Eventrac News

Keswick Mountain Festival

29 Dec, 2024 02:45 By: Ceri Rees

Something unusual happened to me while I was in the lake district last weekend,
that has never occurred to me before in the many years I have been running. After
three-and-a-half hours of sweating, striding, skipping and falling across
dreamscapes in the sun draped Lake District, I decided to cross the line with
another runner.

It shouldn't be a big deal should it? But I wondered why it had never occurred to
me before to try it. The slightly empty feeling or anti-climax that sometimes
accompanies the attainment of a goal, was gone. When you are young and you
win a race, your body is pulsing with adrenaline and a sense of pride, which
comes with testing your resilience in the proving ground of competition. As you get
older though, something starts to mellow. It's not resolve and I don't think it is even
competitive instinct that dissolves. I think you develop an appreciation for the
camaraderie, as the reasons why you enter these kinds of events, becomes
explicit.

The Borrowdale, Buttermere terrain, which sucks at your will, then returns it anew
around the very next contour, seems to encourage the kind of motivation that
comes from within. It forces you to ask yourself, why am I doing this? On this
occasion, the answer, came as something of a novelty. It was invigorating. I was
doing it because I wanted to feel part of something, not just to prove something to
myself.

The trail marathon was part of the Keswick Mountain Festival and the organisers
had laid on a boat to take the small field of entrants to the lake's western shore. In
the centre of the festival, where established brands like Garmin, Inov-8 and High
Five, competed for the attention of festival goers, there was still a definite lack of
urgency, despite the action going on around.

Back in the thick of it, we skirted the helm of Derwent Water forest to Manesty, first
four then three then down to two but not before we'd taken a wrong turning over
the river because a flag had been moved. Then we headed west and climbed the
Honister Pass, which bisected the Derwent fells, descending to Buttermere and
Rannerdale.

The svelte like figure of Morgan Donnelly, a former British Fell Running Champion,
got away on the inclines, and appeared to disappear out of site. On the long
descent along Newlands Valley, I ate up the ground and we were back matching
strides, like two mountain goats in free fall. Two kilometres from the end, as I
caught him something made me ask him if he wanted to finish together. To my
relief he agreed.

I was only nine years old when the first ever London marathon resulted in a tie
between the American Dick Beardsley and the Norwegian Inge Simonsen. They

crossed the finish line together in 2 hours, 11 minutes, 48 seconds, not quite
holding hands. But the image has stayed with me. For some reason though, I was
unable to think of any other instances in athletics, when runners have crossed the
line together ahead of the field in a solo race. It got me thinking about camaraderie
within the sport.

In cycling, which is widely held up to be a team sport, at least on the big tours the
2012 Tour de France, provided a great example of camaraderie between
competitors. The apparently infamous stage 14 sticks in my mind more than any
other, when saboteurs spread tacks across the road, just before the summit.
Bradley Wiggins, possibly acting on orders from his team management, reacted by
calling a truce. Despite spending the seventh day in the yellow jersey and leading
by more than two minutes, he conceded that tour etiquette dictates that rivals do
not take advantage of another rider's misfortune involving the bike's mechanics.
Wiggins later said: "I thought it was the honourable thing to do."

Later that evening, I had the good fortune of meeting one of my athletic heroes
Joss Naylor. This was a man, who very much made up his own narrative. Even at
80, he can seemingly recall in absolute detail, the cairns and crags and combs of
every run over a lifetime in the fells, mainly around the valleys where he minded
his sheep.

Despite being a self confessed loner, who loved to roam the hills with his sheep
and his trusty New Zealand Collie, Celtie, he still appreciates the camaraderie that
comes with his sport. His hero was a local man called Eric Beard, who would
“Have a sandwich off anyone. He'd also come by outside my window and be
shouting up are you all right? He was just checking up on me you see and always
wearing his rucksack. Never took it off.”

He insisted racing did not mean a lot to him. “I fell in love with the fells before I
started running.” He said that in the 1960s when he was first starting out in hobnail
boots “Anyone who did any training was just wasting his time.” At least that's what
non runners thought.

That's not to say Joss did anything by halves: “I'd always run with a full stride,” he
reminded me, as if a reminder was necessary.

His achievements in running 214 Wainwrights in a week and 72 peaks in 24 hours
in the Bob Graham Round are testimony to his competitive spirit. But both of these
efforts required an inspired team of volunteers to navigate and cheer and marshal
and feed the extraordinary efforts that he inspired. He professes to have lived for
the runs not for the races that he did. When the more established running
authorities tried to cajole him in to taking to the richer fields of marathon road
running, he turned his back but only after breaking both feet in a rare foray on to
the roads, with the impact on his joints.

My experiences at the Keswick Mountain Festival got me thinking back to before
the London Olympics, reading about the Brownlee Brothers saying that they would
love to cross the line together in the Olympic Games. Imagine the already blazing
gleam in Mrs Brownlee's eyes, as she saw her sons crossing the line together.
Despite her enormous pride, I wondered if some of that euphoria was dampened
by the organisers, explicitly forbidding the others to do that. The games
demanded that there was just one winner.

The Olympic creed is that you have to do your best and for that to be so, there has
to be a winner. Ergo there must also be a loser. At the time, I thought about
whether this fitted in with what the Olympics should really be about. Still rules is
rules they tell us. But shouldn't sport also be spontaneous and make up its own
narrative?

On the same weekend, another endurance maverick who failed to fit in with other
people's expectations, former SAS serviceman Ranulph Fiennes, gave a
spellbinding talk to a beholden audience. His early biography was one of abject
failure to conform, which resulted in ejection from more than one expensive school
and institution. He founded his own company, which took him to the lost city of
Iram in Oman, was part of the first ever expedition to journey around the world on
its polar axis, climbed Everest and the Eigre, and across both poles unsupported,
among numerous other quests.

The army and public schools have always understood the value of nurturing
camaraderie through sport and outdoors pursuits. I doubt that they would bother
with it if it wasn't something real and capable of inspiring others. Perhaps this
spontaneity and inability to be measured, is why it is so often overlooked by
mainstream commercial interests and the popular media. It's not something that
can be reduced to an easy headline or replicated (at least, it's difficult to replicate
without losing something).

It seems ironic though, that while many public schools have acres of playing fields
and dedicate a significant proportion of their time table to sport, the state schools
have lost big chunks of theirs and PE is seen as the subject option to squeeze.
Camaraderie in sport and beyond the school fields. Perhaps that is what many of
our sporting heroes are really endorsing, rather than a win-at-all-cost mentality?