Running over Wobbleboards

As spring makes its appearance in fits and starts, the Kendal Winter League will fade and the fell racing season proper will take over. In the meantime, the League went to Austwick in the Dales for a spot of boulder hopping. This might not have been the best debut for a pair of new orthotics that I'm learning to clamber about on at the moment, but even though the terrain was much like running over miles of wobbleboards, things all seemed to run their course...

It's often a salutory lesson to watch the end of the Junior races at these events, and this one was typical. A lad staggered in, in something like third place. He crumpled into a gangly heap next to me and tried to throw up. He then tried to stand up but failed twice before finally succeeding...nobody around him batted an eyelid. This was, after all, Yorkshire..."You'll be right, lad..."

A Haweswater Blast

The Lead Runners at the Haweswater Half Marathon

One of the peculiar querks of my career to date has been the experience of organising a p***-up in a brewery. In fact, I did it twice to prove that it wasn’t just a fluke. However, playing a bit-part in organizing the Haweswater Half Marathon over the last few months has taught me that there's a lot more to such things than finding a lot of beer, and people who might be willing to drink it...

The level of detail, meticulous planning and time that this has taken has been a bit of a surprise. But the really strange thing is, on the day, it just seemed to happen of its own accord… It was as if each volunteer was acting on the call of a dog whistle inaudible to the human ear, because it just seemed to happen without hint of a fuss.

But of course, the effortlessness was an illusory artifact of the long hours spent poring over digestives and green tea, discussing the feng shui of the portaloos, polishing of trophies and the vagaries of parking a lot of cars in a muddy field. I could go on. The landslide on the course, tractors to pull cars out of mud, bags of grit in case the entire 13.2 miles were frozen to sheet ice. You name it, we thought about it.

There have been honourable mentions elsewhere, but the race felt like a real success. Ian Crampton (Durham City Harriers) seen in the photo above won the race in 1:13;17, and first lady was ultra-running megastar Lizzy Hawker in 1:20:52.

Wind Over Water

In the calm before the storm of the race, we took off to the dramatic scooped skyline at the back of Haweswater. Watching the squalls move over the water was a strangely captivating sight.



Another striking aspect of this area is the presence of wild, torrential streams that tumble into glacial lakes and on into the flooded valley now occupied by Haweswater. These relentless watercourses are fascinating, and abstracts like these, looking like frozen sinusoidal waves, were everywhere.

High Cup Nick Fell Race

High Cup Nick in better weather

With a tongue of low cloud dipping into the extraordinary rock scoop of High Cup Nick, Morgan Donnelly's rough diamond of a fell race began yesterday.

In a way, it is unlike any other. It is only after 4 miles of uphill running that you get to the steep boulder choke of High Cup Nick, where hands and feet are needed to scramble up the face of the Whin Sill. In wild and woolly conditions, a full-on tail wind blew straight into the scoop, making a sound like a helicopter landing on your head. As we gained the head of the Nick, the waterfall was blowing vertically upwards, and the wind got increasingly more violent. Popping out onto the flat top, the wind in our faces, it was hard to breathe, and hard to stand up. We must have looked like penguins popping out of the water to the frozen marshall on the summit.

The last 5 miles downhill should have been a breeze. They weren't. Energy just left me standing with a ghost-like emptiness. All that was left was a relict synapse that said 'carry on'.

The pain stopped, eventually, on the village green of the idyllic Dufton. After normal consciousness had slowly drip-fed back in, there was one thing I was sure of: I knew that I was alive...

Meditations in Blue

It's a funny thing, but somehow it occurred to me that it was harder to write about kayaking trips than say, anything else Stu and I bumble about with. And that's because nothing happens.

And that is precisely why it is so wonderful. With three days and 30 miles of stunning Scottish sea loch to play with, we just let the meditation begin.


But inside this deep quietness, things do happen. A seal pops out of the clear water, snorts a nostril, and disappears. Porpoises trace arcs on the distant horizon. Fluttering packs of oystercatchers part in front of us.


Caught in the eye of a particularly stable high pressure system over Europe, it was a peaceful, windless paddle. Something we're generally not accustomed to. It provided some amusement to the couple running a bed and breakfast to receive their guests by kayak, dragging the boats into their handily-placed shed by the water's edge.

"At least you won't get Bingo Wings", the landlady said, somewhat quizzically.


But it's never boring. Things stick out of the stillness. Like finding King Tutankamun on the shore at Kilcreggan...It's amazing what McEwan's will inspire you to...

The Venturi Effect

"Venturi Effect: The speedup of air through a constriction due to the pressure rise on the upwind side of the constriction and the pressure drop on the downwind side as the air diverges to leave the constriction"

Last weekend's race was the usually aptly named Fairmile fell race. A gem of a race in good conditions, it traces a horseshoe on the edge of the Howgills. These giant, prismatic beauties are rockless and treeless, so unfractured sunlight can glide across the green flanks. A compelling set of hills to run on.

