I’m unexpectedly writing this from a villa in Lanzarote, thanks to the incredible generosity of another widow. I’m on an online community for young widows (apparently, at the tender age of 44, I still count as young), and a woman posted on Saturday that she’d booked a holiday but was unable to go at the last minute, and would another widow like it for free? I was just about to finish up a work project, and had kept the upcoming week relatively free to hang out with the kids, and I realised that there were still available places on flights - and I keep suitcases (or ‘go bags’) permanently packed, so that we can go on impromptu camping weekends with little fuss - so I took her up on her amazing offer. A week of doing very little by a pool is exactly what we all needed, and I am very very grateful. I had literally just said to my therapist, a couple of days earlier, that all the sudden, unexpected occurrences in my life are dreadful things, and that all the good events are the result of hard work and lots of planning. And then here comes this wonderful woman, and proves me wrong. I’m not going to name her, but if you’re reading this, thank you from the bottom of my heart - not just for the holiday for me and my girls, but also for challenging my pessimistic view of life and other people.
A week by a pool provides a good opportunity to write up the second (and maybe even third) part of my fastest known time attempt, along The Peak Way, a new long-distance 160-mile footpath, with c. 7,500m of ascent, in the UK’s Peak District. In the first part, I dealt with the ultra-lightweight kit I used to run and camp over 5-and-a-half days, and gave a bit of the background of the route (which is also covered very thoroughly in the brilliant website that has been set up by the Peak Way’s originator, Ken Reece). In this post, I’ll talk about the first half (well, the first two-fifths) of the run, from Stockport to Bamford. The third part will describe the remainder of the route, from Bamford back to Stockport (via Bakewell, Matlock, Ashbourne, Dovedale, Ashford-in-the-Water, Buxton and Whaley Bridge).
The Peak Way is a sort-of circular route, which Reece designed to begin and end in Stockport, but which can be started anywhere (it passes through lots of towns and railway stations), and/or covered in individual sections. Rather than a circle, its trace is more like a misshapen hourglass or figure-of-8, with only 1.5 miles separating the quarter-way and three-quarter-way points at Bakewell and Ashford-in-the-Water - so it could also be completed in two separate circles of about 80 miles each, one in the northern, mostly ‘Dark Peak’ region, and one around the southern ‘White Peak’ district. If any race directors are reading this, I think it would be an incredible route for an ultra event, with all these options for shorter distances as well as the whole caboodle.
I began in Stockport, in a state of some exhaustion. Since mid-March I’ve been working intensely on a project , which I’m sure I’ll write about soon, and there was a significant interim deadline on Friday 26 July. I celebrated meeting that deadline, and the week-long work hiatus that was to follow, by going to see the band James play a beautiful, energising gig at the Scarborough Open Air Theatre that evening. On Saturday, I got up early to transport my three children by train(s) from Yorkshire down to Wiltshire, where they were booked into a residential adventure camp. After dropping them off, I got another set of trains up to Stockport, arriving too late to eat in the Premier Inn restaurant, but just in time to have a delicious bowl of pho and summer rolls in a Vietnamese-Cambodian-Lao restaurant called the Mekong Cat (which must have been fate, because, that morning, I had randomly decided to put on my BeerLao t-shirt). If you’re ever in Stockport, I HIGHLY recommend it. Anyway, this rather full-on run-up to beginning the Peak Way meant that I couldn’t face quite the early start that I’d intended, so I didn’t get going until just after 9.30am, which set a pattern for the week ahead.
When I’d first started planning my week in the Peak District, my intention was NOT to run the footpath as fast as I could - in which case, I’d have tried to do it continuously in, say, 2 days, and I wouldn’t have brought camping gear. Instead, I wanted it to be a holiday, but I realised that, because it was such a new footpath, if I covered it in 5-ish days then it could still feel like a holiday and would ALSO be a fastest known time. As I described in my first post, my plan was to run around 30 miles a day, starting on Sunday 28 July and a deadline of arriving back at Stockport mid-afternoon on Friday 2 August, so that I could get back down to Wiltshire on the train that evening and collect the kids early on the Saturday. Because I’ve covered 30-mile races in about 6-7 hours before, I estimated that it might take me between 8-9 hours with a heavy pack, so that, if I set off each day around 8.30am, then I’d get to my camping spot each evening around 4.30-5.30pm: enough time for a nice cuppa tea and a sit down, before dinner and bed. That was the plan. It didn’t quite work out like that.
