup Nick, one and a half checkpoints away from me in Hawes. That didn’t even compute. Just how on earth was he all the way up there already? Feeling quite embarrassed, I took that as my cue to get up and get going.

Back in the main room, which was now even busier than before, I ordered another vegan chilli and started work on my footwear. I hadn’t brought any thin liner socks with me, but I had brought my normal thick running socks in addition to my Dexshells, so I tried them in combination. This felt really good, so I was confident I had as good a footcare plan as any.

When it came to my shoes, I had two different pairs of half-size up shoes to choose from. I tried my TrailTalons first, reasoning that a different style of shoe might also help by loading my feet a little differently. But try as I might to shove my feet into them, the large pair of TrailTalons would not fit over my double socks. No matter; my larger pair of Cyklons was bound to fit, I told myself, willing it to be true.

But they didn’t.

I glared at the three pairs of shoes strewn around my chair. All useless. That was literally the only foot care plan I had. Now I had nothing.

That was it then, I reasoned. I’d just have to go back to my single pair of socks. “And what?”, my inner chimp raged. “Employ your brilliant strategy of ‘hoping for the best’? That’s worked so well for you so far, hasn’t it? That’s obviously going to see you 250km to Kirk Yetholm, you fucking moron!”

But I didn’t have a choice. That is, unless I wanted some bubble wrap taped around my feet. I’d rather have DNF’d.

I could at least try to get the rest of my kit right.

The Met Office’s weather forecast predicted a feels-like temperature of -13C. So I decided to carry 7 upper layers, and double waterproof mitts. To counter my water freezing again, I switched one of my softflasks for a Salomon insulated flask. This gave me confidence that I’d have at least some liquid water I could sip on.

Race staff were aware of our water freezing difficulties too. When the volunteers refilled my flasks, they handed them back to me with hot water inside. “So it lasts a bit longer”, they said. Running with hot water bottles, that was a first for me.

Finally, I was through kit check and out the door. By my reckoning, I’d spent four and a half hours at Hawes. How I’d taken so ridiculously long, again?

Or had I taken that long? After all, I was far from sure of my arrival time. I mean, when I broke it down, I thought I’d only slept for 90 minutes. If I’d spent four and a half hours there; well, that didn’t really add up, did it…

It was the early hours of the morning, and snowing lightly. It was pretty cold of course, but thankfully not as cold as last night. I was soon heading out of town, and up a fell I’d later learn was called Great Shunner Fell.

The climb began gradually. I trekked through fairly deep snow, with nothing to follow but my GPS. This felt a lot more ‘Spiney’, I thought. All I could see ahead was the pitch black of the night sky, and beneath it, a cone of bright white where my headtorch reflected off of the snow. It felt pretty cool.

After a little while, the Danish runner Simon Grimstrup caught me up. We chatted for a while about a race he directs, which runs along the northern coast of Denmark through Thy National Park. It sounded pretty epic. Simon had far more race experience than me, and was clearly more than capable on snow, so I let him disappear off into the distance. At least it gave me some footprints to follow.

As I climbed higher, the good old Pennine Way flagstones came into view. Unfortunately, they were fully iced-over, with a mix of sheet and black ice. It made for slow and tricky going. Worse, they passed through wide sections of sheet ice, like little frozen lakes, which required even more careful attention. I didn’t mind, though. The overall feel was of an enigmatic winter wonderland: snowy undulations, wending flagstone trails, bizarre ice formations. As someone unfamiliar with this sort of terrain, it was really exciting. It was literally otherworldly.

My joy was, unfortunately, short-lived. My shoulder pain returned in spades. I was in no mood to stop and rest, so I experimented with workarounds. I found I could fend off the worst of it if I put my hands behind my back and lifted my pack slightly, taking some of its weight off my shoulders.

Then I began to experience some mild nausea, which wasn’t something I commonly experienced. I could only think of two other occasions: one of my earliest marathons when I chugged far too many gels, and once during my second running of the Arc of Attrition when I got my electrolyte balance wrong. I had just eaten a waffle I didn’t normally consume, and so resolved to leave the rest of these in my drop bag at the remaining checkpoints. I was pretty confident that was it.

Despite shoulder pain, mild nausea, and of course my foot pain all troubling my senses, I nonetheless found myself growing sleepy again. This worried me more than everything else put together. If a 90 minute (or however long it had been) sleep hadn’t fixed my tiredness, how long did I need for goodness sake? And was I going to restart all that zigzagging and dozing off on my feet? I had enough problems, thank you very much, without all that again.

I was glad to summit Great Shunner Fell, but as I began the gradual descent, it quickly became apparent that staying upright would be much harder this way around. The iced flagstone steps were like a staggered slide. I slipped and fell. And then I slipped and fell again. I slipped, slid, smashed my legs, my hip, my wrists… Despite all the bashes I was taking, my tiredness only grew worse, and I had a few more hallucinations. They started to impede my view, which was not at all what I needed while trying to navigate this treacherous descent.