It was nothing like that on Sunday. At the foot of the hill, there was a biting 20 mph wind. Waiting for the start, the runners circulated in much the same way as overwintering Antarctic penguins do. Quickly, I found myself on the outside of the group. As we fluttered our way up the steep climb, 20 mph became 50 mph. There was novelty value in feeling frostbite inside my mouth... for a while, at least...then a frostbitten stomach, as layers flapped wildy in the storm. I couldn't help noticing that the experienced runners were trussed up more securely than a pile of cling-filmed baps.

I think all runners were accounted for at the end, which is the main thing.

The Annual Mush Fest

It's always a pleasure to catch up with huskies at this time of year. The unbridled delight that these doggies (and owners) show in doing what they love doing is infectious. Fantastic!




Nice doggies. It was a quieter event than last year, and the mass start of dogs, bikes, scooters and runners wasn't as catastrophic as last year. See the carnage unfold here. But a day to put a smile on your face nonetheless.

An Estuarine Addiction

The Leven Estuary

It's rapidly becoming an addiction: wombling about on the ever-changing landscape poised between land and sea. So far it's been the slow learning of tide times and channel geography. Soon we'll launch the kayaks into these transient, peaceful spaces.

Weed-whorls as the tide drags out

The complex interactions of tides and channel switching need some advance planning, so we're taking it slowly. As luck would have it, the weekend's Kendal Winter League race was on a limestone bluff overlooking the estuary.

Boats and bogs

Stu took delivery of his new Tiderace Xcite sea kayak this week, and so we took off to Windermere to give it a bit of a splosh. The previous one was a demo boat on the grounds that it had a few imperfections, and didn't hold water too well. It was one of the first kayaks manufactured by Aled Williams' new company.
It's faster, sleeker, and the finish is now stunning, but it's a shame it still leaks.

The Windermere swans were out in force as we landed, and one of these chaps marched up to me and demanded some of a bath bun I'd been eating. With menaces. They're quite big close up.

The weekend's fell racing took place in the South Lakes, at Whitestones Fell. Made more exciting last year by the presence of a few bulls out on the course, this year felt positively quiet by comparison.

So quiet in fact that at the critical point of the course where it goes bushy, rocky and sub-vertical, I got lost. Laughable when it's a flagged course, but I wasn't the only one to be caught out.


I could have done the sensible thing and sacrificed a position by retracing steps back to the nearest fell runner, but instead, I ploughed on and up until I had to scramble up a wet rockface to regain the course some minutes behind my virtual self. Still, it was a great, wet, boggy slog. Wouldn't have missed it for anything.

A Windswept Fell Somewhere..

Firbank Fell Race (courtesy of Helm Hill Runners)

It was the sort of day where the thought of going outside, let alone running a rough cross country race, was unthinkable. And until the icy blast swept into the car there had been the illusion that it wasn't going to be that bad. It was. It always is. Wet, windy, muddy, cold. But there were no miles added on to the course, so we had to be thankful for small mercies.

All this was marred by an out of control car driven by a teenager slamming into my car on the way to work the following day...seconds either side and I would have been mashed. My car is probably a write-off. I only bought it 2 months ago. I feel lucky to be still alive...

Scout Scar Fell Race

Focussed on the race ahead...

The Kendal Winter League opened on Sunday with the Scout Scar race: what I assumed to be a gentle 4 and a bit mile canter up Scout Scar. Unbeknown to most of us who (a) hadn't read the Westmorland Gazette on Friday or (b) hadn't bumped into the organiser at the cheese counter at Booths supermarket, they'd decided to make it a bit more challenging by making it 6 miles with a few more "oops and downs" as they are known here.

Anyhow, it was a grand slog in League fashion, and despite a month off hills, not a bad race for me and the knee.

Look after the kit, lads...

Christmas in Andalucia

The white pueblo on Christmas Eve

I guess it was a tell-tale sign that it had been a less-than-stunning climbing year. Just before putting my foot in my rock boots at the sun-drenched crag, I found that a mouse had decided to call it home. To be honest, I couldn't fault his logic or his interior decorating skills: a pile of wheat nesting in the heel (neatly extracted from my not-cheap wheat bag for heating up sore muscles), some tufts of yellow fluff no doubt pulled out of an expensive fleece, a few nips out of the boot's lining to add a bit of interest, and a name plate nibbled out of the heel tab. And above all, it smelt of cheese.


A mixed, roller-coaster of a climbing trip really...starting out gingerly on a duff knee, slightly dodgy weather, mixed with climbing highs and lows in unexpected places.


A memorable experience was a pilgrimage to the mighty El Chorro. A knot of limestone, pushed out of the plain and slashed with knife-like river gorges that expose a dizzying number of hard cliffs. Flooded in the 1920's for a hydro-electric scheme, there's a blinding number of man-made constructs to negotiate- train tunnels, wobbly, crumbling bridges, wires and the fearsome Camino del Rey. It is a mad, vertical world, like the workings of a crazed mind.


