Spine 2: Return to Zion (Part 8 of 9)

CP5.5 to Kirk Yetholm, and the Box

This post follows Part 7: Bogged down in quantum Flintstates.

Last year, my late evening stop at Byrness had been a simple, utilitarian affair, where I’d been furnished with a bowl of instant mashed potato by volunteers valiantly straining to keep their own eyes open. I’d expected similar this time around, but instead I was welcomed in by a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed team who had everything arranged down to a tee.

There was hot vegan chilli ready and waiting for me, which was just delicious, and I really do mean delicious: a standard of cooking that matched my friend Jandalf’s level of culinary prowess. That was washed down with a delicate, flavourful coffee, and throughout I was given time-checks at a regular internal so I could comfortably plan my departure within the 30 minute limit. I couldn’t have asked for more, and felt so very much better when I departed.

Now it was time that played on my mind. The data on both of my watches was up-the-creek, but my best guess was that I was 20 hours behind where I ought to have been. In which case I was staring down the barrel of a Saturday finish; well outside the window I’d planned for, and potentially a problem for my logistics. I couldn’t remember when I’d need to checkout from the hotel I’d booked in Berwick-upon-Tweed, nor when my last train home was. Would I even have a way home?

So I needed to get a move on. There was no time to pop into the church for a sleep, though this left a bitter taste in my mouth. The church was one of those things I’d missed experiencing last year.

Conflicting Memories

I had jolly good fun on the slightly scrambly climb up Byrness Hill, despite wearing far too many clothes for that level of exertion. I expected a fierce wind at the top, which there certainly was at first. It howled past my ears so violently that it gave me a headache. But to my surprise, when I climbed further up Houx Hill toward Ravens Knowe, the wind cut out and a calm settled over the Cheviots. It was rather pleasant up here now.

And that became the rub. It shouldn’t have been.

I remembered most vividly what I’d experienced last year along the first stretch of the Cheviots to Hut 1, and it hadn’t been anything like this.

Last year, I’d run this in the dark, in horrible weather, over ground covered in snow and ice. It’d been hard to get a good read of the lay of the land, but it’d felt utterly remote, and inhospitable, and alien. Infuriatingly complex to navigate, with its multitude of divergent trails and trods. And I was quite sure I was high atop a mountain, standing proud of all the low-lying land around it.

But what I could see on this mild afternoon bore no resemblance to any of that. For a start, the Pennine Way trail was obvious. There was a line of flagstones snaking into the distance. In these conditions, it literally couldn’t have been any easier to navigate without Mr. Motivator bounding alongside me screaming “You feel good! You’ve got this!”

And then there was the geography. I wasn’t all that high; not yet anyway, at the southern end of the Cheviots. This was more of a fell ridgeline than a mountain. There were valleys either side, and parallel hill ranges beyond. It was visually impressive, but in a calm, gentle, soothing way. Like High Cup Nick without any of its rocky crags and brooding shadows, and only its sweeping curves.

It did look remote though, with absolutely no signs of life. I struggled to find a single tree. That aside, the landscape looked friendly and accessible. This wasn’t at all what I’d experienced last year, in the dark, in the midst of the weather and the arctic temperatures, and the snow, and the ice.

Wasn’t this what I’d come back for, to get a true feel for the race? Perhaps. But surely not like this. I knew what I’d experienced last year, and this felt worryingly close to a contradiction.

An Afternoon Stroll

I set it all to one side as best I could. Right now, the going was easy. “Too easy!” I bellowed on autopilot, while grinning from ear to ear. But the fact was I was knackered. My left Achilles was wrecked from the bogs. My feet were in agony in my tight-fitting Cyklons with their torturous gaiter zips. My left knee was intermittently flaring up, and I couldn’t shake this incessant ‘Spine cough’.

So without any bad weather to push me along, and while starting to recall that I did indeed have a second train booked for Sunday, I simply shrugged my shoulders, listened to my body, and slowed to a walk.

While slightly dispiriting, it gave me a chance to reconnect with the outside world. I fired off a message to Steve, shot some video logs, and fielded social media. When all that was done, I settled down to the business of contemplation.

