The Spine (Part 1 of 7)
My Legendary Triad: The backstory to my running the Winter Spine 2024
When I first started running ultramarathons and speaking to competitors on start lines, they would reel off long lists of famous international races they had run. Marathon des Sables, UTMB, Spartathlon, Comrades.
But there were three UK races whose names and reputations leapt out at me. I didn’t even really know what they were, I just knew they sounded absolutely epic. I called them the Legendary Triad.
At the time, I never imagined I’d run the Legendary Triad. But from small acorns, oak trees grow…
The first of the three races was called the Arc of Attrition. Let me say that again: the Arc of Attrition. I was used to a certain percentage of DNFs in ultras, but to describe a race as attritional… what sort of insanity was that?
100 miles around the notoriously gnarly South West Coast Path in the middle of the British winter, that’s what. I first ran the Arc in 2022, and I couldn’t believe how perilous it was. I was just happy to finish uninjured. To prove to myself that my finish wasn’t simply down to luck, I returned the following year, and collected my second gold buckle. I could tick the Arc off of my list.
The second race in the triad was called the Dragon’s Back. Its logo featured a bright red dragon with an imposing array of spikes running the length of its back. This was not any old dragon though, but Y Ddraig Goch, the legendary dragon of Welsh myth and folklore. Apt, for a race that ran the full length of Wales, billed as ‘the world’s toughest mountain race’.
Despite my genuine fear about traversing Crib Goch, the notorious grade 1 scramble up Snowdon, I nevertheless ran Dragon’s Back in 2022. The DNF rate that year was an eyewatering 62%. It was easily my hardest challenge to-date. I almost lost my nerve on some of the mountain scrambles, and the unrelenting challenge of terrain and weather figuratively and literally brought me to my knees. Nevertheless, I made it to Cardiff castle, and collected my finisher’s statue in the shape of the Red Dragon, Y Ddraig Goch. That was two of the three races conquered.
The last race was the Spine. Its name didn’t give much away. It sounded somewhat enigmatic to me, but with dark, grisly, menacing undertones. It was always spoken about with a respect that bordered on reverence.
The few race photos I’d seen invariably depicted snow, ice and frozen beards:
I knew nothing else about it, really, other than it was the ultimate challenge. Tougher than Dragon’s Back. More attritional than the Arc of Attrition. It was, in a word, serious. Potentially injurious.
But the die was cast.
Despite the Spine’s niche appeal, its entry requirements, and its price tag, the 150-odd spots are nonetheless so hotly contested as to make even Glastonbury look unpopular. Places sell out within just a couple of minutes. Not wanting to be caught out, I pre-prepared the text for my application, and moved meetings to ensure I could give the entry my complete focus when the website opened.
At noon on the dot, hundreds of aspiring Spine runners and I all pounced on the website, frantically trying to access the entry form and submit our applications. The website crashed almost immediately. After 30 minutes of shared panic, the organisers pulled the plug and apologised for the false start. The website technicians got to work scaling their backend services, and a new date was set for a month’s time. I’d have to endure the fight for Spine places once again.
When the second entry window rolled around, I was ready. The website held up, and I managed to submit my application in under 60 seconds. It was both an almighty relief, and a sobering trepidation, to bag one of the remaining places.
I’m not one who prepares for races long in advance. I’ll normally be found packing my kit the week, or maybe the night before a race, invariably cursing myself for not sorting things out earlier. At least it gives me a pre-canned excuse should things go wrong!
This time, I was taking no chances. I figured I’d start preparations in September, straight after I returned from UTMB. This would give me 4 whole months to assess the kit list, buy anything I needed, execute a targeted training plan, run a few recces, and practice, practice, practice with my kit. I would be ready for this, I convinced myself.
Well. You may not know this, but UTMB didn’t go so well. While I did finish the race, I was far from happy with my performance. You’ve not read a blog post about it, because I never got very far with writing one. I simply couldn’t make sense of the unsatisfying outcome of the race, which had been my big goal for years. I was frankly pretty depressed about it. Afterwards, I didn’t feel much like running, let alone preparing for the Spine.
Nonetheless, I forced myself to sit down and read the Spine’s mandatory kit list, which didn’t make me feel any better. Never in my life had I seen a mandatory kit list like this. It was 25 pages long. Twenty-five pages. Ultramarathons typically have a quarter or half-page kit list. Which ultramarathon has a 25 page kit list? It boggled the mind. I made a few tentative purchases, most notably the complete sleep system which comprised a sleeping bag, mat and bivvy. I felt I was making some progress.
Unfortunately, this coincided with the start of an extremely busy period at work. It ballooned to consume both my evenings and my weekends. I struggled to make time for anything else, and sleep became more of a luxury than a habit. The Spine slipped down my priority list, until it fell right off it altogether.
