Dale (son 3) and I arrived in Inverness by train, and we met up with Will (son 1)and LJ (partner), who had flown up from Bristol, and headed off west to the base camp, six miles west of Ullapool. The scenery did nothing to reassure, huge mountains with spiky teeth crowned with an impressive variety of cloud. The camp site came on us suddenly, an abrupt turn into a field already filling with cars in one half and tents in the other. A remarkably simple and fuss-free registration process, where dibbers were fastened onto our arms with the sort of wristbands used as labels in hospitals. We were issued with our start times: 8:59 for Will and Dale, and 9:01for LJ and I - Team Outlaw - mother-out-law and daughter-out-law. Our company milling around the site looked Scary. There was a notable absence of fun-runners, no fancy dress, unless you count the high-tech lycra running gear.
We set up the "big" tents - two two man tents, one for LJ and Will, one for me and Dale, roomy things that could accommodate kit and two people without having to use the kit (or the other person) as footrest or pillow. We solemnly divided the kit, food, medical supplies, emergency rescue bags, torches, batteries, apportioned tents, gas canisters and stoves, balancing the packs. Scott's Event catering dished up a baked potato heaped with chilli by way of supper, and very welcome tea. There was, after that, not a lot that attracted one to staying up any later. Morning would come. Early.
Which it did, of course, heralded by a piper marching amongst the tents at 6am, advertising in this way that Scotts was available for breakfast. I resisted the bacon and egg butty, grabbed a full tray of porridge and took four beakers of tea for our two teams. We met up over breakfast with other acquaintances of Will's, some of whom had had seriously bad car rides from the south, spending long hours in traffic jams trying to escape Edinburgh. Packed, saddled up, there was little to do but wait for our appointed start time.
For those unacquainted with orienteering, the game is to find a series of controls - small orange and white half box kites which indicate the presence of an electronic check point, into which you insert your personal dibber, which indicates the time you reached the control. The whereabouts of these controls are clearly marked on a map, together with helpful comments such as "re-entrant", "north side of lochan". The controls must be visited in a prescribed order. Clock in at each of these, run home to the finish line and bob's your uncle, job done.
This is a grand game on a brisk Saturday morning, when the course may last an hour or two and takes place in a relatively confined relative flat space. Even on such a Saturday morning frustration has moved me to tears, crossing and recrossing my path, each diversion diminishing any confidence I had in my whereabouts, hunting for the small, well-hidden kite that hides the control. The distances to be covered this weekend (23 and 18 km on Saturday and Sunday respectively) and the heights to be climbed (1300 and 800 metres) took the frivolity out of frustration, rendering it into an experience new and strange. Moreover, we were foolish, if not perhaps young, and inexperienced in the art of finding these electronic needles carefully tucked into their (rather large) haystacks. There are many skills involved; we were experienced in very few of them. And we knew it.
But back to the day, warm, sunny, midges hard at work as we transferred our route information - the order in which controls were to be collected - onto our maps, and set out, up a well-metalled land-rover track in bright sunlight. The word that counts in the last sentence is up. About 600 metres of up. Training error number 1: running up Castle Hill several times is Not enough. I had thought of putting bricks in my back pack, and running up stairs for an hour a day. It would have been wise.
So running did not come into the first part of day 1. Actually, it didn't often play any very great role. If the gradient wasn't awful, the footing probably was. Never mind, I was not the only one running. Anyway, up on to the ridge, gasping, sticks in use to compensate for lack of leg strength. We were in fine company - a long string of hard-core whippet like runners leaping over the ankle high heather streaming before and behind us (others started later; no we overtook no one).
One thing we did right: we had invested in an altimeter. This gorgeous device is to your average runner's timepiece what a swiss army knife is to a table knife. I had rather thought it a luxury; it turned out to be on a par with our compass (ok, it had a built in compass too) as mission central kit. If the control was at 580 metres, there was no point wasting time looking for the thing at 550 metres, no matter what the lay of the land. Thus we ran pretty much straight too the first control.
To our quiet satisfaction, others hadn't, and more than one set of leaping gazelles came bounding back to collect the control that they in their energy and enthusiasm had missed. It had been tucked in a re-entrant - a hollow - quietly keeping a low profile.
Control 2 was easy to find. It was on a summit. Ok, we went to the wrong summit first, but not far wrong, and a cluster of runners a few hundred metres away identified the location of the checkpoint for us. It was clear. The day was warm, we could see the way to where the next control must lie - in the bottom of a valley, the bend of an attractive stream. We ran right to it and refilled our water bottles.