“I feel quite pleased with what I’ve done, in terms of building a better picture of what happened last year, learning more about the Spine itself, and the people who run it. You get some really quite interesting people doing this race (present company excluded) - some really quite accomplished athletes, mountaineers, climbers, all sorts.”

“There is an inherent appeal to a big challenge, as people see the potential for personal growth, learning, new experiences, stories; all that interesting stuff that we don’t tend to get if we just go for a regular run, or sit in front of a TV watching Netflix. That’s a big draw for people: to live life, and experience new things”.

Rocking the Cheviots

My journey over the fells proceeded quite uneventfully, with the only excitement being my vain attempts to locate Hut 1 on the horizon. But all the while, my situation was unravelling. It’d been 30 hours since I’d last managed some meaningful sleep; my only sleep, in fact, aside from those 9 minutes dozing in a bog. And over the past five and a half days, I’d only slept for about 3 hours in total. Perhaps I ought to have caught some z’s in that church, I reflected, as my eyelids began their all too familiar routine of edging their way closed, uncommanded.

This was doubly frustrating because I was beginning to recognise some of the features of the trail from last year. That was where I’d sprinted and leapt across sketchy ice sheets on my frenetic mission to bring back medics from Hut 1. In that little dip, I’d skidded off the ice. That was where I fell, and there I’d taken the wrong turn.

It was all here, all the the little twists and turns and climbs that brought memories flooding back. Gosh; it all looked so very different today, in the light, with no wind, or cold. What had been a survival situation back then was just a pleasant afternoon bimble today.

But my eyes kept closing, ever more frequently, and they became harder to re-open. I couldn’t continue like this.

I thought about breaking out the sleeping bag and bivvy. After all, while there wasn’t any shelter here, the weather conditions were absolutely fine. I could happily sleep out in the open. But the hassle of unpacking and repacking my gear didn’t appeal one iota. Instead I resolved to try to manage the situation to Hut 1, where I’d take a short nap.

How best to navigate this level of sleepiness? I tried caffeine, but that had no effect. So I broke out my phone, wherein I was entirely baffled to find I had some limited phone signal (was nothing as it was last year?) I fired up Spotify and found a playlist of 90s rock classics that I hadn’t heard in decades. In no time I was transported back to the heady days of my youth, singing my guts out on the Cheviots, safe in the knowledge that no other soul would have the misfortune of hearing my tone-deaf screeches.

Many of the songs had such an innocent charm. Youths expressing their basic frustrations and desires amidst an out-of-kilter world. It was honest and genuine in a way that seemed lost in so much of the modern, mass-produced music developed to a standard formula. That’ll only get worse with increasing use of AI, I reflected. Genuine, heartfelt human art seemed at risk of becoming a rare commodity.

But even blaring tunes, singing at the top of my lungs and contemplating the downfall of human culture was not cutting the mustard. I still had a couple of kilometres to Hut 1, and I wasn’t going to make it like this. So, seeing a fence and gate, I saw an opportunity to play my last card. I perched my phone on the fencepost, and attempted the one thing I’m least capable of doing - dancing.

Try to picture, if you can, a lone man, in the middle of the remote Cheviot hills, wearing a pack larger than him, stuffed with enough layers to clothe an army crossing the Antarctic. With his phone perched on a fence, blaring rock tunes from his youth, singing wildly out of tune and fudging most of the lyrics, failing his limbs around like a robot on the fritz, in a comical attempt to emulate dancing. That was me.

But I’ll tell you something - it got me those last couple of kilometres to Hut 1!

The Blurry List

Inside the glorified shed that was the mountain rescue hut, the first thing that struck me were the sheets of A4 paper neatly tacked to the facing wall. A handwritten list extended all the way across them; clearly the work of many different people, although two distinctive writing styles stood out. I guessed two team leaders had done most of the scribing. The list looked like a record of each runner’s visit: their name, arrival time, duration of stay and any notes on their condition, such as whether they’d presented with injuries, accepted any medical treatment, what they’d eaten and how long they’d slept.

There were an awful lot of entries. This couldn’t have just been the full Spine, it must have included Challenger North too. But even so... I pursed my lips and grimaced while my name was written in, right at the bottom, a very long way down the list.