Day 1: Stockport to Edale (26 miles (41.6km), 965m of ascent)
I woke up to clear blue skies and blazing sun, and wandered up the road to the beginning of the route, at the entrance to Woodbank Memorial Park - and took an obligatory selfie by a mock-Grecian entrance gate. The Peak Way begins with a straightforward run through the park, which was a good opportunity to begin to get used to running with my 7kg pack.
It’s an odd physical experience. Unlike running with an extra 7kg of body weight, which would be evenly distributed around my frame, a heavy pack concentrates all the weight in one place, relatively high up, and shifts your centre of gravity. The pack didn’t bounce at all, and was cinched tight to my torso, but I did feel much more unbalanced than usual, and was glad of the straightforward terrain. From the park, the route roughly follows the river Goyt to the village of Chadkirk, where the local well had been ‘dressed’ with a stunning tableau that used natural materials (leaves etc) to depict women engaged in traditional methods of dyeing, bleaching, stretching and drying cloth in the fields - a nod to Chadkirk’s industrial heritage.
A few miles later, the path meets and follows the Peak Forest Canal up an impressive and steep series of locks in Marple, at the top of which there was a canal boat serving excellent coffee and cakes. I clung to waterside paths - the canal and the Goyt and Sett rivers - for another 14km, and was averaging around 7-8mins per kilometre. This was much slower than usual, but it felt comfortable considering the heat (in the high 20s) and the pack’s weight and I thought that I was probably on course to get to the campsite around 4pm, as planned.
I usually find that slow running offers the perfect physical condition for letting my mind wander. I think there’s a sweet spot in which regular but not-too-taxing physical movement, like jogging or hiking, stimulates the brain into fluent thought. If it’s too slow and easy, I find that my brain is lazy and sluggish; if the physical labour is too hard, then my body is too taxed with breathing and pumping oxygen around itself to think. But there’s a lovely middle-ground, and lots of people, from Wordsworth to Murakami, have commented upon the capacity of walking and running to bring about that fluent creative state. My therapist is convinced that the right-left motion of running enacts the same bilateral stimulation as EMDR, a form of therapy in which rapid engagement of the right and left brain hemispheres, usually by moving one’s eyes back and forth, helps the brain process trauma and consign it to the past. I believe that no-one knows exactly how EMDR works, but it has a near 100% success rate - although, in a similar way to how I’m immune to the pain-relief medication in the epidurals used during childbirth, EMDR didn’t work on me. But I might give it another go. Anyhow, despite singing the praises of slow running for brainwork here, I found that throughout my entire week in the Peak District, I barely thought about a single thing. I reckon that I had so worn out my brain with writing over the previous month, that my body needed an opportunity to give my brain a rest and focus on corporal matters alone. All I thought about was the mental arithmetic of running: adding up the time I’d spent running so far, how much was left to go, and what time I might arrive at my campsite each day.
24km from Stockport, the Peak Way reaches Hayfield, which, judging by the number of hikers and posters for guided walks, is considered the gateway to the Dark Peak. I took an hour for lunch in the sun here, and then set off along the quiet road towards Kinder Reservoir. At the northernmost tip of the reservoir, the path heads north, up ‘William Clough’ and onto the high moor. My late father lived in Nottingham, where a stretch of the A52 is named Brian Clough Way, after the football manager. When I first visited the Peak District in my 20s, and came upon all the ‘cloughs’ there - steep-sided valleys, with streams running along the bottom - I thought that William Clough must have been Brian’s brother, and wondered why one got an unlovely dual carriageway named after him, while the other got a stunning piece of moorland. At the top of William Clough, the path bimbles south-eastwards around the highest point of the moor - around 600m up - and I remembered how much I love running on gritstone, which is nasty and abrasive if you fall over, but grippy enough to make slipping a rarity. The waterfall of Kinder Downfall was almost completely dry and, at 4.30pm, the sun was getting lower and casting a silvery light onto the rocks, so I sat for 10 minutes and watched a sheep hopping from rock to rock.
