Footprints

Old Barn, Hartsop

It feels like the days since the Haweswater race have been dark. Somehow, the outside world has been playing along with a sympathetic fallacy, and my running has been a stark reminder of this mood. Bleak snowy runs in brooding Lakeland valleys. Runs along the steepening, dark Edwardian streets of Penrith, muffed up against the biting wind.

Alone, even when in company.

Maybe it is, as a friend summarised it, 'coming down off the ceiling' after Haweswater. Whatever that means. It seems apt enough though.

I followed the little dragging hoofprints of Herdwick sheep into the immense scoop of Threshthwaite Combe and out over the back onto High Street. There were no human prints up here. For the first time in a long while, I stopped and thought about the perversity of where I was, what I was doing. Was I running from something, to feel the need to run up here, of all places? Or what? The crashing sound of ice falling off overhanging rock faces in the combe didn't help in this arid place of the snows.

A squall smudged out the hills farther south in pencil grey, but I climbed on, popping through the snowy crust now and again. In a few moments, the grey smudge was all around me.

In this monochrome world, the surroundings seemed to capture and reflect how I was inside. Maybe this, on a weird level, is what mountain running is all about. A validation of what you feel. A connection between you and this place. A coincidence between worlds, one flesh, one stone.

Running away from something, or running towards it? Who knows. But to be part of this mad chase feels right. Whatever the mood.