My West Highland Way race report 2005

My West Highland Way race report 2005

I don’t believe in miracles but…

Few of us will ever experience the thrill of entering an Olympic stadium to compete in an event but I think that waiting for the start of a 95 mile trail race over Scotland’s most famous long distance foot path must come a very close second.

In a slightly surreal atmosphere, 88 runners and their support crews massed in the car park of Milngavie train station for the 1 am start. Yes, I was nervous but after months of anticipation, I was desperately keen to get started.

My training had been exceedingly shaky what with one problem or another ever since the London marathon when I tore a calf muscle. I missed all the long (30 mile+) training runs that I had originally hoped to do and instead had to settle for a combination of hard shore runs and cycling in the weeks prior to the race. My longest run pre-race was a scant 27 miles. In these last few weeks in the run up to the race I had become increasingly nihilistic & lethargic. There seemed little I could do to improve my chances of completing the full 95 miles and my training almost ground to a complete halt.

Despite all that, I still believed that I could do this race. I’m not sure where this confidence came from to be honest. Having done the Devil of the Highlands race last year (the 43 mile Tyndrum to Fort William stretch) and having trained over most of the rest of the route at one time or another, I convinced myself that it was just a matter of stitching together all these runs. How hard could that be? (Never underestimate the power of positive self-delusion). ;-)

Anyway, back to the start. After a pep talk from the race organiser we donned our head torches and shuffled to the start line. On the stroke of 1 am we were off racing through the underpass that leads from the station under the main road through Milngavie. It was then up through the pedestrianised shopping centre which must have been a very odd sight for any onlookers, 88 camelbaked and headtorched runners galloping down the high street.

For the time of day (i.e. 1 am) it was astonishingly warm (18 C) and incredibly humid. Even before the start we were sweating heavily and I knew that getting hydration right was going to be incredibly important. The first stretch to Drymen (12 miles) I usually ran in about 2 hours in training. Given the length ahead of me, I was very pleased to have reined myself back to 2 hours 20. Much of the first section of the WHW is on good smooth paths or on road and running in the darkness even with a small head torch wasn’t a problem. By now it was after 3 am and as we headed towards Conic hill, the sky brightened to the point where we could dispense with our head torches.

As I descended Conic hill I was amazed to meet a couple of walkers on the hill (at about 4:30 am) until I realised they were part of a media company who were trying to film the event. They didn’t look like they were particularly enjoying climbing at that time of the morning!

I reached Balmaha almost exactly on schedule (well, what passed for a sort of schedule anyway) feeling really good. The first 20 miles had been easy and doing the same sort of distance 4 times over again didn’t seem quite so impossible. I met up with my wife who plied me with coffee and rice pudding and topped up my camelbak with some more flat coke.

Brimming with misplaced confidence, I left Balmaha after just 10 minutes and headed off up towards Rowardennan. 2 miles up the road I was suddenly smitten with severe pain behind my left knee. With hindsight I reckon it was probably cramp of some sort but the pain was so severe I could only jog 50 yards (at most) at a time before the pain worsened to the point of reducing me to a shambling walk. I tried stretching and massage but nothing seemed to make any difference. What was worse, I could only run on flat stretches, certainly not any uphill bits and only just on the gentlest of downhill bits. Unfortunately, most of the route is up or down, not flat.

The next 5 miles to Rowardennan were very tedious and depressing. Running into trouble just 22 miles into a 95 mile race is not what you want to happen and I seriously wondered about DNFing.[i] By the time I got there, I had discovered that I could make slightly faster progress by galloping, thrusting hard with my right leg and pogoing along on my left keeping my knee as straight as possible. If you think it sounds stupid, you should have seen what it looked like.

After a longer break with more coffee, food and stretching at Rowardennan, I headed gingerly up the trail again, hoping that the brief rest might have improved things somewhat. Within a few steps I realised that this wasn’t the case and I had a very long stretch ahead of me before I would meet my back up crew again. (About 17 very tough miles over the worst footing of the whole trail).

