Maybe Carroll Shelby isn’t the first person most people think of while sprinting down the side of a mountain in the middle of Cumbria, but we are where we are. You see I glanced at my watch and realised my heart rate had been red lining for almost two hours. But do you know how it felt? It felt incredible. And so I remembered a treadmill session earlier in the year. It was on my lunch break and I’d been watching Ford vs Ferrari while putting in the extra miles. There’s a sequence where Matt Damon, playing Carroll Shelby, talks about the feeling of driving at 7,000 RPM. There’s a point at 7,000 RPM… where everything fades. The machine becomes weightless. Just disappears. And all that’s left is a body moving through space and time. 7,000 RPM. That’s where you meet it. You feel it coming. It creeps up on... View Article
I had a startling moment of clarity as I slogged my way along Val Travenanzes: I’ve got life wrong, I thought. It’s all wrong. I’m not capable of running ultra marathons, my body can’t hold this much stress. I can never, ever, do this again. Time to quit running and spend my money on therapy. You can’t run from your problems forever. I was done. It had started gloriously. I’d came into the race off the back of a horrible training spell where nothing would come together but, as we started the ascent out of La Val early morning, that faded away. I felt like my halcyon days had returned. I was controlling my effort and still making good time. Hundreds of bodies moving in what seemed to be a single organism, first in a crowd but morphing into a long line. We were being lured into running fast through... View Article
I remember my first fell race, the Chevy Chase on the first Saturday of July 2017. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, harder than the road marathons I’d been doing around the time, and for about three days afterwards I’d have to steady myself on things while my quads twitched and groaned at random. For the years after that progress was fairly linear, each year I chose bigger challenges and got generally fitter. Lockdown was an opportunity to push hard and while I couldn’t get into the hills, I got quicker on the flat and ran higher volumes. At the back of my mind was a little voice that said I had to maintain my fitness and keep building until I’d ticked everything off the list; I knew how hard it was to get there, I didn’t want to face doing it again. And that held up until... View Article
December 31, 2023,
by Pete
The descent through the forest was wild. I’ve never experienced anything like it, and I’m not sure I ever want to again. It was the dead of night and we were following each other’s head-torches through the trees. Flattish sections gave way to sudden steep drops that could only be managed by clinging onto tree trunks while the trail disintegrated beneath your feet. Emerging from the tree line a reflective arrow glinted in the head torches and pointed us left onto a road. A full moon hung in the sky ahead of us, illuminating the ribbon of asphalt as it carved its way through the alps. I increased my stride length a little to put some space between me and the guys I was near and turned off my head-torch to run by moonlight. It was as close to perfect as a running moment can be. The night was calm... View Article
Ultra Trail Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur – 100M race report For a good few hours on Friday night, I though it was on. I felt invincible, blinded by adrenaline, pushing myself back up through the field. It’d been a rotten start. I felt fatigued and under the weather from the get go. I decided to start near the back and take things easy, knowing I should be able to make up places later on. The first section is a short climb on a fire road followed by a trail with switchbacks to get you down into Saint-Étienne-de-Tinée, where local school children formed a scream tunnel of outstretched arms that echoed, “allez, allez, allez”. From there it’s straight into a 1400m climb up to Refuge de Rabuons. The early afternoon heat was oppressive and the climb seemed to go on for days. I took a good long stop at the aid... View Article
September 9, 2023,
by Pete
There’s probably not a large amount to be written in a race report for a race you DNF’d 2km in, but I did learn something about myself: I discovered I’m the kind of person who’ll be violently ill for six hours then try to run across the alps in a snow storm. I might not achieve my goals, but I’m relieved to know I’m still stupid enough to try. I’d been feeling pretty confident in the morning. There was a severe weather warning – snow, wind, plummeting temperatures – but I thought that could play to the advantage of British runners. As I frequently assert, I’m from the north. I was in the right head space to try something hard. It felt like this was a moment I could grasp. As I gazed up as the storm clouds drifting across the Alps, I thought of Antoine de Saint-Expury in Sand,... View Article
It all started with an invite to Jane’s birthday party. She moved to Switzerland, seemingly 50% for the skiing and 50% so she could send photos of mountains home to taunt the rest of us. So her party happens to be in the shadow of Mont Blanc: bit of a long way if we’re honest but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for friendship. I’m benevolent like that. I start to look at flights and wonder if it wouldn’t be best to combine the trip with a little running. One thing leads to another, It’s UTMB week after the party and Chamonix starts to whisper my name. Could I really fly home only to sit in front of my laptop dot watching races and wishing I was there? In spite of my conflicting feelings about their influence in the sport, every year it feels like everyone is at UTMB.... View Article
There was a beautiful dissatisfaction to every breath as I pushed my way up to Passo del Monte Moro, the high point of MEHT. I was breathing heavily and the air was crisp, clean and scented with pine trees – but at sea-level the air is 21% oxygen, at the pass that drops to about 14.5%. It’s not extreme altitude, but my lungs sure knew about it. I’ve been following a training plan and have had weeks of building up again following the Bob Graham effort. Less overall volume but more quality, with some cracking sessions. The plan said to try to find a race that would take six hours and be steep and technical: Monterosa Eat Himalayan Trail Sky packs a lot into it’s 38km, with 3100m of elevation gain and a mammoth ascent that’s dwarfed only by the even bigger descent. Perfect. My strategy was to keep the... View Article
I definitely said to Sarah, as I trudged dejectedly into Wasdale, refusing to believe the profuse encouragement that said I could do it, “here’s Fiora, she’ll let me quit”. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure how I reached that conclusion. Maybe I was hallucinating and thought I saw someone who’d let me walk away. That’s not what I got. As we walked to the gate of the car park, she looked me dead in the tear filled eyes and said, “okay, when you go through this gate you’re on leg four. We’ve made you some of that whiskey tea, then you’re going up the next hill.” I was not impressed. None of my support crew would listen when I explained I was quitting. I was being spoon fed porridge. My shoes were changed. I went to the loo and stared down a long drop realising my options were... View Article
There’s a scene in Air, the movie about the birth of the Air Jordan brand, where Matt Damon, thinking he’s failed, phones his friend. “Thank you for believing in me,” he says. Both Miguel de Montaigne and C.S Lewis have written more eloquently than I could on friendship but neither of them, to my knowledge, ever attempted the Bob Graham Round. I’d venture, therefore, that those of us who have may have something to add. I’m sure Miguel would’ve had some flare on the alpine trails and Clive would’ve been a menace around Oxford uni’s cinder track, but the Bob wasn’t on their list and that’s a shame because they missed out on the selfless fellowship it provides. Perhaps the most moving part of attempting the Bob Graham Round is descending on Keswick with a small army of supporters, knowing that for the next 24 hours each one will do... View Article
