‘Probably the running book I have most enjoyed.’ STEVE BIRKINSHAW
N E V A E B Y ALL
2020r: the yea runninsgwere recordritten r ew
ALLY BEAVEN
2020: the
records we year running
re rewritten
Vertebrate Publishing, Sheffield www.v-publishing.co.uk
3 Sabrina Verje
e
Difficult as it is for someone in the Highlands to admit, the Lake District is the hub of UK mountain running. There are more races per year, more clubs per capita, more bumbags per square kilometre than anywhere else in the country, by a very long way. In the summer months it is nearly impossible to take your dog for a walk without accidentally joining a fell race. That group of a dozen Herdwicks you startled coming off Fairfield was actually an Ambleside AC club run. In amongst all this mountain-running ubiquity are a fair number of rounds and records, and they were always going to be at the forefront of the summer’s goings-on. In the interests of narrative progression it might have been good to start with something a little more modest but, alas, I was not consulted and things got off to a monumental start with the daddy of them all, the Wainwrights. An accountant by profession, Alfred Wainwright is best known as an avid fell walker, guidebook author and misanthrope. Although a prolific writer, by far the most famous of his works are the seven 24
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volumes of his Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, published between 1955 and 1966, which provide hand-drawn illustrations and handwritten descriptions of 214 Lake District hills. Enduringly popular, the books have sold millions of copies and are considered by many to be unsurpassed. Completing all the Wainwrights inevitably became a favourite pastime of hillwalking anoraks, in a similar fashion to the Munros in Scotland, and from there it was only a matter of time before some dafty got it into their head to run them all in one go. It hasn’t been done many times, and for obvious reasons. The wrong side of 500 kilometres and 35,000 metres of climbing, the logistics amount to almost as much of a pain in the arse as the running. A quick scan of those completions makes one thing obvious: it is almost definitely a terrible idea. Alan Heaton was the first to complete the round, starting and finish ing at Moot Hall in Keswick. No great shakes over shorter distances (he once finished 422nd of 467 at a national cross-country champion ships), Heaton was, along with his brother Ken, one of the leading lights of very long distance running through the 1960s and 1970s, breaking the Lakeland 24-Hour Record three times and running the Pennine Way in just over four days. Fifty-seven years old in 1985, in nine days and sixteen hours he visited 214 fells and one hospital, where he was put on a course of antibiotics to fight infection in his feet. The very next year, Joss Naylor took his turn. Not much needs to be said about Joss Naylor. He is fell running’s greatest icon, equal parts sporting superstar and folk hero. He equalled Heaton’s tally of three Lakeland 24-Hour records and one Pennine Way, plus a whole lot more besides: ten wins at the Lake District Mountain Trial, nine in a row at the Ennerdale Horseshoe, the Welsh 3,000s record, and on and on and on. There are so many stories about Joss that it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s apocryphal. My personal favourite is that as a shepherd he worked with two dogs rather than three as most 25
BROKEN shepherds would, covering the ground of a border collie himself. In 1986 he slightly modified Heaton’s route and carved off a huge chunk of time, finishing in seven days and one hour. A heatwave last ing almost the whole week meant Naylor’s shoes rubbed so badly that by the end you could see his tendons through the holes in his ankles. This was enough to put anyone off trying it again for eighteen years, but in 2014 Steve Birkinshaw popped himself into the Wainwrights grinder and emerged after just six days and thirteen hours, half a day faster than Joss. In similarly warm weather, he got around the shoerub issue by taking them off wherever possible, padding up the fells in just his socks. If you think that this is a little bit funny and kind of cute, you’re right. Less funny are the health problems that Steve suffered after his round. Unshakeable fatigue, mental fog, repeated attempts and failures to return to training and racing. Steve’s blog from those years, and the final chapters of his book There is No Map In Hell, read like a cautionary tale for aspiring long-distance fell runners. Most recently, in June 2019, the record was broken by Paul Tierney of Ambleside. Originally from Cork, an inter-county hurler turned fell runner and coach with a love of long distances and a penchant for foul language, Paul ran round in six days, six hours and five minutes, finishing up the packed high street of market day in Keswick to be greeted by his parents and a pint.