I hopped, I walked, I shambled and galloped for the next 7 miles until I reached Inversnaid where there was a water station. Now I don’t know what they put in their water there but this was where the miracle happened. After gulping down a couple of cups of water (I was getting very fed up with flat coke by now) I realised that there were a 3 runners loitering there and by the simple expedient of setting off more or less straight away, I was up 3 places! Not only that, as I eased myself tentatively back into galloping/shambling/walking mode, I kept waiting for the pain to force me to walk, but it didn’t. I was actually running again! Hallelujah! I passed two more runners almost straight away and found myself gradually catching more as I worked my way up to Derrydarroch, the next checkpoint.

My knee wasn’t perfect by any means but after what had gone before, it was a million times better. I exchanged a few phone calls with my wife to assure her that I hadn’t died and that I was making slow progress and eventually we met up for more food and drink.

Then it was time for the climb over the hill bypassing Crianlarich and on to Tyndrum. As ever in these events, it was a case of “running when you could, walking when you can’t” but ever so gradually my running was taking the major share. By the time I reached Tyndrum (52 miles) I was running easily if slowly and feeling great. I had now been ‘running’ for 13 hours and I knew that I had run the rest of the route in 8 and a half hours last year. How hard could it be to do the remaining 43 miles in 11 hours?

Very.

I made great progress over the next stage from Tyndrum to Bridge of Orchy, admittedly one of the easier stages and was still feeling good and going well after that. About 5 miles past Bridge of Orchy as I made the transition from walking back to running, I was struck with the agonising pain in my knee again. This time, I could scarcely walk, let alone walk quickly and I had the bleak and lonely expanse of Rannoch Moor to look forward to. Gritting my teeth and making the best progress I could, I was reduced to an even slower shamble than before. After what felt like an eternity, Kingshouse hove into view at the head of Glen Coe. My anxious crew fed and watered me once more and this time I gulped down 800 mg of ibuprofen. Probably not advisable, but having got so far I was in no mood to drop out. I also put on some warmer clothes as it seemed unlikely that I would be doing much running for the rest of the race.

I now had just two major stretches ahead of me, Kingshouse to Kinlochleven (7 miles) and Kinlochleven to Fort William (14 miles) and having got so far I was determined to finish this race off. My support runner joined me for these stages.

The ibuprofen seemed to have worked another miracle on my knee and after some very tentative trials, I was running again! It wasn’t to last however as the terrain quickly becomes unrunnable and it was the long slog up the Devil’s Staircase after that followed by the even longer knee and quad crippling decent to Kinlochleven. The trail drops right down to sea level at this point and the descent really does go on forever (or at least feels as if it does). I had one heavyish fall whilst crossing a stream at this point for fortunately didn’t do myself any serious mischief other than bit of a shin scrape.

Despite all this, once we reached the bottom, we jogged comfortably into KLL to meet my long suffering wife once again.

By now it was about 11 pm and all thoughts of finishing in 24 hours were long forgotten. It was still light enough to do the climb out of KLL without head torches though and there were patches of blue sky visible between the clouds. We knew it would be fully dark long before we got near Ben Nevis but we were hopeful that we might see it in moonlight. More fool us!

The 8 mile stretch over the Lairig to our last rendezvous with my wife was not a happy time. I was now beginning to feel very stretched and ‘thin’. There just wasn’t much left in me. To add to the fun, it started to rain, not just a refreshing cooling drizzle, but in torrents, accompanied by thunder and lightning. In the dim light of our head torches, our confidence in our navigating started to waiver and all around us, we could hear but not see great angry torrents of water cascading off the hillsides.