From the bottom of a valley there is no way but up. The next control was a summit, again not a desperate challenge to find. We were getting good at this game. Slow, yes, but good. A long drink, two and a half bites of Cliff bar, a long drink. A long up.
I have never been very good at technical foods. I believe in them. They work. But swallowing them, and keeping them swallowed always presents a problem. Some present no problem on the way down. Others are rather harder to get down, but on the whole, I consider that fault preferable to the other. Two and a half bites of Cliff bar is about my record. I needed as much of it is as I could possibly manage, washed down with SiS, which, if I carefully didn't think about it, stayed.
A long up, and we were beginning to feel a little lonely by then. It was not hard to find the top. On the top we met two hapless walkers. They had selected an idyllic remote area to contemplate the mysteries of nature in isolation. They were disappointed, but gracious about their unexpected company.
Some aspects of nature are no mystery, but a locally predictable consequence of physics. The sun of the morning had yielded to a majority of cloud, rolling in, rolling lower, and beginning to spatter. This was a greater worry than the mere inconvenience of damp. The next control lay reassuringly at the bottom of the next summit, at the far end of the ridge, with two possible routes to achieve it. Route one, the obvious one, and, as it happened, the one the inventor of the trail had in mind, involved contouring around the next summit in an anti-clockwise direction, before dropping gracefully onto the control just over the far side of the ridge, at its very end. The hitch was the crag on the other side of the ridge, waiting evilly to catch the unwary who, led on by false hopes of having covered more distance than they actually had, might attempt to drop down to the control too soon. Option two involved bailing off the ridge down a slope that stopped barely short of being classified as a crag. We looked at the cloud muffling the summit. We looked at our map, at the inviting landrover track marked at the bottom. We knew our navigational competence or lack thereof. We opted to bail out.
It was a scary lumpy slither down, profiting from the rocky bed of a promising young waterfall at times to afford an alternative to shuffling bottom first. We made it. There was no friendly track however. The map had told fibs, the first of several we were to discover.
Safe, yes. Drenched, yes, but hey, only two more controls before - before pitching tents in the rain and enjoying the best of boil in the bag cuisine. Ah, lovely image to look forward to. Only two more controls, the next just tucked into a re-entrant, just a hundred metres on the crag side of the road. Once we found the road.
We found the road, in the nice level stream valley, but not a nice level road, but one that bucked and reared, hugging the bottom of the crag, leaping from hump to hump, every hump disguising a potential re-entrant. We were overtaken in our searches by another team of straggle haired increasingly desperate "runners". We teamed up and scoured the area, cursing as each hump revealed nought but the next hump. We found it, eventually, after some communal cursing, and proceeded as a foursome on towards the next and final control, at a stream junction not two hundred metres from the midway camp. We slogged through the wet, half blinded by the midge repellent washed into our eyes, but the path clearly trod by many feet. One last control, the finish line, and Will's friends already had a pot boiled, and instant tea in a plastic mug. I will recognise heaven when I see it, It comes in a red mug.
We had rehearsed the procedure of getting the tent up and getting the dinner cooked. Our minute stove perched like a dragonfly on its canister - the little stove that could. 300ml of boiling water poured into the bag of dried chilli with rice, resealed, made an admirable hot water bottle for the duration of the eight minutes required for rice and beans to soften. I think I could probably enjoy boil in the bag chilli even at the end of a day that had not involved 23k "running" and 1300m ascent, but the course and conditions certainly lent an extra something to the meal. The packet once empty served equally well to soften up a second course of supanoodles (and offered second service as hot water bottle as well).
Did I tell you it was raining? We had practiced setting up and striking the tent in the rain. We had avoided practicing sleeping in it. These tents are lightweight, with no second skins to defend against the wrath of the heavens. The wet is within and without. Within the confined space intimacy is inevitable. Packs can be left out in the rain, or else they can be brought in and used as a footrest, or a head rest. I had allowed myself the luxury of a basic sleeping mat - easily a centimetre's worth of mat. Useful. It may not have been raining hard, but it was persistent. My mat was on the lower side. Happily, the depth of water in the tent by the morning was less than a centimetre.
The night was cold. Soggy sleeping bags are not all that warm. We shivered, we made a virtue of necessity and lay half over each other. The cramps from hades struck, fortunately early in the night, fortunately only from the knees southwards, and my teammate spent an anxious five minutes trying to pound the knots out - "harder?""yes, harder, they're not shifting". It works. It just takes time. I just wish it weren't necessary. I'm just grateful it was only south of the knees. In the middle of the night I woke up breathless, gasping, and terrified that I had strained my heart somehow, until I noticed my partner panting similarly - no choice, cold or not, the ventilation panel had to be unzipped, we shivered but breathed easy.