Like James Stewart on the John Muir Way, Sabrina Verjee was always planning an attempt on the Wainwrights in 2020. Initially pencilled in for May, she put it back to June to allow her to run the Cape Wrath Ultra, before race cancellations and lockdown threw everything into disarray. Training alone through much of spring, Sabrina was impat ient to get started. Then from the middle of May, restrictions on exercise were lifted. Equally importantly, the ban on meeting people 26
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from other households was removed, meaning Sabrina would not need to be unsupported on the hill. ‘To me that was the government saying, “Go and do the Wainwrights.”’ Sabrina set off on 2 June. Though she thought the round was now possible, the restrictions that remained in place made life difficult. Her support team was stripped back as far as it could be: single, socially distanced support runners who couldn’t enter Sabrina’s tran sition area between legs and who had to make their own way home because they couldn’t be given a lift. In spite of this, things went well early on. After the first four legs, Sabrina arrived in Wasdale in good shape and an hour ahead of schedule. But there was a problem. While she was up on the fells, her crew had been contacted by Andrew Slattery. An accomplished fell runner and ultrarunner, Slattery is Bob Graham Club member #1836. He is also the Assistant Chief Constable of Cumbria Police, and he said that what Sabrina was doing was illegal. The problem was that, at this stage, overnight stays away from home were not allowed. ‘I hadn’t realised I was doing anything illegal as I didn’t have a camper van or tent; I wasn’t staying anywhere. He said it was illegal as I wasn’t staying in my own home and I asked him if he could doublecheck because it seemed mad! So he went away and consulted with lawyers, but came back saying yes, it was definitely illegal. So I asked him to give me a heads-up and let me know when it was legal. I did feel for him because he was just doing his job and he did get a lot of flak for it.’ Fantastic though it is to imagine Slattery striding through the hills, magnifying glass in hand, following a trail of stud marks and care lessly discarded energy gel packets, rubbing bits of mud between his fingers and squinting into the distance with a furrowed brow, half Sherlock Holmes, half animal tracker, Sabrina’s downfall was a lot more mundane and modern than that. She was carrying a GPS tracker, 27
BROKEN the link for which found its way on to social media. The jugular of her run was cut by the sharp side of the double-edged dot-watching sword. The all-clear from the Assistant Chief Constable came in late June; from 4 July she’d be good to go again. After a few days’ delay for heavy rain, Sabrina got going at 3 a.m. on Monday 6 July. Her schedule was eyebrow-raisingly ambitious. Paul Tierney’s record stood at six days, six hours and five minutes. Sabrina wanted to run the round of all 214 Wainwright fells in six days flat. Rather than running faster, she planned to break the record by resting less and being more efficient. Tierney had made similar tactics a part of his attempt the previous year, but Sabrina’s schedule took things to an extreme. ‘I know I’m not as fast as Paul or Steve, but what I have got on my side is that I am bloody efficient! I’ve been adventure racing for years and I’m damn quick in my transitions. I don’t faff; I just get on with it. Faffing is definitely a man thing. I see it a lot on the Spine [Race]. The guys get into transition and sit on their chair and just sort of stare for a while, then there’s this slow coming-to as they realise what it is they need to do. And I’ve already left.’ Having spent more than my fair share of time sitting in race checkpoints in the middle of the night, staring at the floor like a slack-jawed moron and sipping dreadful instant coffee, it’s hard not to take these comments personally. Changing socks and restocking energy gels in an expedient manner is one thing, but what was really striking about Sabrina’s schedule was how little sleep she planned to take. Running right through the first night, there would be a total of seven hours’ sleep over the following five nights. People respond to sleep deprivation in different ways. Some seem able to trudge on for day after day on very little; while for others, missing anything more than one night is completely catastro phic. Even so, scrolling through Sabrina’s schedule in the early days of 28
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her run, all I found myself thinking was, ‘Can she do that? Can anyone do that?’ On top of all her adventure-racing experience, Sabrina has won races on the Pennine Way in winter and summer; she knows better than anyone what she’s capable of in those circumstances. Things got off to a lightning-fast start. At Wasdale, the furthest point of her illegal June attempt, she was two and a half hours ahead. Twenty-four hours later she was still ahead, but her buffer had been reduced to twenty minutes. Thursday morning came around and after three days, half the scheduled time for the round, it still looked like it might be possible; down on schedule at Kentmere, but by little more than half an hour. As often happens, she had been supported on the hill by the current record holder, Paul Tierney, and his predecessor, Steve Birkinshaw. She had company in the fells north of Keswick, passing within little more than a mile of Kim Collison, who