By November, I was nearing burnout. I was left with no choice but to completely overhaul my responsibilities at work, and rebuild a sustainable work-life balance from the ground up. During this process, I remembered the Spine. It was now just two months away. I dug out the race information and mandatory kit list, sat down and properly read it all cover-to-cover. The scale of the challenge began to dawn on me. I could plainly see that two months was not long enough to prepare for it.
I started a spreadsheet to track all the kit items, which soon grew to some 135 rows. The complexities around planning for such a long race, in both distance and time, were numerous. Mandatory spares in my pack. Spares in my drop bag in case those wet out, or break, or become lost. Larger sizes in the event of swelling. What if it’s unrelenting rain the whole week? What about deep snow? The “what-ifs” kept coming, and my kit list kept growing.
As if time wasn’t already tight enough, another unforeseen problem had manifested. By the 1st of November, the Gazan death toll had reached 8,700 people, with over 22,000 injuries. Much of northern Gaza had already been flattened by the US-backed Israeli military offensive, with some 183,000 residential units damaged or destroyed. The Gazan people were struggling to find food, water and basic shelter. It was a humanitarian disaster that looked ominously like it was building toward genocide. No matter what race I was planning to run, I couldn’t ignore that.
So, on the weekends I had earmarked to travel north and recce sections of the Spine route, I instead had to travel south to march endlessly around the streets of London, chanting “Free, Free Palestine” like a mindless robot. I made sure I ran all the way to the marches, but that wasn’t in any way comparable to a Spine route recce. Nonetheless, unless and until the fomenting genocide stopped, it couldn’t be helped. Under our democratic system, I had a responsibility to speak out.
The one exception to this was a weekend running retreat I’d booked long ago down in Dartmoor, called The Way of The Runner. While it clashed with one of the key London protests, I felt I couldn’t miss it. Hosted by the author of Running with the Kenyans, Adharanand Finn, it was destined to be a fun event. But more to the point from the perspective of Spine prep, Damian Hall (aka Ultra Damo), winner of Spine 2023, would be there too. If there was anyone worth speaking to about my Spine prep nightmare, it was him.
I came away from the weekend with a joyous energy. Damo has long been my biggest inspiration in running, and to find he was just as inspirational in real life as in his books, was a genuinely life-affirming takeaway. I found myself fascinated by Adharanand too, whose natural skill at storytelling shone through. If you get an opportunity to attend one of their running retreats, take it. The whole experience was totally worth it, whether you’re planning something as stupid as running the Spine or not.
I jotted down a whole page of Spine notes from Damo. My overall takeaway was probably not to worry about it quite so much. But then again, that was coming from a Spine winner and 5th place UTMB finisher. I had managed a paltry 174th place. Maybe I should keep worrying after all…
By Christmas, I felt like I had the kit list largely under control. Sure, my spreadsheet still had an awful lot of red rows; but there was more green than red overall, and many of the big ticket items were crossed off. My attention turned to the fact that I’d not run a single recce, and most of the kit I’d bought was completely untested.
So, taking advantage of the lull in protests over the Christmas break, I headed up to the northern Pennines for a few days. This would not only allow me to recce the notorious Cross Fell, but it’d be my only opportunity to test my kit. I had to make it count.
The weather was pretty shocking up there. Snow, wind, hail, bog, 2 metre visibility – I had it all. I got to try on my shoes and socks, and run with a decent proportion of my kit. I was rather astonished by how slowly I made progress over the terrain under these conditions. Unsure whether I was emboldened or disheartened by the experience, I had to accept this was the best I’d be able to manage pre-race.
I still had a lot of outstanding kit to buy. Online orders went in until the very last minute, with the final delivery arriving on Friday afternoon, just 20 hours before my departure. I whooped with delight as I turned the last row of my kit spreadsheet green, and proved that I could stuff it all into my backpack and drop bag.
That still left my nutrition to plan and prepare, a pretty important task if I wanted to complete this race. And when I flicked to the “todo” tab of my spreadsheet, another sea of red hit me. It barely looked like it’d been touched.
I devised a nutrition plan of sorts in less than an hour, and stuffed the worryingly similar selection of sports nutrition into bags for each checkpoint. Was I really going to be able to run 268 miles purely on this monotonous collection of gels and chews? There was no time to worry about that now.
I worked late into the night. At 2am, I started writing an aid station checklist, and by 3am I had it printed and laminated. The rest of the todo list had better not be important, because it wasn’t going to get done.
I managed just a few hours of sleep before my brother arrived to whisk me up to Edale for race registration. Sitting in the passenger seat on the drive up, I finally found myself with some time to reflect on how preparation had gone. I’d started work on this race in September. Headwinds notwithstanding, I’d had four months to prepare. How was I so ridiculously unprepared, again?
What I did feel ready for, though, was the finish line in Kirk Yetholm. If I made it there, in one piece, then I was going to fly my Palestinian flag. Never mind my Legendary Triad, this run was now for the people of Palestine.
Continue reading: Part 2: Pride Comes Before a DNF
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