As this suggests, I had slowed down considerably, finding it impossible to move with much speed or elegance through stony, uphill paths that were heavily curtained with heather. At Kinder Downfall, I knew that I had another 10km to go, before stopping for the night at Edale. Usually this would take me between 1 hour and 90 mins, depending on the terrain, so my fantasy about a cuppa tea and a sit down with a book before dinner started to recede. Still, I was having a nice time, moving well and enjoying the sunshine, although my pack was starting to rub painfully on a bump on my collarbone, where I broke it as a child.
At Kinder Downfall, the route turns south, towards the highest point and the trig point at Kinder Low. As I headed towards it, I was ambushed by a memory of having my photo taken here a few years earlier, holding hands over the trig point with my late husband Pete. We’d been on a weekend away for his birthday, staying at a pub in Edale, and we’d hiked the Edale Horseshoe route, and a stranger had photographed us there. I had remembered the photograph, but not its location, and seeing the trig point again - with other couples now being photographed beside it - momentarily took my breath away. It’s something I really resent about grief, being ambushed like that, all the time, by memories - by a place, a word, a smell, a fragment of a song. I’ve developed a nervous tic when it happens: a jolt in my face, where my upper lip jerks left and up, and my shoulders raise and stiffen. I debated going up to the trig point, and confronting the memory head on, but actually I realised I really needed the loo, so I found a patch of heather and had a wee. I don’t know if that’s a meaningful gesture, pissing on the past or something.
After that it was downhill most of the way into Edale. The Peak Way comes off the moorland, not by Jacob’s Ladder, but a slightly longer and less steep route, and then follows the easy wide path into Upper Booth, and through fields, into Edale. I stopped my watch as I came to the point where I’d begin running the following day, and walked down to Fieldhead Campsite, a calm spot by the river. I set up my tent in a quiet ‘adults-only’ area, had a blissful hot shower, got dressed and meandered up the road to a pub - which, as it was a Sunday, had already stopped serving food by 8pm. Disaster! After a bit of faffing with trying to order delivery mezze from a Turkish place (which had also closed), the pub agreed to fill my dehydrated pack of bolognese with hot water, so I sat in the beer garden with a pint of lager shandy, a pack of crisps and my ‘adventure meal’, before wending my way back to the campsite and falling asleep straight away.
Day Two: Edale to Bamford (26 miles (42.17km) and 1461m ascent)
Now, today was *supposed* to take me on a 50km run from Edale to a campsite, North Lees, slightly off Stanage Edge. But, as we’ll see, I stopped short, and was very glad of it.
I set my alarm in Edale for 6am, but once I’d slowly woken up, made a breakfast of another rehydrated packet meal (Firepot banana porridge - pretty delish), coffee (made with this totally indispensable filter, which I take wherever I go) and orange juice (bought in the pub the previous night), and packed up all my stuff, it was somehow 8.30am. I realised that, on future days, I’d either have to get up much earlier, or would have to significantly curtail my morning route. Anyway, it was another gorgeous sunny morning, and I walked up to where I’d left the path the previous evening. My legs didn’t have a trace of stiffness in them, and I realised that, if I stuffed a folded sock under each bra strap - where it hits my shoulder - then the pack’s straps wouldn’t rub on my collarbones, and this was a total game-changer. Today was going to be one of the longest days, but I felt good and ready.
This day’s route began with a climb up onto the top of Mam Tor, which is only a couple of kilometres due south of Edale, but reached on the Peak Way via an 8-km route that first heads south-west and then east to the summit. Because Mam Tor is so close to Edale, I’d envisaged reaching it in about half-an-hour, but the ‘detour’ and ascent meant that it actually took me over 90 minutes. This set the tone for the rest of the day: I was continually pissed off that everything was taking much longer than I expected, and it meant that, by the end of the day, I realised that I needed a significant change of tack to put me back into holiday mode.
Despite the crowds, running along the ridge between Mam Tor and Lose Hill is pretty pleasant, with wide paths formed by stone slabs, and some gentle downhills. There’s then a steep descent into Hope, where I reached just before midday, and decided to buy an early lunch in the mini-supermarket. This was the day with the fewest amenities en route, so I knew that I would have to take every opportunity I got to fill up on food and water. From Hope, the route goes north and steadily uphill along an old Roman Road. I stopped here and put some preventative plasters on the balls of my feet, where I’ve recently developed an irritating - and extremely painful - proneness to blisters. I didn’t have blisters yet, but I could feel the beginning of ‘hot-spots’. In a race, I’d have just pushed on through, but I was still very much in the early stages of the overall 5-and-a-bit-day run, so I made myself stop and deal with them. I’m not entirely sure whether it made much difference in the long run, though.