At the bottom, I sat down in the snow, and rested my head in my hands. Why was this so sodding difficult? I’d just slept, and now I was falling asleep again. What did I need to do to wake myself up? I took a sip on my water bottles, but they were frozen again. My special insulated flask too. A fat lot of use that’d been.

After Thwaite, the Pennine Way again proved tricky to follow. It took a fair bit of backtracking and fence-clambering to locate the base of Kisdon Fell. From here, the trail was a narrow singletrack that climbed halfway up, then tracked around the side of the fell. With a 30 metre drop to one side, it was a route you’d normally exercise some caution on. Tonight, it was a little riskier, since it was covered in ice.

To add to the level of danger, my hallucinations were back. This time it was animals that were jumping out at me left, right and centre. Making my way along this treacherous trail, slipping, sliding, battling tiredness and hallucinations, centimetres away from a fairly serious drop, felt really dicey. I stuffed packets of Veloforte chews in my mouth, hoping this would help wake me up, but it didn’t.

Thankfully, the trail grew much safer as it passed Kisdon Force, an area I noted I’d love to return to in future. Though perhaps in the daytime, in summer, with a little less ice and a lot fewer hallucinations.

A perfect opportunity to rest jumped out at me. A sign pointed just off-route to the Keld Winter Tearoom. A couple-hundred metres, it said, where I could rest, have a tea, warm myself up and defrost my water bottles. This was perfect. But; alas, my sleep-addled brain couldn’t rationalise adding on any extra distance, even a couple of hundred metres, and directed me to push on regardless. Within seconds I knew I’d made a mistake, but by that time I was already halfway down a short & steep descent. I didn’t fancy climbing back up it again.

I was, at least, to have some company on the next little climb. A family stood at its summit, playing tunes from a boombox and waving me on. That was nice of them, I thought; especially in the early morning, in these freezing conditions. We waved at each other, and I tried to make out the music. It was bound to be one of those motivational songs, like Eye of the Tiger.

It wasn’t until I drew alongside them that I realised the family I’d been interacting with was actually a drystone wall and a dead tree trunk. And the only sound to be heard was the wind.

A runner caught me up on the next heavily iced flagstone section. I moaned about how many falls I’d taken, and my compatriot gleefully explained how effective he’d found his Yaktrax microspikes. He’d only fallen once so far, he claimed. I had my doubts, given that in the two minutes we’d been talking, he’d slipped four times. Nonetheless, I had to give it to him – he broke away and ran on ahead. Arms flailing wildly, looking about as stable as a cat in a swimming pool. I chuckled, and then fell over.

It was daytime again, though which day it was, I couldn’t have told you. From this vantage point on the side of the fell, I could see for miles out over the undulating terrain. There was a building of some sort far up ahead. I had no idea what it was; but it was just nice to have something to aim for, something that proved I was making progress, in this world of indistinguishable iced flagstones and squat, snowy fells.

When I got closer, I recognised the building as Tan Hill Inn, famous for being Britain’s highest pub. It looked like another potential opportunity to get warm and get water. But yet again, my addled brain talked me out of stopping. It was morning; the pub won’t be open, I told myself, and trotted on past. Again, I regretted this within seconds. I think I was just so desperate to get past all the ice. That assumed there was an end to it…

I was falling and bashing myself up so much I may as well have been in the ring for 12 rounds with Tyson Fury. Aching all over, and thoroughly fed up of making such slow progress, I recalled the earlier chat about Yaktrax. If I was ever going to try out these Yaktrax microspikes I was carrying, it had to be now, surely. I wrestled them out of the very bottom of my pack, and spent a few minutes figuring out how to properly affix them over my shoes.

As soon as I set foot on sheet ice with the Yaktrax on, I was amazed. I found I was able to run over the slickest surface, in complete confidence, without a single slip. It was revelatory! Why hadn’t I done this earlier?

But after 5 minutes of the unbridled joy of fabulous friction, I had found the tradeoff. They were extremely uncomfortable, both cutting into my toes from the sides, and carving into the soles of my feet from below, just like the frozen farmer’s fields. Even though I could tolerate the discomfort for now, they’d probably make the pain in my feet worse over time. I didn’t fancy taking that risk.

At least, that was my excuse to stop and remove them. The totally honest truth might have been that I just didn’t like them. ‘Running’ with a metal grid under my feet wasn’t really running. There was no groundfeel. Running must have groundfeel. I’m aware that probably sounds silly. Like I say, officially, I took them off to protect my feet.

Regardless, that would be the last step I’d take with any confidence for quite some time.

Another little snow shower caked the ground with a thin dusting of fresh snow. Little did I realise, this would add a whole other dimension of difficulty to my already hopeless situation. The layer of snow was just enough to fully camouflage the surface beneath, and that meant I could no longer see where the ice was. Every single step was now a complete gamble.

