My Christmas mini-tour of Britain took me to Lancashire for the height of the festive season. I was on the Fylde coast, more famous for its illuminations and fairground attractions than its ranges of hills and mountains. Immediately east of the M6 is the Forest of Bowland, however, a wild jumble of hills rising, in…
‘Tough little buggers’
The Bob Graham round has dominated the outdoors news this week. First US ultra-runner Nick Clark ran through atrocious weather to Wasdale before calling it a day. Then two members of Cockermouth mountain rescue team got all the way round with minutes to spare. The challenge set by Rob and I seemed meagre in comparison:…
The world’s most beautiful silouette?
With a Bob Graham recce – utterly weather dependent, of course – scheduled for Friday, a yomp (with 500 metres of overall height gain) over Worcestershire Beacon was a sensible preparatory exercise. I ran from Malvern itself, climbing North Hill via a zigzagging path to a wind-blasted summit. It was beautiful. A retreating sun was…
Preparing to meet Bob
I am taking Askwithian advice when it comes to training for my Bob Graham round (pencilled in for spring 2012): ‘The only regimes that work are those that you can accommodate in your life.’ The question is, how much can I physically (and emotionally) accommodate? It is a gruelling undertaking training for a 70-mile run that involves thousands of…
A mini-Welsh adventure
The first thing – and it really is the very, very first thing – you notice when you return to London from cycling pretty much anywhere in the UK that is not a city or large town, are traffic lights. Hideous, everywhere-you-turn, always-on-red traffic lights. I once counted 60 sets of traffic lights on an eight-mile journey between…
Guest columnist in Scottish Islands Explorer
Re-produced below is the text of a column I wrote for the now-available November/December 2011 edition of Scottish Islands Explorer. Written while travelling on the London Underground – the very antithesis of the Hebrides – the column discusses some of the island’s literal high points, from Conachair on Hirta and Skye’s Sgurr Alasdair to Clisham on Harris and Mull’s Ben More….
Recovery…
Post-marathon recoveries are tricky things to get right. After London in April, I abandoned the sport for a fortnight, then ran 30 miles in the following three days. My body was all at sea. There was an illustration of how not to recover after a marathon. After the Lakeland Trails Marathon in July, I was running sections of the…
Beachy Head Marathon 2011 – race report
So, Beachy Head, the second hardest marathon in the UK. Which only makes you wonder what could be harder. The ironically named Picnic Marathon in Surrey, a quick Google search revealed, with that race climbing 6000ft in 26.2 miles compared to Beachy Head’s 3300ft. Second place it may be, Beachy Head, nevertheless, starts hard, gets…
When running a marathon is no longer enough
I’m running the Beachy Head Marathon tomorrow. It is my ninth marathon in the 11 years I have been old enough to compete over 26.2 miles. Following a 2.50.23 London in April and a 3.15.39 Lakeland Trails in July, Beachy Head is my third marathon this year. Prior to 2011, I had never run more than one marathon…
Reviews for The UK’s County Tops
Reviews continue to come in for The UK’s County Tops. Good ones, I hasten to add. The most noteable is from Grough‘s Bob Smith, who calls the guide a ‘fascinating little book’. Meanwhile, there is a write-up on a walking blog, My Pennines. And there’s also an extract of one of the featured walks (Cornwall’s Brown Willy)…
If all else fails… cheat
This must be the news story of the week. Rob Sloan, a competitor in the Saloman Kielder Marathon, which took place at the weekend, didn’t fancy completing the full 26.2-mile course. Well, who can blame him? It’s a long way. So, after reaching mile 20, he caught a bus. He rejoined the race shortly before…
London 2012 (the marathon, not the Olympics)
I knew what had happened, what was happening, from my news feed on Facebook. My dad was happy. A former work colleague was exultant but nervous. Another friend was disappointed. I hastily began home; a letter from the people who run the Virgin London Marathon beckoning me. I was in. Of course, I was. I…
Heights of Madness 