I am the keeper of the records for the Rigby Round, an entirely self-appointed role and inherited from no-one, but inspired by the desire to maintain a list of those people who succeed in the dogged task of running a continuous loop of 18 Munros of the Cairngorms, ideally within 24 hours. The Rigby Round…
Category: Munros
Running the Rigby Round – the Cairngorms in one go
The glory is in the doing, not in the having done. These words have become my mantra. They are words to live a life by and they are words that ring with deafening truth when I go to the mountains. But what if the doing is insufferable. What then happens to glory? The Rigby Round…
The 2018 Glen Coe Skyline: The One When Scotland Won
As the years go by, like Friends, the Glen Coe Skyline has an episodic quality to it. First, in 2015, there was The (Very Successful) Pilot. Then, a year later, The One With the Obstacle Racer, before 2017’s The One When Kilian Came to Scotland. This year could have been similarly titled – perhaps The…
The preciousness of time in high places
‘A trip, a slide, a tumble – how slender is our attachment to life, but how precious its gift when we are in the mountains.’ I often think of the words of Martin Moran. They refer, starkly, to death, but they also provide an eloquent summary of what it means to go to the mountains….
What to read when you read about hill running
WHAT TO READ WHEN YOU READ ABOUT HILL RUNNING Writing and running are activities connected by extended metaphor: while running is prose, hill (or fell) running is poetry. This sport, therefore, demands writing of the highest ilk. In the course of research for my own book on hill running, The Mountains Are Calling, I have…
Beautiful Madness
Below is my article, ‘Beautiful madness,’ on the Glen Coe Skyline, published in the Scotsman magazine. @MuirJonny
Alpinism meets mountain running: the inaugural Glen Coe Skyline
Midges clung to the perspiring face of Emilie Forsberg as she caught her breath. Forsberg – an extraordinarily talented Swedish ultrarunner and girlfriend of the equally extraordinarily talented Kilian Jornet – had spent the previous eight hours running across towering summits and precipitous ridges in the Highlands as skyrunning came to Scotland for the first…
Running the summits of the Inner London boroughs
Doctor Andrew Murray is at it again. Not content with running from Scotland to Morocco, galloping up Mount Kilimanjaro or jogging to the North Pole, he has this week announced that he is going to run the 10 highest Scottish mountains in one day. This is why: ‘We are doing this because we had a…
What is Alan Hinkes up to at the moment? … and other questions
Traffic – is that the right way to describe people? – to this blog arrives via a plethora of web searches. Handily, WordPress lists these terms. Many are questions: some are perfectly logical, others make me question the sanity of the human race. However, according to the web search questions, people do not want much….
Two out of three ain’t bad…
Having survived my altercation with the ghost of a Jacobite in Glen Shiel, I ventured east, first to Inverness, then to Moray. I had a three-day Bank Holiday plan. Day 1 – The Glen Challenge, a 10-mile trail race that forms part of the Glenurquhart Highland Gathering and Games in Drumnadrochit; Day 2 – Ben…
Macaroni cheese, the perverted Jacobite and the South Glen Shiel Ridge 9
What can one expect of a day that commences with the consumption of a can of lukewarm macaroni cheese, eaten with a Debenhams gift card? Standing in an empty layby near the Cluanie Inn, I gazed skywards at the mist-covered South Glen Shiel ridge. The forecast was for this theme to continue: mist and intermittent…
Knoydart 3
‘Land of the giants,’ a running friend remarked when I announced I was Knoydart-bound. Knoydart is a wild, west coast peninsula suffused in the mythology of the outdoors: a place of extremes, a place of dreams. The Rough Bounds – as Knoydart is also known – have also been over-described as Scotland’s ‘last wilderness; that…
Heights of Madness 