Spine 2: Return to Zion (Part 1 of 9)

Take the blue pill, and the story ends. Or take the red pill...

Apr 19, 2025

Five years ago, I set out to run the Legendary Triad of British races: Arc of Attrition (100 miles), Dragon’s Back (236 miles), and Spine (286 miles).

Little did I know the evolutionary journey this would take me on.

Both Arc of Attrition and Dragon’s Back challenged me beyond expectations. Harsh winter conditions, tricky technical terrain, bogs, heights and exposure, over innumerable hours, days and nights.

I overcame so many challenges, and learned so much about running endurance races. And after each race, I grew into a stronger trail runner, ready and waiting for my next big challenge.

The Spine should have followed a similar path.

Except it didn't.

Spine 1

When I started the Spine last year, I had no idea what sort of physical and metaphysical rabbit holes it would lead me down. They proved to be deeper and weirder than I could ever have imagined. Hallucinations, phantasms, existential questions, physical breakdown and extreme sleep deprivation were some of many curiosities the white rabbit introduced me to.

I needed to DNF shortly after the first checkpoint, and only continued because there was no alternative. One section was so horrendous I erased it from my memory, though it would later return to haunt me in my nightmares. I broke waist-deep snow over Alpine-style peaks. I skated through frozen realms so fantastical that they couldn’t be real. I got blown up mountains, and slid and tumbled down the other side. I waved at people who were really trees, dodged beasts that were really rocks, and imagined thousands of unique Banksy artworks handcrafted out of snow.

Atop the Cheviots, I helped lost & injured runners to safety; while in any other context, in the condition I was in, I’d have been the one being rescued.

After 120 hours barely surviving in that incorporeal Pennine Wonderland, I smacked into the wall of the Border Hotel in Kirk Yetholm, and that was it.

Spine, and my Legendary Triad, was complete.

Or so I thought…

Because unlike Arc and Dragon’s Back, I didn’t celebrate, grow into a stronger trail runner, and set about planning my next big challenge.

I didn’t even celebrate.

I’d reached the very end of the Legendary Triad rainbow, but found no pot of gold. There was just one thing there. Pandora’s f***ing box.

And when I opened that box, out poured questions, emotions, psychological insight and trauma surrounding the Spine. It all reverberated around my brain like a monkey crashing cymbals. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t force it back inside Pandora’s sodding box.

So I spent weeks reliving the race, writing a blog that micro-analysed it minute-by-minute, but I couldn’t bring myself to zoom out to process the whole. What I’d experienced, what it meant, how to build from here. I felt like I was stuck in a state of mental purgatory with that blasted monkey crashing away in my head.

How could anyone reconcile life in a comfortable Orwellian plutocracy with such savage enlightenment? It was like Morpheus had shown me the Matrix, and offered me a choice between the blue pill and the red. It was the Matrix or Zion. The Big Brother cult or the Pennine f***ing Way.

The Red Pill

It was a few weeks later when entries for Spine 2025 opened. I had absolutely no desire to put myself through that again. I couldn’t even figure out how to recover from it. But equally, I didn’t see that I had a choice - I had to re-enter. The return was the recovery. More than that, it was the gateway to reality.

You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you return to Zion and I’ll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

I considered whether I was, ironically, being selfish. For some of my friends had felt inspired to apply for the Spine themselves, and given how oversubscribed Spine is, my repeat entry could come at the expense of theirs.

But that couldn’t be helped, I reasoned. I’d been unplugged. I’d swallowed the red pill. Zion may be hell, but it was also home. There was no question in my mind, I had to return.

And as if it were fated, I secured a Spine place for myself, while some of my friends did not. But as bad as I felt for them, I needed my place. It enabled me to shove all those reverberating questions, the hope of Pandora, the land of Zion, my crashing monkey, and even the resolution of Orwellian duality back into that unassuming little box. I could shut the lid and launch it all back over the Spinebow. For now, at least, I could resume my life as a prole in Airstrip One, a willing inhabitant of Big Brother’s comfy Matrix.