A Perfect Dawn Rising Over El Chorro

Stuck to the vertical cliffs way above a dizzying drop is the Camino del Rey, a pathway built for the then king of Spain in the 1920's, King Alphonso XI. I would have liked to have seen his face, quite frankly. Now replete with bits that fell off, huge sections just disappeared and the like, people crawl along it, attached in via ferrata style to rusting fragments of time's passing with more than a prayer on their lips. This is the recommended route to the crag.


The Space Between Your Feet: the Camino del Rey

We chose the other, less risky route- skipping through the tunnels shared by the Spanish train system. Yes, up and over a 12 foot steel fence and into a series of eery tunnels, with all the trepidation and excitement of meeting the 11.05 from Madrid when you least wanted to.

An iconic place to climb, with a unique atmosphere induced perhaps by the challenge of even getting there. Andalucia has a well-known charm in photographic circles. Somehow even the pattern of furrows in farmed fields, the shades of drying earth have a devastating photographic richness to them. It's all abstract art painted with earth colours.

For us middle-grade climbers with bad knees, the best place to be was the smaller, greyer crags. There's a neat, natural colour coding that goes on with limestone: steep and nasty=orange, nice and slabby=grey. You can't go wrong if you stick to the grey ones...The crags here tend to be on the steep or overhanging side, meaning we ended up driving a long way to find gentler ones to pander to our pathetic climbing standards.

It didn't matter though. Tucked up in a medieval street of tiny white houses, burning olive wood in the stove, the goats bleating outside, it seemed as though richness isn't about money at all. It's a quality that can come upon you quite simply, and probably isn't far off what my ancestors would have had within their grasp.


Happy New Year.

Season's Greetings

My Dad's Christmas, over half a century ago. Those were the days. When men could survive two and a half years in the Antarctic and grasp the finer points of icing cakes as well.
Have a good one, wherever you are.

A festive run

Eden Runners once again took to the streets of Penrith to admire the festive light shows on display at this time of year. This house was one of the best. There were though, mutterings that things were a bit on the tasteful side this year. Maybe the credit crisis had hit the sales of "Santa in a helicopter" lights in Penrith. Anyway, a good run in cold, dry conditions.

Flat...flat...f-lat...

Storm boulders, the Cumbrian Coast

You may have noticed something about this blog of late...a distinct lack of hills. And that, dear readers (I am using the plural cautiously), is because I have been grounded. By my chiropractor, if the truth be known. Now it's a long story involving a festering yoga injury, much burning of cartilage at both ends, and a Welsh heirloom of a tendency to endure pain. But the long and the short of it is I have a stuffed knee. And I have been instructed not to go "up or down anything". Pretty bad news for a fell runner.

Still, we have to be thankful for small mercies. It's about as good a time as any to be out of action. And I can still do things on the f-l-a-t. And I'm not as yet crawling up the walls in frustration as could have been the case.

Today's f-l-a-t bike ride took in one of Cumbria's finest tea rooms. Allonby, a tiny, salt-washed collection of houses on the edge of nowhere, was the unlikely setting for what I can only describe as a mystical experience involving a scone. Yes, a scone. One hot summer day, we alighted outside a tea room set back slightly from the usual melee of ice cream joints and chip shops. A fat labrador was laid out on the grass, snoring. To one side of the large dog, a table was set, bone china glinting in the sun. We ordered tea and scones.

And then out came the silver tray. Scones, puffed to perfection alongside a glinting chalice, brimming with jam, and another of heavy cream. Sculpting great pyramids of jam and cream onto the wonderful substrate, we could almost hear angels. They were that good. It was what could be described in the language of Physics as a Scone Singularity: the coming together of antique bone china and Sheffield silver cutlery, flour, raisins, butter, jam and cream into a oneness.

But maybe we had just cycled a bit too far...

Anyhow, in homage to the great Allonby Scone, we stopped and ate another.

Ritual and Meaning

It happens every year, at about this time. As the weather becomes colder, windier and wetter, we find ourselves face-on to the winds battering the small isle of Lindisfarne.


Quite rarely for us, we don't go there with any particular objective. We don't take kayaks, climbing gear or any of the usual accoutrements. We just go there to raise the drawbridge for a while. We wait for the tide to cut the island off from the mainland, and we wander.


We stare at sand, watch in wild amazement as the tide pushes arcuate shapes over sandbanks. We laugh at the way the sandpipers run with a thousand little footsteps.
For such a tiny scrap of land, an afterthought of geology, it never fails to surprise and delight. We can wander for hours, and not get bored. With each turning year, we unearth new things to gaze at whilst making simple pilgrimages to see those we already know.

In St. Mary's church, we found Fenwick Lawson's great sculpture for the first time. It is arresting in its scale, sombering in its mood. And here it was, resting in a pool of soft, winter light.

The sculpture represents the journey of St. Cuthbert's body, taken around Northumberland after his death. It is extraordinary.

And so it is that we have spent another year together. In this, the simplest of ways, we stand, battered by wind and rain, knowing that we couldn't have enjoyed ourselves much more. It is a ritual with great meaning.