FEET IN THE CLOUDS: A Tale of Fell-Running and Obsession
By Richard Askwith
Aurum Press, £16.99; 256pp
ISBN 1 854 10989 8
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Most ways you look at it, fell-running — that is, running over mountains, hills and moors — is an eccentric sport. Even the names of the races are odd: the Haworth Hobble, the Trunce, the Raas Ving Vradda (Bradda Fell race). Its greatest practitioners have often shared this unorthodoxy. Take Bob Graham. In 1932, this Keswick B&B owner celebrated his 42nd birthday by running 42 Lakeland peaks in 24 hours. He did it wearing a pyjama top and plimsolls and eating a lot of boiled eggs. It was a personal challenge, but soon became a benchmark for other fell-runners, much as the London Marathon is for Britain’s joggers.
It was the Bob Graham Round that snared Richard Askwith, who — by his own admission — is not typical fell-running material. A 13-stone southerner with weak ankles, he dedicated five years of his life to completing the Round. The tale of his four attempts provide the thread of his excellent book. In between he writes about the history of the sport and portrays its legendary runners.
It’s an ancient discipline. Askwith describes the first marathon runner, Pheidippides, as a fell-runner. Early British races were local affairs, but well supported for all that. Thousands turned out to watch the “guides races”, where aristocratic patrons and big wagers gave events an atmosphere closer to horse-racing than the Olympics — a fact that brought fell-running into conflict with the Amateur Athletics Association and led to some of Britain’s finest 20th-century distance runners being banned from competition.
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Though an unashamedly modern runner himself, Askwith’s heart lies with the vanishing breed of older ones: men like “Iron” Joss Naylor, who had two discs removed from his back, but set a series of endurance records, including 214 Lakeland peaks in a week — equal to 15 London Marathons plus four times up and down Mount Everest. Askwith’s fascination is also nostalgia for “a Britain I will never know; a Britain whose wild places really were wild ”.
Fell-running, he admits, is a dying art. The over-forties now outnumber the under-thirties in many events. The sport has always been a highly localised activity anyway, and Askwith argues that its appeal does not easily translate on television. The influx of second-homers into the Lake District has killed off much of its traditional support.
Besides, what can fell-running offer the urban world apart from pointless suffering? “The man who is truly at home in the mountains . . . can see that our selves can never be entirely divorced from our surroundings,” Askwith writes, before quoting Oscar Wilde on the Greeks: “We all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little . . . They saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.”
What’s more . . .