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…
Tag: Bob Graham round
John Kelly’s Grand Round – a triumph of imagination
In April 2017, John Kelly became the fifteenth person to complete the Barkley Marathons. I remember watching him approach the yellow gate that marks the finish, a torn plastic bag draped around his torso offering meagre protection against the roughness of this unforgiving corner of Tennessee. But that wasn’t the story. In the same race,…
Lessons from Kendal
There are things I know and things, from time to time, I need to remember I know. Speaking about my book, The Mountains are Calling, at the Kendal Mountain Literature Festival, I was reminded of the latter: those precious things I must remember I know. There are far more important things than running up and…
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 – 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…
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…
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…
The 100th Ramsay’s Round?
It has taken 39 years, but very soon the number of completions of Ramsay’s Round will reach 100. Successes 98 and 99 came last week, as Damian Hall and Charlie Sproson got round in the allotted 24 hours. Someone has to be number 100. It could be me. In the early hours of Saturday –…
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. 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…
The daddy of all compromises: trying to be a father and a runner
The essence of Nick Hornby’s biographical Fever Pitch is that Arsenal is the author’s constant in life. Amid the flux of education, work and relationships, happiness, sadness and indifference, Arsenal and football remain resilient to the vagaries of life. Come what may, for Hornby, it is Arsenal yesterday, Arsenal today and Arsenal tomorrow. The love…
The unpredictable art of running blogging
I have been blogging for some years. I was a writer and journalist first. My original purpose was to support the publication of my first book, Heights of Madness, and my second and third books thereafter. Over time, heightsofmadness.com graduated into a running blog – a blog that last week pleasingly surpassed 50,000 visits. Writing…
Heights of Madness 