The morning came with an announcement that the sun was up and so should we be. I regretted an absence of tea. Two packets of oat cakes three mini pepperami and two Tracker bars make a less than perfectly satisfying breakfast. The inner man was not fed.
Fed or not, we set off as early as we could in the hopes of finishing in time for the organisers to pack up and get home for their well-earned teas.
An unwise choice of route led us along a delightful track - unfortunately at the top rather than the bottom (as it appeared on the map) of the the ravine we would have to cross before scaling the opposite side to control 1. I am not sorry, it really was some of the loveliest running of the race, in beautiful setting under brilliant blue skies. The stream at the bottom, when we finally found a place we dared descend and ascend, was as appealing as any stream I have ever crossed. We even found the control in the re-entrant. Without tears. But we had spent a lot of time having fun getting there.
On to control two. This involved some up, some lovely down, and crossing a significant stream. We achieved this immediately below a picturesque waterfall, with no dither, and no falling over. The control appeared right on cue, in the stream bend, as specified. We were getting good at this, yes? Two lochans, and one more re-entrant, we can do this, yes?
Innocent we were indeed. Not hard to find a lake, but in that patch lakes abound. Moreover, the number of lakes on the land exceeded the number of lakes on the map. I am told that it's not a lochan unless it satisfies some minimum depth requirement. Was swimming required to determine which puddles qualified and which didn't? Worse, with so many promising bodies of water to choose from, it did not occur to us for some considerable time that we might be way off course, that there were even more lakes hidden above and beyond where we could see, and that we had strayed nearly to control 4 in search of control 3 before recognising the error of our ways. I doubt we would have found control 3 had it not been for another pair of stragglers looking in a very different direction.
Having found control 3, it should have been an easy matter to retrace our steps towards control 4, yes no? Except that what we had thought might have been the lochan hiding control 4 was not the lochan hiding control 4, while the lochan hiding control 4 was yet further up, and out of sight. My partner was very persuasive. Had she not been, we would not have achieved control 4.
So be it, with very very little time to cover the distance, control 5 lurked to the south, not so very far as the crow flies. We are not crows, nor have we wings of any description. It was a long way down, and a long brutal way up, and time was ticking. The control was set to close at 15:00. It was only the north side of a lake. Again. But we had begun to distrust lochans. Our fears were entirely justified. We visited lots of lakes. The rain began to spatter. The time ticked on, 15:00 came and went. Well, we had tried. We really had tried. Nothing to do but head south and strike for home.
We headed south, and stumbled on the north side of yet another lochan, the control sitting there trying to look innocent. Words failed me. Words still fail me. We both punched the control with an unwonted degree of savagery. And headed south.
It was easy running from there on, providing that one did not get caught in the occasional mires of peat. The navigation was a doddle, the rain had stopped, we had signal for the telephone, we rang Will to pass on the message to the organisers that we had fallen down no crags, and would be returning to base tardy but unharmed and in no need of assistance.
The gentle slope turned into a landrover track, and then a foot track-cum-stream bed (did we care about sharing the track with a stream by then? not a lot) and then a very respectable road. One last control, at a bridge. Dale met us at the bridge, and we sauntered back to the finish, trotting the length of the final field to the energetic cheers of the few who had not yet packed up and departed, before clocking ourselves in.
The wonderful organisers had very kindly kept the clock ticking. 79th, final finisher, and five hours after the preceding finisher (gulp). For our part, sure, I would like to have navigated better and run faster, but honour is satisfied. Well satisfied. We did it. We got round.
Is it possible that the organisers can imagine how much it means to me that they did not time us out? I am aware of the strain a team like ours places on the organisation; a hugely slow and inexperienced team, at best a worry and a delay. I am aware of a degree of presumption on good nature in signing up for such an event. In this, as in other challenges I have taken on, the generosity and good nature on the part of the organisers in making me, us, very much more than welcome defies description. What a privilege to have taken part. Thank-you is hopelessly inadequate, but for lack of any others it will have to do. Thank-you thank-you thank-you organisers, thank-you LAMMers, one and all. I sincerely intend to be back, although, in spite of all we have learned about how to train and how to navigate, I suspect it will be in the role of marshall next time, if I may.
