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…
Category: Writing
Running Hard blog tour
To mark the paperback release of Steve Chilton’s book Running Hard: the story of a rivalry on Thursday, I am hosting a guest post from the author as part of a three-day blog tour. Here Steve discusses the process of researching, interviewing and finding a voice. When I started thinking about my third book (Running Hard)…
Running in the boot marks of Wainwright
‘The face of Place Fell overlooking Patterdale is unremittingly and uncompromisingly steep,’ wrote Alfred Wainwright in his pictorial guide to the Far Eastern Fells of the Lake District. Wainwright recommends any ascent of the 657-metre peak that rises above Ullswater but this. And that is where I find myself, trudging upwards on pathless mountainside, the…
Donnie Campbell: a record-breaking winter Ramsay’s Round
Donnie Campbell has been running for 20 hours. He is shrouded in the darkness of a Scottish night in December. He is climbing Aonach Beag, the seventh highest mountain in Britain. As he ascends, a wall of snow, glistening in the glow of a headtorch, rears above his head. The microspikes that might have eased…
Feeling the Burns
‘Yon wild mossy mountains sae lofty and wide,’ Robert Burns noted in 1786. Scotland’s national poet of Auld Lang Syne repute could have been contemplating the waves of brown bumps that characterise the landscape of the Scottish Borders. Burns was no runner. He probably would have scoffed at the idea. Burns found compulsion elsewhere. As…
The call of the mountains
It is 7am on Sunday. A furious wind tries to stop me opening the car door. The forecast is for 50mph gales. I have scheduled a four-hour run in the Pentlands, the green and brown hills that back on to Edinburgh’s southern fringe. From the car park, the ascent of my first hill – 478-metre…
Beautiful Madness
Below is my article, ‘Beautiful madness,’ on the Glen Coe Skyline, published in the Scotsman magazine. @MuirJonny
Defining the hill race: ‘I had neither time to think nor breath to speak with.’
Robert Louis Stevenson was no hill runner. Not that such a pursuit would have occurred to the Edinburgh novelist. In Stevenson’s lifetime, running up hills was not a thing, certainly not in the recreational sense. It was not until 1895 – a year after his death – that a man decided to time himself to…
Why we go to the hills… and how to join us
Some years ago I was running in the Eastern Fells of the Lake District. As I descended a mountain called High Street, I passed a walker. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ he shouted incredulously into the breeze. I smiled. Encumbered by boots and bag, I wondered the same: How…
Not another kit review: an appreciation of the OMM Ultra 15 rucksack
This is just a note to say thank you. I have never told you how much you mean to me. Until now. I did not want you at first. All those years ago, when I first saw you – in the flesh, not just in those glossy pictures on the web that I couldn’t stop…
Running on the edge: on foot on Scotland’s west coast
A British expat living in Thailand was visiting a tourist centre on Koh Chang when a photograph, purportedly of the island’s Kai Bae beach, engaged his attention. To the casual observer, nothing was amiss. Here was an illustration of the unerring beauty of the Koh Chang coastline: a white-sand beach, a cobalt sea, a shimmering…
Running. What’s the point? Strava, of course.
Iain Whiteside was running. What was Whiteside thinking about when he was running? Strava, of course. ‘I realised I had spent the previous 30 minutes thinking about what I was going to name this run,’ he admitted. Whiteside stopped running. He was on Braid Hill in Edinburgh. Inspiration came to him: ‘At a standstill on…
Heights of Madness 