A group of Spine Safety Team members poured into the hut, returning from a resupply mission. It was mid-afternoon, and given the great weather, they were understandably in high spirits. I accepted some tea and vegan biscuits, but I found all the commotion a bit much for my sleep-deprived brain to handle. Only 3 hours of sleep in the last 130 wasn’t enough.

I felt bad asking whether I might be left alone in the hut for 10 minutes, knowing this would effectively confine everyone to their tents, but it had to be done. Everyone filtered out, leaving me alone, with only the grating sound of some monotonous pop music crackling from a portable speaker.

I couldn’t be bothered to remove my muddy shoes, so I laid down on the hut’s wooden bench, kinking my hips so that my feet remained on the floor. I had no pillow, so I crooked my neck to allow my head to rest upside-down on the bench. For a professional contortionist this position might’ve been alright, but for me it was diabolically uncomfortable.

But after five minutes my sleep deprivation won over the discomfort, and that long list of names on the wall began to blur. Finally, I could feel sleep coming. I was drifting out of consciousness now, into that sweetest of states of peace and tranquillity. A state of deep, relaxing sleep… a state of deep, relaxing whispers… chatter… louder… laughter…

Oh, for the love of mother nature, let it not be so. The five stages of grief flashed through my mind at breakneck speed: this can’t be happening, this isn’t fair, can I ask them to leave, I’m so screwed; and, finally, there’s no point remaining in this painfully contorted position. I drew myself up to a sitting position, opened my eyes and brought the hut back into focus.

The Debonair Conversationalist

Another runner was in front of me, engaged in animated conversation with two members of the Spine Safety Team. He seemed so unfathomably happy. He was telling jokes, making witty puns, eliciting raucous laughter, and grinning from ear to ear. I felt really pleased for him. The only problem was it happened to be the polar opposite of what I personally needed.

Then he turned to me, and did the very thing I desperately wished he wouldn’t. He asked me a question. And he stood there, beaming; along with the Spine Safety Team members, staring directly at me, waiting patiently for my entertaining riposte.

But my brain wasn’t in my head. It was still down on that hard wooden bench, asleep. I wasn’t mentally capable of interpreting the question, let alone composing a response.

My mouth frantically searched for some words. Any words, anything at all. Even a mumble would have sufficed. But nothing came to mind. So I made some grunting noises, and meekly diverted my attention to those biscuits I’d been nibbling on earlier, willing the others to resume their conversation so that I might be left alone.

It must’ve been the timing, I thought. The precise second I’d slipped into unconsciousness, I’d been jolted back awake. And then required to join in some ripping banter, leaving me looking like a brainless fool.

This entire situation wasn’t working. Just as I had at Bellingham, I felt I had to get out of here, stat.

I mumbled in pidgin English that I was heading off, then rose to my feet, lost my balance and clumsily toppled into the debonair conversationalist. But he looked like he was preparing to leave too. So… I supposed that meant we were going to leave together? Right after I’d made a total fool of myself? While I couldn’t yet speak in full sentences?

We got underway, and quite understandably he began asking me questions. At first I struggled to respond, and could only mumble an apology and explain that my brain was still asleep. But in time it whirred back into life, my conversational capability returned, and we struck up a genuine conversation.

I found I was running with Andrew Heaney, the same chap I’d encountered very briefly back at Horneystead Farm. I learned he was one of the founders of the charity Into Ultra, which I made a mental note to investigate later. And we ended up having a lovely chat, discussing past races, future plans, and our shared desire to get this thing done.

In no small part thanks to Andrew’s company, my tiredness was behind me now, and so I figured it was time to break away so I could focus on sorting out my nutrition, hydration, layering and planning the journey ahead to Hut 2. I wished him well and shot off down the muddy descent, setting a clear intent to make good progress from here on.

The Sisyphean Time Warp

It was a beautiful night on the Cheviots. Almost perfectly still, and a great temperature for running. At least, it would have been were I not so preposterously overdressed. And I could only de-layer so much since my pack was full to bursting. I had to keep a close eye on my overflowing side pockets lest any gear fell out.

While I was comically overburdened with clothes, I was almost out of food and water. I’d just used my last caffeine gel, and could only find one regular gel remaining. I decided to save that for later. I’d stop at Hut 2 for water and a coffee anyway.