A Comfortable Life

But my life didn’t resume comfortably, so much as it drove straight into me and then reversed back over my writhing corpse.

I became unwell, yet somehow I hauled myself around UTS100 in what was a flagrant act of self-neglect. That caused me to deteriorate into a long period of illness, during which I fastpacked the Pyrenees and smashed my knee on a rock. I had to pass on what was supposed to be my first backyard ultra with my friends, and wasn’t able to run for most of the summer.

October brought me some respite. I built back into a respectable training cadence. I started upper body training, readying myself for the rigours of carrying a hefty Spine pack once more. And I began kit preparations, changing out jackets, shoes, nutrition, goggles, and replacing all the mandatory medical kit, in accordance with the Spine’s somewhat puzzling new requirements for 2025.

As it was emerging, my biggest concern now wasn’t so much physical as it was mental. I’d completely repressed my reason for rerunning the thing. I mean, I knew I had a reason. But it was locked in that sodding Pandora’s box I’d lobbed 268 miles back over the Spinebow. And try as I might, I simply could not remember what was in that bloody thing.

Having run a fair few big races now, I felt experienced enough to know that for a race as formidable as this, having no purpose, no why, was a recipe for disaster.

So I explored the situation in writing and vlogs, desperately trying to uncover what it was that might have persuaded me to re-enter. Why I was proposing to put myself through hell again? I produced various theories, but I never managed to answer the question. My why felt just as elusive as Elon’s capacity for empathy.

Finding my why evolved into a painfully insufferable itch I couldn’t scratch, so I was fortunate to be gifted with a fresh lens through which to view Spine 2.0.

Apparently inspired by my description of the Spine as ‘hell’, my brother had signed up for Spine Challenger South. This would be his first hundred miler, no less. So he appreciated (or perhaps tolerated!) the opportunity for a recce expedition with yours truly. We headed north to run a couple of stretches of the route, bookending each day by enjoying live performances at Marsden’s legendary Jazz Festival, something that had been on my bucket list for many a year.

My brother’s involvement in Spine 2.0 became a vector by which I could push my own looming car-crash into the dark recesses of my mind, and instead live vicariously through my brother’s infectious quest for adventure.

Friday

On race week, we travelled up to Hope Valley together, staying in probably the coldest youth hostel in the country. He sailed through his kit check, and in keeping with my usual pre-race tradition, I took my brother for a pre-race curry. “Very, very, very mild, please”, my brother pleaded with the waiter.

Over his very, very, very mild curry, we discussed our race forecasts. Challenger South would start in 12 hours, on Saturday morning. There was deep snow covering the course, and cold conditions were forecast to persist for the duration of his race. So it was going to be tough going, especially for those at the front, breaking trail through deep snowdrifts.

It’d still be snowed -over when I started on Sunday morning, though it’d probably be a little warmer. It would continue to warm up over the course of the week, meaning the snow was likely to start melting as I headed further north. Heavy rain for 12 to 24 hours from Monday would add to the snowmelt, giving a high probability of a muddy, heavily waterlogged, deeply boggy course. It was likely to end with some balmy warmth, though, so that was something to look forward to.

Saturday

In spite of his evening curry, my brother was in high spirits when he set off on his Challenger South race. He bounded off through the snow, forging trails through what looked like a picture-postcard winter scene. I was buoyed by his enthusiasm, and willed him to have as safe and enjoyable an experience as possible on this most demanding of 100M courses.

Back at our youth hostel, the heating still wasn’t working. Somehow it was actually colder inside than out, so I bailed, checked-out and crawled around the local coffee shops, stuffing my face with tea and goodies, feeling entirely at ease, passing time before my kit check slot.

At Spine HQ, my gear received the A-OK, meaning I got my hand stamped with the customary Spine stamp in the form of Lindley Chambers’ grinning face (in my opinion, this is one of the race’s little-known esoteric highlights!)

