I can’t exactly remember how this came about but both my sisters are adamant that it was my bright idea. At some point last year we decided that it would be lovely to spend a weekend together, just the three of us and somehow thought that the ideal way to do this was to enter a 100K slog along the Ridgeway national trail. The last time the three of us got together on our own was a looong time ago, pre-kids when we did St Cuthbert’s Way so we do have form for that sort of thing.
RTTS was ideal as it offers different variations on the theme of “slog along the Ridgeway for 100k” – you can run it or walk it, do the whole thing in one go or split it over 2 days or just enter one day and do a mere 50k. We opted to walk it over two days as middle sister, Jenny, doesn’t do ultra running. She’d done a similar event with her husband so knew she could walk the distance and also knew the likelihood of pain being involved. “I’ve brought ibuprofen, dihydrocodeine and tramadol” she announced brightly when we were doing our pre-race kit faff.
Step 1 – Edinburgh to London. I got an email couple of days before departure from the Caledonian Sleeper asking “are you as excited as we are about your upcoming journey?”. I really don’t get this modern thing about everything having to have superlatives attached to them. Every bloody horrible housing scheme these days has a massive sign outside declaring that it’s an “EXCITING!!” development of 2 and 3 bed houses. Job adverts, estate agent blurbs….it’s all over the place. It’s like nobody can face the mundane honest truth that most things are Ok at best and more often just a bit shit. Politicians are the worst, promising sunlit uplands and delivering instead a miserable, paranoid, grey, impoverished litter-strewn shithole of a country where nothing works but where train rides are described as exciting.
Strangely enough when Becky and I boarded the sleeper, that staff didn’t seem terribly excited to see us. We were just relieved it was running at all with all the strike action going on. I like the sleeper and tend to sleep reasonably well on it. Unfortunately yet another gift of middle age has been that I have started snoring really badly. My poor sister has insomnia at the best of times and even ear plugs couldn’t drown out train noises and snoring sister in the bunk above so she didn’t get much meaningful sleep.
We dropped our luggage off in storage then had breakfast outside at an Italian cafe near the British Museum. It was seriously warm even that early, and sitting in that cafe it couldn’t have felt less like Scotland. We were far far far away from our jobs, children and husbands and we both felt a certain amount of weight lifting. We’d booked tickets for the Stonehenge exhibition at the museum which killed a couple of hours then retrieved our bags and got the train to Jenny’s place in Herne Hill.
Our plan was to sleep in Jenny’s camper van at the race start and arrived at sunset. We then discovered that you weren’t supposed to camp at the start the night before (you could camp at the finish and get a shuttle bus) but nobody seemed too bothered about applying the rules so we bedded down. I probably slept the best of the three of us and awoke to complaints of “you snore as loudly as our Mother!” which is quite a feat.
The weather forecast for the weekend was hot and sunny but at least at the start there was some high cloud and the route at first was nice and shady under trees. My knowledge of the layout of England is pretty sketchy so I thought we were in Wiltshire but apparently it was Oxfordshire. Wherever it was, it was all very bucolic and rural until we hit the Thames and had a tarmac stretch passing some very expensive looking houses and dodging Range Rovers (presumably other cars are available in Oxfordshire but you wouldn’t know it). Afterwards we were mainly up on the Ridgeway proper for the rest of the two days which was an advantage in terms of catching what little breeze there was. It’s a surprisingly empty part of England and a very nice route with easy walking and fringed with wild flowers a lot of the way and lots of butterflies. The way is pretty popular with cyclists too, many of whom seemed reluctant to slow down or give any quarter to pedestrians.
The race itself seemed very well organised. It is a big event, much bigger than my usual ultra of choice and run on a commercial basis and of course had the obligatory pair of blokes with microphones providing motivational banter at the start. And the finish. And the overnight camp. How they managed to keep up their inane and chirpy banter for hours on end in blazing sunshine God only knows, it takes a particular and rather niche talent. One had a beard and one was called Nigel. The route was waymarked within an inch of its life and the pit stops were good with a huge choice of food & drink. There were water stops between the pit stops. There were people spraying you with water. There were also big buckets of cold water for dipping caps in, although I just went for the full wet t-shirt effect and dunked my top in too. The overnight camp was well set up with fantastic views out over the plain below and stalls selling ice cream and beer etc. They transported all your gear, provided a really decent dinner and had a wee pop-up tent for every overnight participant. The other nice thing about it was that it wasn’t terribly competitive, most folk seemed to be doing it for fun or as a challenge and the cuts off were very generous.
Generally speaking the three of us get on pretty well, but there is a bit of a family habit of spectacular fallings out. These usually happen at Christmas but also at other family gatherings when emotions are running high. We reckoned that we should have a safe word to use if conversation seemed to be heading into dangerous territory and picked “halloumi” as this was the unlikely trigger of the most recent family conflagration. We only had to use the safe word once despite some fairly wide ranging chat (although most conversations circled back to “humanity is completely f*cked” and we are all in agreement on that one!).
