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…
Category: Scotland
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….
A question of how: running the Ring of Fire
‘It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it,’ sang Ella Fitzgerald in the late 1930s (and, much later, repeated by a collaboration of Fun Boy Three and Bananarama), with the chorus ending resoundingly: ‘And that’s what gets results.’ There is a metaphor for life – and for running around in the…
The Mountains are Calling: the launch and the blog tour
The Mountains are Calling was published last week, with a launch at Edinburgh Waterstones. The book is now available in bookshops and via online sellers. Please let me know what you think of The Mountains are Calling here or via the usual social media channels. A blog tour straddled the launch. The highlights are below….
Beautiful Madness
In a life that stretches to more than 13,000 days, I can boil my existence down to five truly momentous days. The day I got I married. The day my first daughter was born. The day my second daughter was born. The day I completed the Bob Graham Round. The day I completed Ramsay’s Round….
365 days of hill running wisdom: April
Day 91: ‘Every time you go for a run, take a stone from the top of Scald Law and put it on Carnethy. We only need 3 metres off one and 3 metres added to the other if that, taking into account glacial rebound and remeasurement by the OS. We can do it!’ New identity…
Running books – what’s in a name?
There is, it seems, a rule for anyone who wants to write a book about running. It must have the word ‘running’, ‘run’ or ‘ran’ in the title – just to leave the reader in no doubt about the subject matter. Eat and Run Running Hard Run Mummy Run Running High Run Wild Running for…
365 Days of Hill Running Wisdom – March
Day 61: An insight into the High Peak Marathon: ‘The descent off Lose Hill was something to behold – a frantic, impossibly slippy, muddy, vertical drop. Most logical humans would take their time to pick a good footing and a safe line off such a death trap – not so fell runners.’ Day 62: The…
Ultra running: the art of futility
On a particularly hot day in the summer of 2014, I ran between the summits of London’s 12 Inner London boroughs. Starting from Hammersmith and Fulham, moving clockwise to the Isle of Dogs, going as far east as Greenwich, and then west to Wimbledon Common, I travelled 41 miles, venturing no higher than 134 metres…
To go to the hills by any means is prose. But to run among them? This is poetry…
I have been running for almost 22 hours. Running is probably the wrong word. I have been moving – insistently moving over the summits of the 23 Munros that form the wild, high loop of Ramsay’s Round, Scotland’s classic 24-hour mountain running challenge. I am running down the rubble of the tourist track on Ben…
Why running is the ultimate adventure
It is 5am in the Scottish Highlands. The darkness is total; the temperature a few degrees above freezing. On this late-November morning, it will be three hours before dawn breaks. The silence is vast, only interrupted by the clacking of studded shoes on a single-track road. Suddenly, the clack is no more. The runner has…
What is it about the Carnethy 5?
The field lies open and exposed, looking up to Scald Law and Carnethy, the highest points of the brown and grey Pentland Hills. Above a saturated bog is a hummock of low grass, decorated by clumps of scruffy gorse. Runners cower in the vegetation, squatting on ground littered with sheep droppings, pinning numbers on vests,…
Heights of Madness 