About 10km after Hope (a friend texted me at this point to say that he and his wife thought it was hilarious that I was now officially “beyond Hope”), the route drops down into the Upper Derwent Visitor Centre, which sits between Ladybower and Upper Derwent reservoirs. I’d hoped to be here for lunch, but it was now about 3pm and, once again, I was pissed off: why was it taking so long? Why was I so slow? I’d wanted to be at my campsite by about 4.30pm, and that was nearly 30km away. At this rate, I’d be there gone midnight. Of course, the answer was that, with my pack, I found it pretty hard work to run at all, unless the path was flat or downhill, and completely non-technical. So I was almost entirely walking, but my expectation of pace and time was still geared around running: I was still mentally calculating that I’d be covering about 8km each hour, when, in reality, sometimes I was only covering 4km. I finally sympathised with my children, who are regularly unimpressed when, on a hike, I tell them that our lunch stop is ‘only 30 mins away’ (because that’s how long it would take me to run it), and it ends up being more than double that.
This negative mental state meant that I was resentful about the next section, in which the path runs north along the reservoir for a few miles before doubling back on itself and venturing south and south-east, up onto Howden and Derwent Moors. It wasn’t the first time in the day that I contemplated cutting across and taking a shortcut. The early stages of the Peak Way are full of such temptations. It’s only a few kilometres due east from Hope to Bamford, for example, whereas the Peak Way’s route between those points takes nearly 30km. But I didn’t succumb. I ploughed on, getting hotter and crosser as I moved upwards towards the cairn at Lost Lad.
From then on, though, I was at least heading in the right direction - south - for my campsite. The sun was getting lower, and the moorland scenery felt familiar from my runs on the North York Moors, and the weird gritstone rock formations were so striking, that I couldn’t help but be cheered. And I knew I had to make a decision. It was now 5pm. My intended campsite wasn’t anywhere near a pub or shop, so if I did stay there, then I’d have to be certain that I’d make it there in enough time to do the 30-min walk down through the fields into Hathersage before the pubs stopped serving food. Considering that the campsite was almost 20km away, over steep and rough terrain, that seemed pretty impossible. Another option was running down into Bamford - where the Peak Way goes anyway - and continuing a further kilometre to a food shop at the garage; eating dinner on the hoof; and pressing on to my booked campsite - but this would almost certainly mean running the last hour or so (which was on exposed moorland), and setting up my tent, in the dark. Not a deal-breaker, but not necessarily that fun. The third option was to camp and eat dinner in Bamford, and then try and make up some of the missed mileage the following day(s).
In the event, the decision became a lot clearer when, at 7.30pm, I started descending into Bamford. The road into the village is the steepest I’ve ever walked upon in the UK: a whopping 40% decline. That’s the maximum incline on my treadmill, and I’ve never been able to stick at it for long, and certainly not with any speed. I had to dig my toes into the tarmac to stop myself slipping over as I headed down. Not surprisingly, the local authority has erected ‘road closed’ barriers at its top and bottom: I can’t imagine the fear that would result from being taken along that route by a car satnav. As I tiptoed down, I knew that there was no way on earth that I was going to jog 2 kilometres further to the garage, eat dinner, and then turn back and return the way I’d come, up that 40% hill, and THEN do the remaining 10km up onto and along Stanage Edge, before finding my campsite (which was another 2-3km off the path) and setting up my tent. No Way. So I used my slow downhill pace to photograph a nationalistic scarecrow by the roadside, and to find a nearby campsite. I made my way to Heatherhill Farm Campsite, in Bamford, and phoned the owner once I arrived - who was lovely, found me some space to pitch my tent, and introduced me to my pitch-mate, another woman who was travelling alone (cycling) and had also arrived late and without a booking, and also had a tiny hiker tent. I set up, walked down to the garage and bought a lot of food and a beer, and wandered back to the campsite, where I sat and chatted to the cyclist, and was entirely satisfied with my decision to cut the day’s running short. But I knew I had some planning to do: was I going to try and make up today’s missed miles tomorrow, which was already supposed to be a long 53km day? Did I really want to push that up to 63km? Or was I going to have to rejig the entire week’s plan?