I knew that one couldn’t really get lost on this stretch of the route but when you can only see a few feet in any direction, you’re miles from anywhere and there’s no phone reception, doubts start to creep in. We felt like we had been walking forever, the path was far too rough to run in the dark. I was now beginning to shiver gently but uncontrollably. My jacket and everything on me was soaked through. Seeing the light of torches at Lundavra was one of the most welcoming things I’d seen in a very long time and we dived into the car for yet more coffee and a complete change of clothes. Just before we arrived at Lundavra we’d been met by a marshal who warned us that we would get our feet wet because of flooding ahead. We couldn’t help laughing as she wasn’t to know that we’d been wading streams for miles already. We donned every waterproof item we could find and headed off to finish the last 6 miles.

Over the next 3 miles the paths rises and falls infuriatingly as it passes through stygian forest, the sky only lit by the occasion flash of lightning. At long last Ben Nevis came into view and I keenly anticipated hitting the forest road. Unfortunately, it was a false dawn, tree felling had given us a premature glimpse of the mountain and we still had another mile to go. When we did reach the forest road, I stopped to empty the gravel and sand out of my shoes. My feet were feeling ‘raw’ and the prospect of running the last 3 miles on a harder flatter surface with stones in my shoes didn’t appeal.

No sooner had we set off we were caught by another runner. 92 miles into a 95 mile race is not a good time to be passed and as we upped our walking speed we realised he was slowly pulling away from us. This couldn’t happen!

The track slopes gently down Glen Nevis all the way to Fort William and I vividly remembered how my screaming quads had prevented me from doing any serious running down it last year but this time, all the walking had spared my quads and we broke into a run and passed the runner. We ran until we were well out of sight reckoning that we wouldn’t need to run all the way, just break his spirit. We runners can be so cruel sometimes. ;-)

After walking a short way, his head-torch came back into view and we realised that the b*gger was still chasing me. There was nothing for it but to carry on running and that’s what we did all the way to the finish.

In many ways, the finish was a bit of an anticlimax. For a start there was no marshal or sign to direct runners to the finish line and Fort William was treated to an enraged and infuriated runner shouting “Where’s the f*cking finish line” to nobody in particular as I was terrified that this other runner would slip by my if I took a wrong turning. I needn’t have worried as he didn’t come in for another 10 minutes but I didn’t know that at the time. Of course I could have avoided this aggro by reading the race instructions but who does that? The Lochaber Leisure Centre where the race finishes wasn’t far away and we soon found it and I raced in through the front door in ‘just finishing a 5K’mode’ to the astonishment of the few onlookers there. Don’t ask me why, it just seemed a good idea at the time.

Having given my number and surrendered my mortuary tag on my wrist, that was it. Full stop. Period.

I’d tried to phone my wife to let her know of my imminent arrival but she had managed to find the one spot in the car with zero reception and was soundly (and deservedly) asleep when I finished. After establishing that I wasn’t going to be showered in champagne and that there didn’t seem to be anything happening at the sports centre for finishers we wandered back out to the car-park to rouse my wife and find our way to our accommodation. We staggered in at about 4:30 am and collapsed into bed for a few brief hours sleep.

The remains of the night went all too quickly and we were out by about 10:30 to hobble around the streets of Fort William in search of an artery clogging fry up which we quickly found and devoured. It was then off to the prize giving in a nearby hotel where we discovered that for only the second time in the race’s history, the organisers had been forced to stop the race for some of the later runners because of the extreme weather. There had been snow and hail at the top of the Devil’s Staircase and flash floods in the valley leading to Lundavra. Out of 88 starters, only 48 of us had made it all the way to the finish line. I was 35^th in a time of 27 hours and 19 minutes.

The West Highland Way in a single push is a fantastic challenge and I am SO pleased and delighted to have done it at the first attempt. A tiny bit disappointed not to have gone under 24 hours but given what I had to overcome to achieve 27 hours, I’m more than happy. It is, to be honest, a terrible waste of some fantastic scenery. You’re either too tired or it’s too dark to appreciate it properly but don’t let that put you off. It’s a great race and the organisation is fantastic. Surely a must for every ultra runner!

Oh, before I forget, one more miracle. I haven’t got a single midge bite.

Tim