had set off from Braithwaite at 3 a.m. on Saturday to attempt to break the Lakeland 24-Hour Record. Kim’s was a significant undertaking: 12,000 metres of climbing over seventy-eight peaks would be required to better Mark Hartell’s twenty-three-year-old record, a mark that had withstood the atten tion of a number of Lake District notables in the preceding decades. As Sabrina was arriving at Dodd Wood at 10 a.m., five hours behind schedule, Kim was descending to Dunmail Raise, twenty-six peaks in the bag and ahead of record pace. Since Monday morning, Sabrina had become the darling of the dot-watching world, and for those glued to her tracker, things were getting anxious. News circulated that she was having trouble with her knees. Some remained optimistic: five hours down on a schedule that was six hours faster than the record meant that she was still an hour ahead of the record, right? She could still do this! (It doesn’t really work like that.) Others assumed a more realistic outlook: the trend over the last two days made an outright record unlikely, but she would still become the first woman to complete a round of the Wainwrights 29
BROKEN and probably in the second-fastest time. For all, there were nagging doubts: the lack of sleep, to say nothing of all the hills, could be catching up with Sabrina. The wheels could soon be off, and in spectacular style. Six hours later and Kim Collison was descending into Wasdale, a further twenty-five peaks ticked off. At the same time Sabrina was on her way down Sale Fell. She had added just two Wainwrights to her tally. One of those was Binsey, the round’s biggest outlier and, as Paul Tierney would have it, ‘the feckin’ asshole of the Wainwrights’, but still, it was a section that Paul had done over an hour quicker. Saturday morning’s ships-in-the-night act was reprised in the early hours of Sunday. As Sabrina rested at Rannerdale, up above Kim tagged the cairn of Grasmoor. It was twenty-four hours of contrasting fortunes. Sabrina struggled. The problems with her knee and the general fatigue of six days in the hills had reduced her to a walk, and a slow, painful walk at that. Time losses were significant. As Kim ran back into Braithwaite at quarter to three, setting down a strong early contender for Run of the Year, Sabrina struggled down Rannerdale Knotts, her deficit double what it had been a day earlier. By the time she arrived at Newlands Hause, the round’s final stop, at midday on Sunday, Kim was very long gone and Sabrina was over twelve hours down on schedule. The final six Wainwrights were scheduled to take four and a half hours. They took almost double that. Sabrina arrived at Moot Hall at nine minutes to nine, six days, seventeen hours and fifty-one minutes after she started. Among the socially distanced crowd that met her there was Joss Naylor. It was instantly big news. Running websites, outdoor magazines and even non-specialist outfits rushed to get their stories online. It was covered online, in print, on radio and TV, a clearly still slightly bleary Sabrina giving socially distant interviews. It was an undeniably powerful story: the first woman to run the Wainwrights, persevering through 30
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nearly a week, much of it in a good deal of pain, and in the third-fastest time. Faster even than Joss! Unfortunately, it wasn’t the whole story.
The problems with Sabrina’s knee had been serious. ‘Pain is one thing – you can just block that out, just get on with it – but I couldn’t actually bend the thing. I think it might have been bursitis, the whole thing was just so inflamed.’ This immobilisation had proved debilitating, and as early as Friday afternoon she had been unable to go downhill unaided, leaning on her support runner, Little Dave Cumins, to make it down off Clough Head. Fortunately, Little Dave’s name refers to his height; he’s a strap ping lad, more than up to being used as a crutch. But although the support team’s roles are many and varied, there is one thing they are definitely not there to do. ‘I had assistance, physical assistance, so it doesn’t count. There were a number of big descents where I had to hold on to two people to get down. As soon as the knee thing happened I wasn’t thinking about a record any more; I just wanted to finish what I started.’ Reconsidering the last forty-eight hours of Sabrina’s run with this in mind hardly makes it less impressive. ‘I mean, all of me was quite inflamed, but my knee was just a joke. It made me think, “OK, I can no longer challenge the record here, so I either sack it off or just get round with any method I can”, which is what I ended up doing. I mean, why wouldn’t you finish the Wainwrights if it’s physically possible?’ As I learn again and again this summer, some people are a bit different. You wonder what proportion of people would have made it to Moot Hall in similar circumstances. My guesstimate: bugger all. ‘It was mixed feelings to get there. I was very pleased, obviously, and super-happy to have Joss there to congratulate me, but was also 31