The trail broke out onto a road that snaked around the side of the fell. It was fundamentally a flat road. I couldn’t walk or trot this. Despite my misgivings about what was beneath the surface, I had to pick up the pace.

Ten seconds later, I took my hardest fall to date. I smashed my hip onto the iced tarmac with such force that, despite my head never touching the ground, I suffered whiplash.

I set back off, somewhat dazed. “I’m trying to run”, I lamented into my dictaphone, “but every time I do, I slip, I slide, I fall and I hurt myself. I’ve had enough. It’s just shit. Really fucking shit”.

Thankfully, the GPS directed me off the road and back through more iced moorland, which wasn’t so bad to fall over onto. But then the weather worsened. Snow flurries made way for rain and hail. I passed a wooden shelter, and paused by the door, edging it open and tentatively inching my way inside. I didn’t want to delay my passage through the ice, but nor did I want to pass up an opportunity to take a break from hurting myself.

The wooden slats of the shelter were covered in graffiti from those who’d hiked the Pennine Way in years gone by. I spent a couple of minutes reading these emotional outpourings. Many of the messages suggested I was far from the only person to have found this journey to be both a physical and mental challenge.

The door to the shelter creaked open, and the face of another runner peeked in. It was orange jacket chap. I’d spotted him 5 minutes ago, tracking me a couple hundred metres behind. 

“Are you alright?” he enquired. Fucking spiffing, I thought, my head still throbbing from the massive fall. I’m so deliriously happy I’m liable to break into song any fucking moment.

“Sure, all good”, I responded, feigning a smile. “Yourself?”

I followed on a short way behind him, through the hail that assaulted our faces, until we stumbled upon a veritable oasis in the arctic desert. I present to you: the Clove Lodge tea & coffee stop. 

It was an open farm barn that’d been transformed into a self-serve café. It had water, a kettle, tea and coffee, an array of snacks, and even some deckchairs to lounge on. There was also a fridge with ice creams, which I suspect might prove more popular with the Summer Spiners than us lot.

We brewed some tea, kicked back on the deckchairs and munched through packets of crisps, watching the snow blow around outside the barn. It was a picture postcard scene out there, one I was very happy to observe from my comfortable vantage point. Orange jacket guy left, while I spent a bit longer enjoying the view, and licking my wounds.

By the time I set off again, the snow was a little deeper. I had no idea how transformative this would be. The snow was now deep enough to provide real, useful friction. For the first time today, I could run without falling over! Overjoyed didn’t cover it. In fact, I’m not sure there are enough superlatives in the English language to describe how happy this made me!

From here on, I made excellent progress over the undulating snowy fields, easily catching up and overtaking orange jacket guy. The ability to move freely over the terrain freed my mind to focus on nutrition, hydration and pacing, and as I did everything became easier still. I felt like a real runner again. I estimated I’d reach CP3 around 6pm, and planned to catch a solid 3 hours sleep there, in the hope this would stave off further sleep deprivation and hallucinations. 

Heck, maybe I’d sleep even longer. I could treat it like a stage race – run in the day and sleep at night. It’d be like old times at Dragon’s Back. This thought perked me up.

The new race route skirted around Middleton (where the checkpoint used to be in previous years), and dropped me onto a roughly 10k trail that tracked the river up to CP3 at Langdon Back. Calm weather, and a nice, simple riverside trail, I thought. After the ridiculous, unrunnable hell I’d been through today, it had all come good in the end. I’d be back in the warm, tucking into some Langdon Beck curry well before nightfall.

My simple riverside 10k did indeed start off nice and easily, but the path grew progressively trickier, with countless streams, more of those heinous frozen farmer’s fields, boulder hopping, iced tracks alongside steep drops, and iced rocky scramble descents.

This would have all been par for the course, were it not for the change in the weather. The wind picked up, until I was battling freezing headwinds. The rain grew heavy, then torrential. Hail hammered into my face. As darkness fell, the weather cranked up another couple of notches, until the universe was throwing everything it could muster at me.

Wet through and absolutely freezing, I struggled to comprehend how things had deteriorated so rapidly into… this. “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!”, I yelled into the wind, but all I got in return was a mouthful of hailstones.

As I scrambled down the latest iced over boulder descent, I acknowledged that this definitely felt like the Spine now. I think I got a sense of what Nikki Sommers meant when she spoke about being “properly, properly broken”.

But this was just the riverside ramble. What about Cross Fell? What about the Cheviots?

I battled on through the onslaught, counting down the metres to CP3. There was 2k to go now, and it felt like a hundred miles.

The Spine, “Britain’s most brutal”. This wasn’t just marketing bumf. It was genuinely fucking brutal.

Continue reading: Part 5: Alpennine Chilliewack

The post The Spine: Ice Goes Better With Whisky appeared first on The Trail Explorer.