On the downside, in the race briefing, they threw me a curveball by explaining that CP1 had become snowed-in, and would need to be relocated. I was told the new location would probably be somewhere in the vicinity of Hebden Bridge; but where exactly, or at what distance, remained a mystery.

After receiving that little bombshell, I met up with my friend Steve, who would also be running full Spine this year. We’d both had a long day preparing for the race, and were ready for dinner. So, naturally, I took him for a traditional pre-race curry.

“Very, very, very mild, please”, poor Steve begged the same waiter who’d served my brother and I yesterday. Over Steve’s shoulder, the waiter fired me an interrogatory look, as if to ask why on earth I kept bringing diners who quite obviously didn’t want curries. I just grinned and gave him a double thumbs-up.

In return for my dubious hospitality, Steve hosted me at his youth hostel, which turned out to suffer from the exact opposite problem of mine. Instead of zero heating, Edale YHA had its heating on full-blast, resulting in a near-tropical climate in the bedrooms.

Adding to our heat-triggered delirium was Steve’s curious decision to re-waterproof his shoes with a spray that, as we quickly discovered, should have been used in a well-ventilated area, which our hermetically sealed dorm room was not. The fumes clouded the air and our minds alike, precipitating much laughter and some questionable last-minute decision-making, not least my self-reinvention as a tailor wherein I decided to make some “improvements” to my running pack...

Sunday

On race morning I met up with Cedric Castille and Ashley Ward. Cedric I knew from last year, and he shared some of his impassioned why for running the race, which turned out to be a thousand times clearer and more compelling than anything I had for myself. I sincerely wished him well.

Where was my why at, I reflected? Nowhere, that's where. I had nothing invested in this race. No why, no goal, no need to hit a time, to finish, or even to start. In contrast, I was invested in my brother’s journey; in Steve’s, Cedric’s, Ashley’s. Everybody and anybody’s except mine. Frankly, I was in denial that I was even running the thing.

Mingling with the spectators on the sidelines of the start line, I could sense the anxious buzz of nervous tension from a hundred and fifty fearful souls, trepidatious about setting off on their adventure of a lifetime. Some were here to rectify a past DNF, many were stepping up from the Challenger races, and some were Spine virgins, with absolutely no idea of the dark rabbit hole they were about to descend into.

Me, though; I felt exactly like I had yesterday when I’d seen my brother off. I wasn’t a part of it. I was more like a spectator. I even imagined myself a reporter, in a helicopter up above, gazing down on the starting field, introducing the start of the race. I was explaining the Spine’s history, the route, the highlights, the challenges, the weather forecast…

But my report was interrupted by a megaphone, which was making an announcement very much like a race briefing, and the runners around me were retying their laces and adjusting their packs, and the spectators were cheering, and those around me were running, and my little feet were pattering through the snow, casually cruising through Edale toward that sign marking the start of the Pennine Way; and I could feel the heavy weight of my pack on my shoulders, and I was questioning - am I doing this? - and I was thinking this stupid, and asinine, and irrational; and I was protesting, and telling myself I was only a spectator, or observer - anything other than a runner, though I was surely running, wasn’t I - and as I ran, I began to recall how indescribably hard this had been, how deep down the rabbit hole I’d had to go; and I knew, I really didn’t want to run this again, and injure myself again, and subject myself to all that trauma again - not without a reason, not without a why… but the run was drawing me in, and I had no choice in the matter, not really, because I’d swallowed the red pill, and I knew I’d swallowed it for a reason, and the reason was locked away in the box, at the end of the Spinebow, and I was going to have to get myself back there, to the end of the Spinebow, and find the box, and open it, and resolve Pandora's predicament… my predicament… for there was a crazed monkey crashing, and a white rabbit retreating, and Morpheus beckoning, and Big Brother brainwashing, and a f***ing war raging -