BROKEN thinking it wasn’t quite right. Then the media was all over it. I wanted to make it really clear that it wasn’t a record, that I’d had assistance so it didn’t count, but they just brushed over that and declared me to be the first woman to complete the Wainwrights.’ Her frustration, even as we speak months later, is palpable. A couple of days after she finished, as glowing news articles about her Wainwrights run were still appearing online, Sabrina posted on a fell runners Facebook page, explaining the extent of the help she had required and making it clear that she did not wish her run to be considered a record. Sabrina’s chosen channel gives us some insight on one of the fundamental questions of FKTs: Who gets to decide? When Sabrina sought to clarify the reality of her Wainwrights run, she didn’t go to the Fell Runners Association or the Bob Graham Club. She didn’t email UK Athletics or Pete Bakwin at fastestknowntime.com; she went directly to her peers. ‘The general public don’t really care about this stuff; that’s why I posted on a fell running page, to get across to the fell running community. I didn’t want them to think I was going to take something I didn’t deserve. It was, and still is, important to me that people understood that.’ These are the people who are best placed to judge and, ultimately, the people who care the most. As Sabrina’s frustrations with the media demonstrate, and as will be even more forcefully demonstrated later, when outsiders get involved, things can get murky. Another thing this highlights is the importance of integrity. If the policing of these things is a community effort, something decided among the runners, then it’s important that the runners hold them selves to a very high standard. There are other examples of this from this summer. The best of them doesn’t come from running, but from ultra-distance mountain biking. In late July, bikepacking mega-stud Huw Oliver rode the Cairngorms Loop, a 300-kilometre self-supported ride starting and 32
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finishing in Blair Atholl. He finished in eighteen hours and thirty minutes, taking half an hour off Chris Hope’s record, or so he thought at the time. He later found that while riding through Glen Feshie he had ridden 2.5 kilometres off route, taking Land Rover tracks where the Cairngorms Loop proper heads off on to singletrack in the woods. The detour didn’t make the route any shorter, and certainly wouldn’t account for Huw’s thirty-minute advantage, but nonetheless he chose to withdraw his claim on the record. As Huw himself wrote at the time, ‘This form of racing lives and dies by the integrity of its participants. I wasn’t sure it was fair to Chris to have his “fair and square” time taken away by one that would always have a little niggle of controversy. What’s a record worth if it always has to be qualified a little, rather than standing on its own two feet?’ There’s a happy ending, though. In late August Huw tried again, going the right way this time and getting round in eighteen hours and twenty-three minutes. Speaking to Sabrina, this sense of fairness to other people is some thing that clearly plays on her mind. ‘It is a little bit ruined, if you think about it. If another lady went out and completed it with no assistance but took longer than I did with assistance, they might not be seen as the record holder.’ For most runners this question of integrity is of slightly less importance; many a comforting hand has nudged many a quivering bottom up Broad Stand on a twenty-three-hour Bob Graham Round. But when it comes to records and firsts, integrity is a vital pillar of their importance. Cutting people stylistic slack here and there may not seem like much of a big deal, but the more levels of qualification and explanation a record needs, the less worthwhile it becomes. Sabrina had planned to put things right in the same way that Huw did. ‘I feel like the only thing I can do to rectify that is to go out again and do it properly. Do it in six days, like I wanted to in the first place! 33
BROKEN So that’s what I’m going to try and do.’ But 2020 being the year that it is, by the end of the summer it was already too late. On 10 September Mel Steventon set off from her home near Penrith at a little after five o’clock in the morning, arriving at the bottom of Great Mell Fell a couple of hours later. Her plan was to complete the Wainwrights in around eleven days, in the process raising money for two charities, Community Action Nepal and Women’s Aid. In fact, the Wainwrights was just one of a number of runs that would see her cover a total of 546 miles, a distance equivalent to the length of Nepal. Steve Birkinshaw and Paul Tierney once again came along to help out and Mel made steady progress, dropping several days on her schedule but never really looking like the outcome was in doubt. After thirteen days and twelve hours she descended Little Mell Fell to close the loop and become the first woman to finish a complete round of the Wainwrights. And Sabrina’s fears were well founded. During and after her round, Mel received a fraction of the attention that Sabrina got. It’s a depressing note for the whole thing to end on. A far cry from Huw’s happy ending and maybe an indictment of the ways in which the value of these things is assessed. Maybe this is another downside of the dot-watching age. Had Sabrina’s run been presented in its entirety after the fact, physical assistance and all, people’s perceptions of it might have ended up less muddled. The retraction of the round was far less widely reported than its initial completion; there must be many people who saw that it had been done but have no idea how it was achieved. The only hope is that in the long run it is the fell runners, the people who know and care, who get to decide, and that Mel Steventon gets the credit she deserves.
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