Ground conditions were much milder than last year over Windy Gyle, but nonetheless. This was the high section of the Cheviots. Up here, the snow was back, and it was often quite deep. The flagstones were not without occasional ice, and they offered little protection against the monstrous bog.

“We use the word bog”, I mused, “but… there’s ground at all levels, flagstones floating at weird angles on unpredictable amorphous substrates; deep water, deep sticky mud that claims your shoes, your shins, your knees, and threatens to eat you alive. Some of these bogholes are deep, and for shorter runners like me, the risk of entrapment feels quite real. Every step, every jump, is a leap of faith. There’s no parallel I can think of in southern England; certainly not our XCs, not even the Arc of Attrition’s notorious Pendeen stretch comes close to this.”

My flashbacks grew stranger. The course was starting to feel very familiar; not just like I’d run it once before, but like I’d run it many times, like I was in my own backyard.

“Ah yes, back here again - I always love this stretch!”

I’d felt the same last year too, when I’d never run it before it my life. The sense of déjà vu was powerful and made absolutely no sense.

The really big climb began. Running low on food and battling tiredness, the increasingly deep snow and the resurgence of high winds, I repeatedly checked on my distance remaining, seeking validation that I was making progress toward my goal. While my Enduro 2 was actually working for once, it was as if it were stubbornly refusing to advance its digits. Its empirical data showed I wasn’t advancing at anywhere near the rate I felt I ought to be given the effort involved.

It was all coming to a head. The night sky was pitch black. I was on an extremely remote fell. I had no visual context outside of the beam of my headtorch. The landscape was alien; inconsistent, multi-layered, rocky and covered in snow. Every step was a puzzle to solve, and fraught with risk. I was out of supplies. I needed to sleep. I needed this to be over. But the climb continued endlessly, minute by minute, hour by hour; days became months and months became years…

Perhaps I was trapped in a spacetime glitch. Decades of my lived experience would be spent climbing this infinite mountain, while for people on the outside, going about their ordinary lives, it would be but a fleeting moment. As if they were travelling near the speed of light, and I at a snail’s pace. Would I ever escape this time warp? Was this to be my fate until the end of days? Would there be a society left when I finally re-emerged into civilisation?

When I spotted the snow under my headtorch beam levelling out, I breathed a sigh of relief, and whooped in glee. I wasn’t stuck after all - I had been moving!

Wu Wei

I stood proud atop Auchope Cairn. From here, I could see it all. I could see dots of warm light down below, a very long way away. Perhaps that was Kirk Yetholm, or Coldstream, or Kelso. It didn’t matter; it was evidence of civilisation, and it was such a relief. More than a relief, it was over! The whole ordeal, the whole shebang!

My broken hand, my friends’ DNFs, my searching for a reason that I could never fully grasp. It was all over!

And just like that, the land fell away before me, opening out into that long, steep descent down to Hut 2. I flowed down that mountain like water, my feet barely kissing the snow. My surroundings flashed past at breakneck speed; and I couldn’t have told you how I knew my footfalls would hold as I sprinted down that steepest of fellsides, but this was the most secure I’d felt in the entire race, and the most in tune with the Cheviot, nature, and The Way.

Where the descent levelled out, I was met by a volunteer who ran me into Hut 2. It was mightily cosy inside, with steaming brews and cheery bearded folks lining the benches. They implored me to stay for a while, or at least have a drink and refill my water - “it’s still at least 4 hours to Kirk Yetholm” they warned, pointedly. But I’d been here before. In the flow state I was in now, it’d take me less than 2.

I hastened back outside, where my chaperone ran with me for a kilometre to guide me around the most dangerous bog holes in the vicinity. “We don’t want to have to come back and dig you out”, he explained. But sensing my straining at his reins, he soon waved me off into the darkness.

The Last Morsel

The ground rose up before me, which I knew must signal the start of the final climb up The Schil. The very last one! How far it was exactly, I couldn’t recall, but I was going to dispatch it as efficiently as I could. I powered up through the snowy mud-bog, leaping and bounding and sinking and swearing, though firmly with my eye on the finish.

