Spine 2: Return to Zion (Part 4 of 9)
CP2 to CP3: Frozen in time: Chronos' revenge
This post follows Part 3: The rise and fall of Poseidon.
30 incredibly long hours after setting off from CP1, I finally reached the youth hostel in Hawes. Thirty hours, that was 25% longer than it’d taken me last year. It showed just how difficult it’d been to hack paths through the snow.
The checkpoint’s L-shaped room was configured similarly to last year. I was even directed to the same chair in exactly the same position. The vibe of the room felt different though, and not for the better. The air of despondency was deeper.
I overheard one of the volunteers muttering “Challenger South had the slowest winning time on record”. That made sense, I figured. The deep snow had been challenging for us on full Spine, but it would have been even worse for those who’d started a day earlier in the Challenger South race. I could only imagine what its frontrunners had gone through, both the formidable task of breaking trail and the difficulty of navigation.
This felt like the right time to spotlight my second quote, from the United Nations’ Human Rights Council:
With that off my mind, I could attempt to unwind. As a volunteer handed me a steaming mug of tea, I enquired after my brother. “Has he finished?”
There’d just been a shift change so my volunteer didn’t know offhand, but he checked the tracking website for me.
“Yes, here you go - he’s down as a finisher”.
Woohoo! Good news at last! And just like that, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. I really hoped he’d enjoyed it; well, not all of it, obviously, but parts of it. That he’d experienced some of the deep introspection that exceptional undertakings like the Spine can provoke. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience after all - well, supposedly…
I ordered some soup, and followed that up with vegan chilli. All the eating gave me time to take a deeper read of the room. People’s injuries looked particularly severe this year, with the frosted snow taking its toll on people’s feet and legs. There were some challenging scenes as people tried to process what they’d been through. I’d seen and experienced enough to need a break.
Last year, when I’d felt particularly wrecked at CP3, I took a lovely steaming hot shower. That’s what I ought to do now, I decided.
My shower was pleasant, but it didn’t feel the same as last year, because it didn’t feel like the right thing to be doing. In the context of a race, this was plain timewasting. Was I racing? If not, then what exactly was I doing here?
Why was I here?
Should I sleep here? I didn’t feel particularly tired, but I reasoned I probably would soon, and so I made the executive decision to sleep anyway. The bunkroom I was assigned to was full aside from one top bunk, where I lay, fiddling around with the alarm app on my phone, trying to set a 90 minute alarm that wouldn’t piss off everyone else in the room.
I closed my eyes expecting to fall asleep on a dime like I had last year, but my hand was in pain, throbbing relentlessly. I tossed and turned to no avail. For ages I tried, growing ever more frustrated, while nerves fired pain signals up my arm and thoughts crashed around my mind like that monkey with its cymbals. After 2 hours I cut my losses and headed back to the main room for another bowl of chilli. What a total failure that’d been; not only hadn’t I slept a wink, but I felt worse for totally wasting another couple of hours.
Packing for the next leg was a monumental task, for there wasn’t a dry or unworn item in my pack. Absolutely everything needed to be replaced.
And while I ran through the motions, sorting out each kit item one-by-one, I felt just like I had back at Malham Tarn. That I had no purpose being here; no DNF to correct, no poor time to improve upon, no novel strategy to bring to bear. All I had was quite possibly a broken hand.
With no insightful thoughts of my own, I allowed myself to become distracted by the chap next to me who was busy toasting his mobile phone with a cigarette lighter. A pretty risky strategy just to dry out one’s USB charging port.
By the time I’d finished packing my gear, volunteers were furnishing that chap with a lender phone. It seemed he’d taken his toasting a little too far.
A Great Emoshunal Rollercoaster
I’d been in the YHA for almost 7 and a half hours, very close to the 8 hour checkpoint limit. Where on earth the time had gone was quite impossible to discern.
I genuinely didn’t care though. Any sense that this was a ‘race’ had long since dissipated. Frankly that’d happened shortly after CP1, when I’d internalised that the snow would make for a slower time than last year.
All that aside; now it was daylight, the weather was fine, I was on a road, and it was clear of snow and ice. This was not normal! Should I use the opportunity to do something? I decided that shooting a segment of video made sense, so I pulled out my phone and started a vlog.
I was mid-diatribe when I noticed I was climbing up Great Shunner Fell. It looked so different in the light, without any snow. Instead I was trotting up a most agreeable dirt/stone track that had meltwater gently trickling down it. The conditions were pretty good too, just some mizzle and a light breeze. I didn’t mind this at all.
In fact, when snow reappeared higher up the fell and reminded me of the cols I’d crossed with my friends in the Pyrenees last summer, I really started to enjoy myself once more. Picking routes around icefields, those little gambles with the tufty bogs, all in fair weather - this was rather good fun!
When the sun broke through the clouds, I grinned widely. This was more like it! I properly let myself go on the descent, catching a couple of SSTs by surprise on the road into Thwaite. Given how far back in the field I was, I figured they expected to find someone rather less spritely and carefree than I was at that moment.
The sharp climb out of Thwaite caught me off-guard, until I was able to join the dots and comprehend where I was. This was the start of the sketchy singletrack I’d remembered so vividly from last year. It was a slither of angled trail that wrapped around the side of Kisdon Fell, and last year it’d been covered in slick ice. In my hallucinatory semi-conscious state, it’d been absolutely treacherous. The sound of water crashing over rocks far, far below had only added to a looming sense of doom.
This year, it looked very different. Under a glorious daytime sun and free of ice, it was no longer a death trail, but rather a marvellous stretch of singletrack boasting an incredible view over the valley.
It was still the Spine though, so the trail soon became trickier. It rambled endlessly up-and-down, over rocky protrusions, through mud, bog and more snow. It was impossible to develop any sort of rhythm here. Just as soon as I got up to speed, I’d have to slam the brakes on to pick my way over something else. Adding to my frustration, rain teased throughout, and so I fell back into my earlier despondency. Why was I putting myself through this again?
A Purposeful Tearoom
Hearing the sound of a waterfall, I sensed I was nearing Kisdon Force. This meant the end of this semi-technical section. Here the trail split in two, with the Pennine Way breaking right down into the valley, and a sign advertising Keld’s “Winter Tearoom” pointing along the remaining path. Last year, I’d desperately wanted to follow that sign and avail myself of warmth and shelter, but for some reason I didn’t and I’d regretted my decision for hours after.
Well, here I was again at that sign. Keld Winter Tearoom. Warmth, shelter, tea and cakes. It was a shame I didn’t need to stop this year, for the weather was fine, and I had ample food supplies. Frankly, the only thing I needed was a why, and I certainly wasn’t going to find that in a Winter Tearoom.
But this time around I remained standing beside the sign, an invisible force preventing me from running on. It might just be a tearoom, but I’d seriously regretted passing it by last year. Now I had another opportunity. Somehow it felt important that I complete the visit, irrespective of whether I needed a cup of tea or not. It just felt like the purposeful thing to do.
It took a good few minutes to reach the village of Keld, but I quickly assessed it to be a most pleasant looking village community, and so I readily entered its quaint tearoom. Inside I found a cosy room bedecked in wood panelling, strewn with travel magazines and burgeoning under the weight of homemade cakes and pastries. Here I met volunteers and village folk alike, with whom I engaged in some excited discussions about the eccentricities of the race.
One volunteer, John, an academic specialising in brain chemistry, recounted the hallucinations he’d experienced during last years’ Spine, and his self-analysis of them. I found learning about the science behind our madness fascinating. But my tea was drunk, and I’d been standing chatting in the tearoom for a half-hour. Spine HQ would dispatch a Safety Team if I stayed here trading stories any longer.
Running back toward the trail split, I reflected that in concrete terms, I’d wasted 40 minutes diverting to Keld, all for a cup of tea I didn’t need. But somehow it didn’t feel like time wasted. It felt like time well spent.
A Purposeful Inn
It was late afternoon, and the last of the sun bedecked Tan Hill in an effervescent light. The scene had for all the money in the world the look of a warm autumnal evening, with straw-coloured grass blending into deep oranges and punches of dark shadow, as though harvest were coming due. The only hint to the month of January came from the occasional punctuations of bright white snow.
If only the going were as dreamy as the mind’s eye, for despite appearances, the trail was unrelentingly waterlogged and boggy. I scanned the horizon for the Tan Hill pub, certain I should be able to pluck it out of the fellsides, but I could not. Instead tiredness tested me, offering up the odd hallucination - that branch, seemingly a man reclining - but; alas, no sight of Britain’s highest pub.
As I moved through this anti-oasis; my feet sloshing through water that was indistinguishable from desert from afar, my brain retreated back to the existential question of my why in the race. “I’m here reliving the experience, the emotions. Putting the jigsaw together. But what that means in terms of what I ought to do out here - how hard I push myself - who knows?”
There were also my logistics to consider. I had post-race accommodation and trains booked, and at this rate I might miss the lot. Perhaps I should push harder? But if this was the last time I’d be here, perhaps I should ease off and enjoy it? But what about the logistics… The arguments were circular, and I grew tired of my inane deliberations. Instead, I set myself a tangible goal of reaching Tan Hill Inn before dark.
While I didn’t quite make it before darkness set in, the revelation of Tan Hill’s lights was a sight for sore eyes. Just like at Keld, I had no need to avail myself of a rest here, but the same logic I’d employed at Keld rang true here as well. This was another stop I’d regretted passing by last year, and thus the only vague purpose I’d found - to experience everything as best I could - dictated that I must stop. So I did.
The inside of Tan Hill’s function room reminded me of a chalet in the Alps. Wooden throughout, furnished with quaint knick-knacks, boasting a well-stocked bar and a roaring fire that kicked out enough heat to burst the mercury out of your thermometer. It made me want to head straight to the check-in desk - “a single room for a month, please. Oh, go on then - make it three!”
Here I enjoyed an unexpected tomato soup and roll, and I sort-of set up shop here, with my feet up & phone out, taking care of social media. I checked on my friend Steve’s progress, and hummed away to the music, quite content in this little haven of tranquillity.
Hitting the 30 minute time limit, it was with some reluctance that I collected my gear and headed back out into the night. I supposed all good things must come to an end.
A Purposeful Bog
Over Sleightholme Moor, planets, constellations and a full moon popped against the otherwise pitch black night sky. This is probably the boggiest section of the Pennine Way. Flat, desolate and entirely isolating, it’s notorious for playing mind-games. Save the discordance of Tan Hill Inn’s rainbow lights fading away to the rear, there was nothing on the horizon to indicate humanity’s existence. Just 5km of pure, uninterrupted bog.
A lonesome danger sign warned to keep to the right to avoid disappearing into bottomless bogs. But, out here in the darkness with nothing to orient on, stay right of what, exactly? Poles were key to gauging the consequences of each step.
While I find myself reluctant to reflect too positively on a bog crossing, beneath that ultra-black starry sky, I found a strong sense of connection to the earth and cosmos that feels tangible to this day.
Sleightholme Moor Road offered a brief respite from the omni-bog, before the black hole that was Wytham Moor swallowed me up once more. Now the distant horizon teased me with an illuminated line running perpendicular, with dots of light skimming along it like aeroplanes. Was it real, or a hallucination?
After eons squelching through that bog, the illuminated line had developed into a road, and the dots into boxy little vehicles. Soon I could hear it, and then I was there, standing beneath it, cars rocketing overhead. People. All in their individual containers. Propelled through the landscape like rockets. Did they have any idea of the remarkable landscape they were hurtling through?
The Pennine Way crossed under the A66, before heading straight up onto the next barren expansion, Bowes Moor.
By now, mizzle had set in, the wind had picked up, and the temperature had plummeted, making the going extremely unpleasant. Here, the Pennine Way existed more in conception than reality, borrowing indistinct trods over this undulating omni-bog, criss-crossed by marshy streams that were best tackled with a hearty bound. It was all I could do to keep my head down and my feet pointed in the general direction of that most heavenly of refuges, Clove Lodge.
Tea by the Bale
The barn at Clove Lodge had proved an essential pit stop last year, when the bogwater had been even icier, and the weather even harsher. This year, while milder, the journey from Tan Hill had been wetter underfoot, and the bog tougher to traverse. My feet and I fancied another break.
Clove Lodge Tea & Coffee Stop is a sizeable barn of breezeblock and corrugated metal construction. The front is wide open, inviting one into the first half of the barn where long tables and industrial shelving creak under the weight of an eclectic range of chocolate bars, crisps, energy mixes and other edible wonders of broad and unusual origins. Drinks bottles and the all-important tea and kettle round out the nutritional offering, while a multiform collection of garden furniture and beachfront sun loungers offer space to relax with a view of the outside.
The barn was busy today. Two volunteers were seated, looking very comfortable with their steaming mugs of cocoa. Across the way, two runners stood over their chairs, grinning from ear-to-ear and gossiping excitedly like it were a school reunion.
It was lovely and wholesome, but the sunny disposition of my compatriots was in conflict with my own mood after such a wet & difficult stretch. After all, I’d been running for 62 hours and awake for 65, without so much as a jot of sleep. I was cold, wet, hungry, aching, a bit miserable, and only had proper use of one of my two hands. I still couldn’t clearly articulate why I was doing this silly thing. So I didn’t fancy putting on a happy face and chatting about how amazingly awesome everything was. And that made me feel like a killjoy, which made things even worse.
So, possibly slightly discourteously, I kept my head down and busied myself with my own activities. I boiled the kettle, hydrated my food pouch - a 5 Bean Cassoulet - and ate in silence, only nodding and smiling politely when called upon.
The two runners left, ushering in a peace within the barn. Feeling warmer, fuller, happier and much more communicative now, I struck up a conversation with the two volunteers. In no time I was engrossed in discussion, learning about their why for volunteering, what they’d been up to, what their aspirations were, all the while searching for my own answers. I drank at least two cups of tea during this discussion, though it could easily have been more (I wasn’t counting).
An hour had passed at Clove Lodge, wherein I’d principally chatted and drunk tea. It certainly hadn’t been a sensible use of time in racing terms, but it had very much felt like what I ought to do in Spine 2.0.
Realising it would be even colder now, I donned four upper layers before I left, refusing only my balaclava because it was still soaking wet from the previous night.
It certainly was cold back out in the bog. I shivered uncontrollably for quite some time, at a loss for ideas to warm up other than getting a move on. But getting a move on was easier said than done when the route consisted of a gate or style every 50 metres, linked by gloopy, sticky mud.
After such prolonged exposure to cold air, my respiratory system was really beginning to struggle. I pulled my buff up over my face to pre-warm the air, and was relieved to find this a gamechanger. I’d entirely forgotten about this aspect of last year’s race.
It was at the intersection of Pennine Way trail and B-road where I stumbled upon the strangest of situations. As if by magic, a miniature hay barn popped out of the darkness, illuminated by a warm orange glow. It was lined at the rear by a dozen stacked hay bales, and fronted by a folding stall and a lone gentleman, with his wares laid out before him. His shoulders were open, his hands were clasped in front and his face projected a genuine, welcoming, though slightly vacant smile. He reminded me of the shopkeeper from the old children’s TV show Mr Benn.
The shopkeeper waved, and called me over. I obliged, quite astounded to find this most peculiar of sights was no hallucination. It really was a miniature hay barn, and the shopkeeper turned out to be a volunteer. Well, I’ll be!
I didn’t need anything, since I’d recently drunk enough tea for a month of Sundays. But as I got talking with the gent, I learned he’d been awake almost as long as I had. He’d been waiting until I passed before catching some shut-eye, for behind me was a long wait until the next runner, apparently.
Knowing I’d kept him awake, I felt keenly as though I ought to have something, and so accepted yet another tea. But then I spotted his bowl of bananas, and jumped at the opportunity for my first piece of fruit for days. Rather a treat, that!
With a little more tea swishing around in my belly than I thought entirely wise, and a couple of bananas to the good, I set back off. Mercifully, the bogs were disappearing, the mud was reducing, and wonderful grassy, rolling fells were emerging. The going was becoming immeasurably easier.
But; alas, a new problem was developing. My GPS tracker (the beefy box taped to our pack straps) was digging into my shoulder, and it was cutting off blood flow, or affecting a nerve, or something. Whatever was going on, my shoulder was in agony, and it was damn near paralysing my left arm.
I could lift up the tracker to relieve myself of the symptoms, but as soon as I dropped the tracker back down onto my shoulder, I’d be in pain again. The rotational movement of running caused it to dig in awfully, though I found if I walked & kept my upper body rigid, I could avoid the worst of it. Then I discovered that adjusting my running gait into a non-rotational robotic waddle-run afforded a fair compromise between speed and pain reduction. It was all very awkward, and to make matters worse, my robo-gait seemed to enrage my tibialis anterior. Short of cutting off my GPS tracker, it seemed I couldn’t win.
So over these last couple of runnable grassy fells dropping down into Middleton, the best I could do in the end was walk. Which was ridiculous really, given how runnable this stretch was compared to everything that had come before. But instead of losing myself in frustration, I pottered along quite happily, gazing down upon the lights of Middleton and imagining what the residents might be up to at 2am on a wintry Wednesday morning.