Day 1 went pretty smoothly, especially once the bulk of the runners had come past. It was hot from midday on but of course one can keep a lot cooler walking compared to running. The aid stations all had water melon which was lovely in the heat. Considering that Jenny hadn’t really trained she stood up to the distance very well, but bloody mindedness is a bit of a family trait. I found the final 5k or so the most enjoyable, I suppose because I knew we could stop soon but also it was getting a little cooler and the sun was lower and casting a beautiful light through the long grass beside the track. It was very peaceful and hypnotic and…..”Can you hear Nigel?” said Becky. We strained our ears and definitely caught snatches of hearty banter being carried on the breeze. Poor Beardy and Nigel (or maybe Nigel was the one with the beard, we never worked it out) must have been at it for hours by then but their patter didn’t falter “Heyyyy, welcome to the overnight CAAAMMPPP! Are you ready to PAAARTAY?”. Once through the finish area we make a bee-line for the stalls and settled down in the evening sunshine for ice cream and a pint.
Despite the invitation to PAARTAY I turned in so early that I didn’t even see the text from the race organisers saying the earliest start had been brought forward an hour to 5am to try and beat the heat. I slept remarkably well. The same cannot be said for anyone within a 20m blast radius of my tent. Even with ear plugs in both sisters said that my snoring was reaching epic decibel levels. Sorry…
We were up, breakfasted and sent on our way by a bleary-eyed and slightly less enthusiastic Nigel before 6am and it was getting hot by 7am! It took me a while to get into it, and I had a minor sense of humour failure at the first aid station which was at the end of a pointless out and back. I felt a lot better once I’d got the first 20K or so under my belt. We passed a sign to the Uffington white horse and decided to detour to have a look at it. Well, Becky and I did, Jenny resisted then grumbled along behind us and of course it turned out that you couldn’t see any of the horse other than the tip of an ear unless you went off the ridge and down to the bottom. We didn’t do that, we’re not that masochistic. The area around the horse was a nature reserve and absolutely teeming with birds, in stark contrast to the farmland we’d passed through before. It’s easy to overlook how little wildlife there is in the British countryside until you are confronted with evidence of what it should be like.
Further along there was another potential detour to a neolithic tomb. This time the detour was short and the tomb well worth the visit, nestled under a canopy of trees. It is thought that the Ridgeway has been in fairly constant use as a travel route since prehistoric times and if you’re that sort of person (I am guilty as charged) there was something romantic about feeling like I was treading in the footsteps of generations of ancestors.
There was nothing remotely romantic about the state of Jenny’s feet, which were starting to blister in response to the mileage and heat. Each time we stopped she applied more tape, raided her stash of painkillers then soldiered on. She also started to develop tendonitis down the front of one shin, which she had looked at by the medic at the final checkpoint. Their interaction was vaguely along the lines of:
Medic “Oh that looks sore!”
Jenny “Yup. Can you do anything for it?”
Medic “Not really, you’re just going to have to suck it up”
Jenny “Will tramadol help?”
Medic “PLEASE DON’T TAKE TRAMADOL!”
Jenny <necking tablets> “Too late! Righto, off we go!”
Apparently the tramadol didn’t do much for the pain, and a mile or so down the track most of the skin on her little toe sloughed off. I applied more tape gingerly to the raw flesh and she stoically kept plodding onwards.
It was still very hot and with 10k to go we all knew that although that didn’t sound an insurmountable distance it was still going to take 2 hours. Becky and I decided that it was time for a sing-song to lift Jenny’s spirits! Tunes of various quality were belted out, including “Flower of Scotland” but she didn’t seem terribly grateful for our efforts. Suddenly we could see the finish area through the shimmering heat haze. The kilometre markers were at 94k and the finish looked a lot closer…..either the markers were wrong or there was going to be some kind of pointless loop or out & back. And so it transpired – the clue was in the name, the race to the stones visited the Avebury stones which were not at the finish but on an out and back. At this point poor Jenny let out a yelp and thought she’d trodden on a nail but it turned out that it was just one of the blisters under her foot exploding. She decided just to stay put while Becky and I visited the stones (in previous years the race route went through the stone circle but for some reason permission for this was withdrawn this year but we were told we were welcome to go into the circle and have a look). I’d like to go back as the area was quite extensive with a processional avenue that we only spotted from the bus on the way back.
After that it was just a kilometre or so to the finish – I’d forgotten that we’d given ourselves the team name of “smells like middle-aged spirit” until it was announced to general hilarity on the tannoy by a Nigel substitute as we approached. Presumably by this point Nigel himself had gone a for a wee lie down in a darkened room. Luckily there was a shuttle bus back to the start about to leave so we grabbed our bags and jumped on.
Our varying levels of fitness and endurance were laid out clearly the following morning. Becky felt grand, if a little sleep deprived and reckoned she could have managed another 50k. I had one blister and a touch of tendonitis and was grateful that I only had to walk as far as the train station. Jenny had more blisters than feet and a nasty patch of bruising over the extensor tendonitis on one leg and was very grateful indeed to be working from home that day.
The biggest endurance test was the train journey home. It ground to a halt south of Berwick with ominous announcements of trees on the overhead lines and “we don’t know how long this will last”. When we pulled into Alnmouth station to let everyone off to stretch their legs Becky phoned our parents and my dad drove to collect us. He’s always said he would be prepared to drop everything any time to come and rescue us and is as good as his word even when his daughters are in their 5th decade, bless him! We offered a lift to a couple who took about a nanosecond to decide to throw in their lot with total strangers rather than stay a minute more on that train. My dad drove us to Berwick then I borrowed my nephew’s car to drive myself and the very grateful couple on to Edinburgh. The train should have arrived just after 3pm but we got there at 7pm. I found out later that the train finally got in at 9pm having run out of food and water, with no water in the loos either. A lucky escape.
We haven’t made any plans for our next get together yet.
runswiththedug 