But the boggy climb just kept on coming, and coming, and coming. My whole world, contained within this narrow cone of light, felt like it was being subsumed by the encircling darkness. My space-time warp was returning. Like a bad dream where your legs move but you do not, I wasn’t advancing through space as per conventional physics. Time had taken on the stickiness of the bogs.

My motivation was fading, so I made the last play I had and ate my very last item of food. Eat, and hang in there, I instructed myself. I was holding out for that fabled summit.

When it came, relief flooded my body. The ground dropped away abruptly once more, and I commenced my second effortless flight down toward Kirk Yetholm.

Neither my lack of food and water, my many suffocating layers, my overweight and oversized pack, nor my two shins screaming ‘shin splints’ could hinder me now.

Crossing the finish line evoked many emotions. First and foremost, there was relief - that the ordeal was over. There was a sense of justice - that all my suffering would be recognised with a finish. There was pride - in my courage and perseverance.

There were also reflections - on the friends who’d had to DNF, the damage I’d done to my body, my slowness, purposelessness, and an observation that this was essentially my second consecutive DNDNF - ‘did not did not finish’.

But I shoved all that to the back of my mind; for, right now, I was finishing. I ran through the routine of kissing the Border Hotel wall, giving a finish line interview, and heading inside to the finisher’s room, where I made my final spotlight - Amnesty International’s most recent appeal to the international community:

While I stood there holding up my little cardboard sign, it dawned on me that I’d rather have turned over my final spotlight to individuals. Perhaps the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors, so many of whom were standing up and making their voices heard. People like Agnes Kory, Ursula Blumenthal, Stephen Kapos and Haim Bresheeth.

While I didn’t share their voices then, I will do now:

As survivors and descendants of survivors of the Holocaust who condemn Israel’s genocidal actions, we feel our views are not taken into account and neither are those of many Jews who oppose the actions of the Israeli government.

The UK has a duty to comply with international law and to support the international organisations that uphold it; the failure to take such action risks making the UK itself complicit in these crimes

The UK should have the courage to act independently and to take a lead

In doing so, it would regain much of the respect and moral standing that it has lost by its failure to comply with its obligations under international law so far. It is not too late to act.

With my last spotlight complete, I felt I had at least achieved something here. Even if nobody else were to see or read what I’d reported, I had shared meaningful moments with the volunteers who’d acceded to take my photo in each checkpoint. Every one of them had connected with me in some way - from a simple nod of the head, up to a full-blown emotional outpouring about the horror they felt at the inhumanity of the situation in Gaza. Every single one had shown empathy, and that gave me hope.

It was time to sort myself out. I started with tea, water, and food (the first plate of which I managed to tip all over myself), before taking that steaming hot shower I’d so wanted back at Bellingham.

Then I caught a taxi to my hotel in Berwick-upon-Tweed, where I hauled my drop bag up to my room, boiled the kettle, and prepared the last dehydrated meal I’d been saving for just this moment.

The White Rabbit and the Jar

There was nothing else left to do but toast my finish with one of my favourite teas. I’d brought a nice big jar of it in my drop bag. It’d been transported from start to finish, from checkpoint to checkpoint, all the way up along the Pennine Way.

I popped the lid off my tea jar, wherein the smell of jasmine petals infused my nostrils and delivered me unto a state of tranquillity. My thoughts drifted back to my metaphorical box at the end of the Spinebow. Pandora’s Box.

It was funny, I reflected, how the myth of Pandora’s Box came from Hesiod (the ancient Greek poet), while Hesiod himself had never written of a “box”. The idea of a box had only come about from a popular mistranslation of his work.

In Works and Days, Hesiod had recounted the myth of Prometheus giving fire to humans against the will of the king of gods, Zeus. Zeus then sought revenge by creating Pandora and delivering her to Epimetheus with a “pithos” - a jar - that she wasn’t to open. When Pandora opened the jar in violation of Zeus’ instructions, she unleashed his revenge upon mankind, leaving behind only hope.

So it wasn’t Pandora’s Box, it was Pandora’s Jar.

I stared down at my hands. My right hand was holding the lid, and the left was holding the jar.

I hadn’t just found my box at the end of the Spinebow, I’d opened it.

“I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes”

It was time.

Continue reading Part 9: