Somehow it is June already. The calendar says 2026, and this past weekend found me in the woods, responsible for twelve young minds at a Scout Survival Camp I named “The Freezing Mist.”
The scenario I gave them was stark: You are hiking through the Scottish Highlands with your leader, Bob. He leaves his pack by a tree and steps off trail to get a photo from a higher vantage point. Then, the freezing mist rolls in. Bob doesn’t return. You are stuck for the night. You must stay put and survive until rescue arrives.
I went to town on the execution. I set off a smoke flare to swallow the trees in grey, forcing them to engage with the reality of the situation. We spent the day foraging for strategically hidden provisions - a punnet of mushrooms by a rotten stump, a bag of apples nestled in a crook of branches. They built shelters from a tarp and rope found in "Bob’s" abandoned pack. I taught them how to set snare traps, how to skin a rabbit from the local butcher and how to turn it into a hot stew over an open fire.
It was exhausting, the way all true youth volunteering is, but it was pure, unadulterated fun.
Yet, late into the evening, while the kids slept soundly beneath their stretched canvas and the woods went completely still, my mind drifted back. Looking out into the dark, I remembered a time when the scenario wasn't a game. A time when I was truly in survival mode. My mind travelled back seven years - to June 2019, to Cumbria and the highly questionable decision to enter my very first Skyrace.
The False Start
The first thing I noticed at that start line was a distinct lack of vanity. I stood surrounded by hardened humans beneath an iron-grey sky, everyone stripped of their weekend-warrior gloss. My stomach churned a slow, heavy rhythm, my heart already pounding against my ribs before the countdown had even hit zero.
Then: Go.
The pack moved, a mass of collective adrenaline, only to stall instantly at a stone stile. Wedged in the middle of the crowd, I climbed over and watched the man-goat hybrids -my friend Barry among them - already scaling the zigzag trail of broken rock above. I followed, and the gradient took a chunk out of my courage immediately. It wasn't a hill; it was an insult to every mile I’d run in training. Behind me, the sharp tick-tack of pole tips hassled at my heels as faster runners began to force their way past on the single track.
By mile 0.4, panic had me squarely by the throat. My temperature skyrocketed. My breath accelerated into the shallow, desperate gasps of a wounded bellows.
I stepped off the trail.
I stood in the scree and watched the entire field press past me. I was frozen, utterly paralyzed by the scale of what I had signed up for, until an angry, unvarnished voice in the back of my head started shouting: Why did you come here?
The answer wasn't complicated: To finish.
I stepped back onto the rock and watched the last train of people disappear around the bluff.
The Voices on the Mountain
As the running turned to pure climbing, the mist swallowed the world. Out of the soup emerged a runner in a bright yellow waterproof coat, descending against the flow of the race. He shook his head as he passed me.
"Sod that up there. I’m not doing this."
The imagination fills the gaps that visibility leaves behind, and the summit was far further than the map promised. Before I reached it, I stumbled upon a bearded man perched on a boulder. I asked if he was alright.
He looked down at his watch. "It’s been an hour and ten. If you’re not at the checkpoint within fifty minutes, you might as well quit. You’ll never hit the cutoff."
I left him on his rock, ignored the math and pushed through the cloud to the summit of Harrison Stickle. I ticked off my first checkpoint.
From there, the muscle memory of training took over. I didn’t look at the mountain; I looked for the next marker. This was the exact birthplace of what I now call my “Three-foot world” strategy. On that mountain, it began simply as one flag at a time.
I repeated it like a mantra until I found a flag planted squarely in the middle of a rushing river. I stopped and stared.
“Surely not,” I asked the mist.
But the mountain doesn’t compromise. I abandoned any illusion of dry feet, charged through the cold, rushing flow and logged checkpoint two on the far bank.
Up through Pavey Ark and onto High Raise, the weather turned malicious. A brutal headwind and driving rain reduced my pace to a slow, defensive jog, the mist threatening to hide the next flag from view. I stopped for two minutes to haul on my waterproof trousers. They didn't come off again until the day was done.
Grit has a way of closing gaps. To my surprise, through the grey, I spotted a shape - a human with poles. I wasn't alone anymore. We hit checkpoint three together, gathered another runner on the descent as the visibility briefly cracked open and then dropped out of the bleak remoteness straight onto a tarmac road.
Company and Solitude
It was a jarring transition, swapping wet rock for hard road. We formed a small, mostly silent mob, picking up two female runners as we trotted toward checkpoint four. One of the men looked around at our rain-soaked, bedraggled crew and muttered, "Misery loves company."
Checkpoint five was a sanctuary inside a barn - the only feed station on the course. My left foot was a mess; the insole had slipped inside my shoe, floating and creasing directly under my arch. As my coffee cooled, I wrestled with the wet foam, failed to straighten it, and simply ripped it out entirely.
I checked the clock. I was ten minutes inside the cutoff. I turned to the four runners I’d travelled with, expecting us to move out together.
Instead, they all declared they were retiring. The barn was dry, the mountain was wet, and they were done.
I swallowed the rest of my coffee, stood up and walked out alone. I didn't want the infection of quitting to touch me. The road brought me back to exactly how I started: solitary. It was fitting, really. They said misery loved company, but as I stepped back into the rain, I realized I didn't need company. I was as far from misery as a man could get.
The Gravity of Great Gable
The solo journey led up Sour Milk Gill, climbing slick, wet slabs beside a roaring force of water. Every false summit revealed another wall of rock, the trail eventually vanishing into heavy cloud at Windy Gap. Checkpoint six was a voluntary casualty of the weather; the marshal had wrapped himself in a golden survival bag and sheltered behind a rock outcrop a mile lower down. The gap itself was too hostile for a human to stand stationary.
Windy Gap lived up to its name. The dense cloud created a false dusk, and the route ahead was a vertical drop of deep, loose scree. As I picked my way down gingerly, a seasoned fell runner passed me, gliding effortlessly on his heels through the shifting stone. I tried to mimic his technique, letting gravity take the wheel, though I lacked even an ounce of his grace.
Then came the traverse around Great Gable. It was spectacular, torturous, and thoroughly terrifying. I had twenty minutes to clear it to stay in the race, but the terrain refused to be rushed. Green algae covered the wet stone like ice underfoot. One misplaced heel sent a thousand stones barking and cursing down the steep slopes into the abyss below.
One mistake here would have been life changing.
Suddenly, a safety marshal appeared at a sheer wall of rock. He pointed to a couple of marginal footholds and watched as I hauled my exhausted body up and over the ledge.
"Keep moving," he said.
I picked through the boulders, scanning the colours of the rock - learning on the fly which shade meant grip and which meant a fall. I descended a steep slope to a mountain rescue stretcher box, where another marshal checked my eyes for exhaustion before clearing me for the next big climb up to Esk Pike.
The Alternate Route
I reached the ridge forty minutes after the cutoff. My race was officially over. There would be no official time stamp. The sweepers were already stripping the flags from the summit of Esk Pike behind me.
Two other runners stood there in the mist, caught in the same net. The marshal pointed us toward an alternative descent - no shorter than the main route, but spared of the extreme exposure of the high peaks. The other two, intent on a fast return, took off at a hard run. My left knee was barking, my legs were thoroughly spent; I could not follow.
They faded into the grey. I was the last runner on the mountain.
But as I walked down Rossett Gill, wading ankle-deep through the water filling the trail, carefully placing every single step, a massive smile broke across my face.
I had covered more than twenty miles of the most punishing terrain England could throw at me. Official time stamp or not, nothing was going to stop me from crossing that line. The marshal from Esk Pike, his pack heavy with recovered flags, caught up with me on the Cumbria Way. We walked the final mile together, trading stories. He told me he volunteered just to earn a free entry for next year.
I smiled again. "I’ll look out for you on the start line."
The True Medal
We finished at Stickle Ghyll. Barry was waiting there, having utterly smashed the course four hours earlier. Beside him stood the Race Director, holding not a piece of cheap ribbon and metal, but two bottles of local cider. He handed them both to me.
I have never felt so deserving of a finish in my entire life.
The challenge now is simple: I must go back. It has been seven years, and I need to return to the Skyrace. (I waited fifteen years to cross Buttermere, so you know I hold to my promises.)
I won't return as Runner 81 and hopefully not as the lanterne rouge sweeping the rear, but I will go back. There is something indispensable about dancing among the clouds, stripping away the gloss of modern life, and finding out exactly what your bones are made of on the rugged edges of the lakes. I will return older, but stronger of mind.
The route may greet me with grace, or it may seem to wish to tear me apart. I know now that neither is true; nature doesn’t care either way. But pushing through whatever it throws at us is where we earn the medals we wear in our hearts.
Bones
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