I passed straight through the town, turning left to join the 13km riverside stretch that torrential rain had made so thoroughly miserable for me last year.
Shielded from the wind down here, I felt much warmer, and mercifully my GPS tracker seemed to have shifted into a position that felt immeasurably more comfortable, allowing me to command a decent running pace once more. I’d be able to enjoy this stretch this year, and take in the sights - High Force, for instance, widely regarded as one of the best waterfalls in England. It all felt correct. This must be what the return to Spine was all about.
The Great Unraveling
I checked on the distance to CP3, but as usual my Enduro 2 was rebooting, as it had been roughly every half-hour for days now. Like at the base of Fountain’s Fell, I decided to roll up the sleeves on my other arm so I could access my Forerunner 955 and take a distance reading from that instead.
But when I finally revealed my 955’s screen, I could tell something was up. I had it on a clock screen to save battery, and I knew that wasn’t the right time. I furrowed my brow, unwilling to entertain the implication. I tried to scroll the watch to its navigation screen, but the 955 didn’t respond. It just sat there on the clock screen, showing a static time that I knew to be wrong. The watch had frozen.
I stood motionless, disbelieving the situation. Here I was, in the middle of the Spine, sporting two top-end Garmin watches. Both of them were broken. What was the f***ing point of these things if they couldn’t even manage basic nav?
I’d used both of these watches last year, and they’d both performed perfectly. This year; well, look at me. Thousands of pounds of Garmin gear, and I had nothing.
I Googled how to soft reset a 955, but when I followed the instructions it only rebooted my 955 to a blue Garmin triangle, where it stayed. I stood around drumming my fingers for 5 minutes, but nothing changed. The watch seemed to be bricked.
That was the last straw. All my frustrations about Garmin came flooding out. The bugs they’d introduced over the past year. Their focus on headline features over stability. I started listing all the whacky problems these two watches had manifested for the very first time during this race, but the list was so long I couldn’t retain them all in my head without a pencil and paper. I pulled out my phone and recorded an irate rant, which I then edited down; but then I ditched that and recorded a longer one, and edited that. Somewhere in the middle of all this my Forerunner crawled back to life, hanging its watchface in shame.
When it came to publishing my video, I first looked up and around, and drew breath. When I’d started making this video it was totally dark, and now there was enough light to make out features. I was surprised to discover I was standing in the middle of a muddy field in a valley. What on earth had I been doing?
It was getting to the point when HQ would be thinking about dispatching a team to check on me. I’d better move my dot, pronto! Not because I cared about being DQ’d for failing to report in, but because there might be other people who needed the Safety Team’s help more urgently than I, who had, somewhat inexplicably, been standing around in a field filming a documentary about Garmin watches.
Back on the go, my mind was tied up in knots. Had Garmin just pushed the most disastrous software update in the history of wearable devices? It hardly seemed plausible. Maybe they’d been sabotaged by a rival company - this wasn’t such a stretch of the imagination, considering their debilitating ransomware attack back in July 2020.
The remaining 10km to Langdon Beck was not the pleasurable sightseeing tour to High Force that I’d hoped for. I was busy mentally unplugging myself from the race. I’d had enough of Zion, I decided. My moving forward had nothing to do with the Spinebow any more. I would have happily ripped off that tracker and thrown it into the river. I was quite simply showing a middle finger to Garmin, the Spine’s Sentinel, and its continual efforts to frustrate me.
Arriving at Langdon Beck YHA, I maintained a deadpan expression as I shuffled past a courier van blocking the driveway, and weaved between piles of drop bags lining the pathway to the entrance.
I didn’t even bother trying to put my worthless Enduro 2 into rest mode, but instead rolled up my sleeves to reveal my Forerunner 955 and hit its rest button, which had worked earlier. But all that did was start a new lap. Err… what?
On Garmin watches, the rest button doubles as a lap button. All I could think was that after its freeze and reboot, the 955 had mistakenly automatically resumed the activity in ‘regular’ run mode rather than ‘ultra’ run mode (which switches the lap button to function as a rest button).
That was it. I’d had enough.
F*** Garmin.
F*** the Spine.
F*** the box.
F*** the monkey.
F*** the why.
I had reached the end of my tether, and the end of my story.
It was time to call it quits.
I wanted nutritious food, a hot shower, a good night’s sleep.
And then I wanted to go back f***ing home.
Continue reading Part 5:
