Road to Endorphia Chapter 3 - Inverness to Fort Augustus

Awake in my bunk this morning I savour my body in it's many aches and it's rested readiness. Both feet are blistered and stiff and swollen and sore but everything else is fantastic. After a hundred and twenty miles in four days my resting heart rate is forty four beats a minute and my muscles and joints feel fine.

The body is the spirit. That all the experiences and sensations conventionally labeled as spiritual are physical in nature seems obvious to me. The low morale which accompanies physical fatigue. The uplift which follows a good night's sleep and a decent breakfast. The frontal lobe brain injuries which destroy love and conscience. William James gives us a bundle of examples of religious conversion coming at the back of a vigorous walk on the hills. Art is physical. Music is sound. Bach's two violins may invoke in us the most angelic of visions, but it begins in neurons firing in the brains of the violinists, it continues in the enervation of muscles, the motion of limbs, the friction of bow on string, the vibration of air and eardrum and ends in the brains of the listeners.

So much for proximate causes. But why music at all? In Songlines Bruce Chatwin speculates that the first languages were sung. And, yeah, a huge fraction of the world's people speak tonal languages. For me, the answer to, why music, lies in the beat. All music begins with the beat. What is it, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and fifty beats a minute? The pace of sustained, aerobic running, endurance running, a hundred and fifty or so footfalls to the minute, springs from the genetic memory of the persistence hunting of our ancestors. Music is running remembered. Selah.

I’m up and out by nine thirty.

The Great Glen is one of the most distinctive features on a physical map of Scotland. A natural fault line, it cuts across the narrowest part of the Highlands from Inverness in the north east in a straight line south and west to Fort William. Three great lochs almost fill the valley, Loch Ness, Loch Oich and Loch Lochy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a huge engineering project, the Caledonian Canal, carved channels and built locks between these natural waters and forged a route navigable from the North Sea to the Atlantic, allowing sea-going vessels to avoid the dangerous seas around the north end of the island of Britain.

The official start (or finish) of the seventy three miles of the Great Glen Way is up at the castle. I head up there from the hostel and down the other side of the hill. It’s a sunny morning with a touristy feel to it.

I am careful making my way. I’ve got lost on the way south out of Inverness before and wasted hours on the wrong route. I get lost quite a lot, by the way. But if I’m careful I shouldn’t get lost on this trip until I get past Motherwell.

In a little grocer's shop I buy a couple of cans of food and some chocolate bars. Outside the shop a group of three teenage girls want me to go back inside and buy their cigarettes for them. Nah. I continue through the park and the waterside paths which take me through the southern suburbs of Inverness. Yes, suburbs as well as outskirts. Maybe there’s a suburban chip shop. Too late, too late. On the other side of Inverness I begin the climb out of the urban plain into the forested hills. Soon I pass the place I intended to camp last night so I feel as if I’ve caught up with myself. I manage some running. It is a joy to be running on paths rather than roads. And now I can’t get lost. I’m on the way.

As I run grass whips at my bare legs and I remember to be paranoid about ticks. In Britain ticks are known to carry Lyme disease and two other diseases I can’t spell but am frightened of. Ticks are bloodsuckers. They embed their mouth parts in your flesh and suck your blood until they are full and then fall off, bloated and gorged. If you find a tick attached to your leg you can’t just pluck it off because those ‘mouth parts’, yeah nothing as simple as plain old teeth, are spirally and barbed and just fixed into your flesh. If you pull at a tick before it’s ready to let go these disgusting alien mouth parts are likely to remain embedded in your flesh to rot and fester and give you gangrene till the only way to save your life is to have the infected limb carved off. I’m not really paranoid. I just don’t like the idea of weird alien species burrowing into my flesh and living off my life’s blood. Another reason to keep an eye out for them is that they like it dark and damp and hairy. So if you don’t spot them when they’re on your legs they crawl upstairs and live in your nads. I check that my special tick removal tool, the Tick Twister, is in a convenient pocket and try to relax.

For the first part of the route the path drifts away from Loch Ness up into the forest. I keep myself going with thoughts of lunch at the Abriachan Campsite. Yes I’ve been down this road before. It’s comforting to be on familiar ground. Even if it is mostly Forestry Commission land.

The Forestry Commission has a reputation for sucking the life out of the earth with endless gloomy acres of alien pine trees. Their website claims that is all in the past, they are completely reformed and they are now committed to biodiversity, environmental sustainability and saving the planet. Yeah. ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help.’

I plug on through the forest. The track varies. The older roads are easier on the feet. But the newer ones, recently carved by Forestry bulldozers have been surfaced with broken stones which stab at my tender plantar tissue. Now and again I turn the wrong way on an ankle. Ow! Shit!

Look, I’m not going to bang on endlessly about how my feet hurt. They hurt. OK? Relentlessly, and in ways I never imagined possible. But I’m not going to keep on about it. It’s boring me and I’m sure it’s boring you. So let’s just assume, unless I say otherwise, that my feet hurt.

I’m having to walk more than I want to. I’m not a huge fan of walking. I mean I’m happy enough to walk myself down to the shops or around an art gallery. But to actually go for a walk as if it was some kind of separate activity worth doing in and of itself seems complete madness to me. And there are people who sneak up on you with walks. My older sister does it all the time. You go to Anne’s for dinner and you’re sitting there afterward wondering how she can justify calling that a pudding when it didn’t have any chocolate or any cream in it. And suddenly everybody’s pulling their boots on and we’re going for a walk. Jeez. I find myself wanting to let them go without me so I can search the cupboards for chocolate biscuits.

Right now what I want to do is run. Technically, the difference, the only difference, between walking and running is that when you walk your rear foot doesn’t leave the ground until the leading foot lands. If you’re back foot takes off before the front foot hits then you are running. That’s the physical difference. And it sounds simple. It sounds like nothing. But in that brief moment when neither foot is in contact with the earth you are flying. And as you continue to run those moments string together into one continuous soaring flight of freedom. Your muscles feel it, your blood feels it, your heart feels it. The difference between walking and running is the difference between talking and singing.

But I don’t let it get to me. Injuries all heal eventually. My feet will get better and then I’ll be running again.

About fourteen miles from Inverness I get to Abriachan Campsite. The trail is winding its way through a wood when you become aware of hand-painted signs inviting you for coffee and cake, or camping, or caravan based bed and breakfast . If you are tempted by the signs, and honestly it’s worth it just for the sheer hand-knitted lentil-pressed eccentricity of it all, you can camp in their ecological campsite, wash in their eco-shower, take a dump in their eco-toilet and throw your garbage in their eco-waste disposal. At Abriachan you get the feeling they really do believe in saving the planet. These guys haven’t just stuck a green label on it. They are living the life.

The last couple of times I’ve stopped for coffee at Abriachan a lovely guy called Ruari has been there to serve my cafetierre. He is tall and gaunt and bearded with an impeccably authentic highland accent and a dry, iconoclastic wit. When he first saw that I was traveling in shorts, he delivered a doom-laden lecture on the natural history of ticks of which is the root of my fear of the little freeloaders. Before Ruari ticks weren’t even on my radar. Am I grateful for that?

Right now I’m feeling good but pretty hungry. Ruari isn’t there but Sandra serves me a bowl of chunky lentil soup with grainy bread. Lovely. I sit outside with the chickens free-ranging underneath the table and the rooster strutting around like a complete cock.

While I’m having my coffee an Australian cyclist heading north stops for a cuppa. Well, he might have been a New Zealander but the difference is not something I can get myself to care about.

When I ask to borrow his map to check some distances he’s like, ‘What? Haven’t you got a map?’

‘No. I haven’t got a map. I’m traveling light.’

They give you a pretty generous jug of java at the Abriachan Campsite and the caffeine has got me pretty agitated so I’m bristling up at the guy’s reluctance to help me out.

‘What’s the problem? Is it like a treasure map or something?’

So he digs it out of one of his panniers and I scan it to remind myself of the road ahead.

He pooh-poohs the idea of my reaching Fort Augustus by the end of the day and I wish him well on his journey ahead to Inverness and his flight back to the other side of the planet.

I buzz ahead on fake coffee energy and pretty soon I’m out of the little free enterprise enclave of the Abriachan Campsite and back into the Forestry running along their busted-rock roads on my busted-feet feet.

After a while the route is running along the hills above the lochside and there are, off and on, some pretty spectacular views of Loch Ness. The coffee jag wears off and I slow right down again till I’m pretty much dragging my arse.

Dragging your arse is a pretty miserable experience but if you find your pace and stay hydrated and munch on a square of chocolate every so often you can get through it. What makes it really miserable is rain. Now it has rained on me before on this trek, everything from drizzle to out and out pissing rain. But the rain that comes down as I drag my backside along the road to Drumnadrochit convinces me that my rain vocabulary needs extending. I could call it pissing rain and let it go at that. But that really doesn’t get close to capturing the intensity of this downpour, the sheer relentless wetness of it all. No. Pissing rain will not do.

This is horsepissing rain. And my unwaterproof waterproof jacket invites it in. Down my back and into my pants and down my legs and into my shoes which are now getting wet from below and from above. My vision is a lens-wet blur. My chocolate wrapper wets to a pulp. Acceptance. I put up no resistance. I do not flinch. I embrace the footsore wetness which is my life.

Eventually I reach a road and it is downhill into Drumnadrochit. I love Drumnadrochit for its name alone, this perfect pair of alliteratively-linked trochees is so unashamedly teuchter-sounding. But it doesn’t go so far as to fall into self-parody like the unfortunate Auchenshoogle. Drumnadrochit. Isn’t it melodic. It deserves to have the Loch Ness Centre and to be the spiritual home of the Loch Ness Monster Mystery.

But today Drumnadrochit is drookit. And so am I. I use the public toilets and then I spend a long time in a shop trying to pick good things to eat. Mostly I just want to hide from the rain but tonight I will be wild camping for the first time and I want a nice supper in my tent, something tasty that I can eat cold. I buy tinned sardines and chocolate.

Drumnadrochit is another of those small places that you can just walk right through with little chance of getting lost so pretty soon I am walking uphill again past some holiday cottages and into the trees. I’m really struggling now and though I’ve only managed eighteen miles all day I decide to get off the road and pitch my tent. The land on either side of the road is fenced-off Forestry. I clamber over the wire and climb up the slope looking for a relatively flat space.

I unshoulder my pack and take out my tent. I love my tent. The Coleman Kraz X1 one-person tent I bought last summer in Tiso in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street has already served me well on the West Highland Way and in the southern Carpathians. It is small and light, just over three and a half pounds, and a fantastic bargain at eighty quid. It has a double skin so I’ll be sleeping behind a ventilated, insect-proof mesh which in turn is protected by the super-waterproof outer tent. It takes five minutes to set up.

The quality of the tent notwithstanding I make a complete dog’s dinner of pitching it. I’ve got it on a slant and the pegs are fixed to the forest floor in what is effectively mulch but I need to get my weight of my left foot. I give up and get inside. I unroll and inflate my mattress and get in my sleeping bag. As I eat sardines and chocolate I grudgingly reflect that the antipodean cyclist was right. I am a whole chunk of miles short of Fort Augustus.

I wake to the sound of rain on the outside of the tent. I am warm enough. The double blanket of cloud cover and forest canopy has kept the chill from my little green igloo. In the night I have slid downslope and am jammed against one edge of the tent.

I lie there until the need to pee drives me out of my sleeping bag. Actually, I only climb half way out of the bag. I unzip a flap of the inner tent and pee from the left lateral position directing the steaming jet out onto the dew-beaded grass. It’s a man’s world alright. I clean up and wriggle back into my cocoon.

If you’re covering twenty or thirty or more miles a day on foot, a fair amount of it at a run, and you’re going to be doing that indefinitely then you need to allow your body to recover as you go. It does that best when it’s asleep. Without enough sleep, fatigue will wear you down to nothing. When I’m tired enough I can pretty much sleep anywhere. I’m happy to curl up at the side of the road and fall asleep. But if you want to have a quick slumber session in the open air and it happens to be pissing down with rain you have a problem. So the best time to sleep is when you’re in your tent. And one of the joys of wild camping is that you can stay in bed as long as you want. It’s not like I have to clock in. I let the pattering rain lull me back to sleep.

Some time later I twist the valve on my mattress and let my body weight deflate it. I get myself out of the sleeping bag and roll it up. I have to roll it and squeeze it in just the right way so that it will fit back into its own tiny little bag. And in turn that tiny little bag has to fit into the tiny little space reserved for it in the restricted capacity of the twenty litre Salomon back pack. And I have to do all that rolling and stuffing inside my cramped little tent so that it gets packed away dry. Oh yes, once it is in it’s little bag it gets double wrapped in plastic bags so that the rain doesn’t get to it during the day. The Salomon pack, wonderful as it is, is not waterproof.

Once the sleeping bag is stashed away I roll and squeeze the remaining air out of the mattress. This is another item whose packing has to be done just so. It is waterproof though, so when it has been bagged up it gets strapped to the outside of the back pack by a little bunjee cord.

I find a pair of dry socks, may favourite Hilly Mono Skin running socks. I put them on my dry feet which I cleaned last night with baby wipes. Lovely. Wet socks get attached to the outside of the back pack in the hope that there will be enough sunshine during the day to dry them off. There is a plastic bag with an empty sardine tin, chocolate wrapper and used baby wipes. I tie that plastic bag also to the outside of the back pack where it will stay till I find a bin. From the pocket on the wall of the tent I take my watch. Nine thirty.

I stash everything that needs to be stashed in pockets and pouches and throw the back pack outside.

The rain has stopped now and I can see the crawling shadows of midges all over the outside of the tent. Midges are horrible. Only about, what, three millimetres long, they are slow, flimsy little insects, easily squashed. But it’s the numbers. Clouds of them, thousands upon thousands. They crawl all over any exposed flesh nipping and biting. They don’t bother you when you are on the move so when you are running or walking you are OK. But right now, when I am taking down the tent I will be most vulnerable. I take the Jungle Formula and spray my hands, rubbing it into the backs and palms and the webs of my fingers. I spray again and rub the liquid round my wrists and far up my forearms beyond where I will tightly velcro my sleeves. I rub it into my face, ears, neck, throat and hair. I wear my waterproof trousers so I won’t have to spend an age midgie-proofing my legs but I do rub some bug juice around my belly and back above my waistband. They have crawled up under my jacket before and left a big patch of their nasty little blisters.

Finally I put on my shoes. I have left this to last. Because for the first time since leaving John O’Groats I wasn’t able to dry them on a radiator last night. I put my dry-socked dry feet into the cold wet Wave Riders. I feel the cold wetness seep into my socks. Yuk. I tie the laces tight and crawl outside.

The tent comes down quickly. I work fast. The midges mob me and taste. They don’t Like the Jungle Formula. Ha ha. I fold the poles. I fold and roll and bag both inner and outer tents. I pull and count pegs. At last everything is stuffed in the back pack. I shoulder the pack and clip both belly and chest straps. I look around to check I’m not leaving anything behind. I walk down the hill and clamber over the fence. I’m on the road again.

Today is much like yesterday. I struggle up and down forest tracks more or less stony. But the route runs closer to the loch now, and often there are views down the long wide water and across to the hills on the other side. Now and again a white flicker of sail or hull gives scale to the immensity of it all. Remember, Loch Ness is longer than the English Channel is wide. And colder. That the world record for swimming the length of the loch is held by a woman is evidence that given a long enough distance and harsh enough conditions women can excel over men at endurance sports. Obvious really. Just think childbirth/man-flu. Still, I comfort myself that no matter how tough a woman is she still can’t take a piss without getting all the way out of her sleeping bag.

There is nobody else on the road. Apart from the shop assistant in Drumnadrochit I haven’t spoken to another human being since the cyclist with the pirate map at Abriachan. I wish I had a map now. It’s not like I’m going to get lost but I want to know where the next town is so I know when I’m gonna have breakfast. I try to remember what the next town on from the Drum is but it just won’t come to me.

It turns out that the next burg on the way south is Invermoriston. Of course it is. And fourteen miles and five hours later when I find it I am dizzy with hunger and drunk with fatigue. I walk past the Invermoriston Hotel. I am still blanking them because last summer they refused to serve me coffee one night at about nine o’clock when I was powering my way up the glen in an attempt to do the hundred and seventy miles from Glasgow to Inverness in five days. I needed to get a few more miles done before bedding down for the night and reckoned that a jolt of caffeine would be just the thing to keep me going. But although the restaurant and the bar were both open for some reason the making of a cup of coffee was a catering task too far. This is a big posh hotel for goodness sake. But no it wasn’t possible.

‘We have a selection of alcoholic and soft drinks.’ He said (I swear he did), indicating the gantry with a sweep of his hand.

I had the same thing in Edinburgh once. I asked for a coffee in the White Horse on the Royal Mile. The barman glared at me.

‘Ah’m jist here masel.’ (I’m working unaccompanied.) he said.

The clear implication was that he considered the making of a cup of coffee to be at least a two person job. Now, I’m not an experienced innkeeper. But I can make a cup of coffee all on my own. In fact, if I have a big enough kettle and a selection of mugs I can make coffee for as many as half a dozen people at a time. What is the big deal about getting a cup of coffee (instant would do) in a place whose business it is to serve drinks? That goes for the Invermoriston Hotel and the White Horse.

So I take a shortcut through the Hotel carpark scattering their too-tidy gravel as I go and I scowl through the windows at a couple of old ladies having afternoon tea. That’ll teach them. I stock up on tinned food and chocolate bars at the shop across the road and then follow the signs for the Glen Rowan Restaurant where they haven’t yet made the mistake of thwarting my coffee expectations.

I find I like the Glen Rowan Restaurant. It is light and clean and crisp. I am unwashed, unshaven and sodden-footed and definitely feel out of place, but the waitress makes me feel welcome. I plug in my iPhone for a recharge as I consult the menu. I go for the three-bean chilli with wild rice. It comes with fresh, leafy, tomatoey salad. Nice. I have room for an apple pie and ice cream chaser. Yum. Pudding is followed by a pot of tea. Aaaah! I note the gleaming chrome of the espresso machine behind the counter and I’m reassured that, had I felt the urge, the pleasant, efficient staff of the Glen Rowan would have been more than happy to serve me with a cappuccino, a latte or an americano as fine as anything you could get on the King’s Road. Lovely.

I don’t linger too long over my tea. I have miles to go before I sleep. I use the toilet, refill my water bag and get going. It has been showering on and off but it is dry as I leave the restaurant.

My pack never seems to be as light as I expect it to be. Full of water and with a couple of tins of food on board it is as heavy as it gets, which must be fourteen or fifteen pounds. That’s pretty lightweight but it’s still quite a load if you want to run. The food is lying pretty heavy too and the miles (about seven of them) between Invermoriston and Fort Augustus are a real slog.

It’s coming on evening by the time I get to Fort Augustus. As I hike into the town I find myself walking behind two young Americans. I’ve been starved of human contact all day so I’m leeching onto their conversation. One of them is telling the other that he is an engineering major and plans to be a project engineer. He explains in considerable detail to his less than attentive companion how he is going to achieve this goal. By the time our paths diverge I’m pining for the hermit life again.

Fort Augustus is a little place straddling the canal where a series of five locks slows the water traffic and marks the beginning of the channel from the great Loch Ness to the lesser Loch Oich to the south. The locks make an impressive focus at the centre of a pretty little village and it’s easy to see why the place is such a big tourist draw. From my point of view I am just happy to be hungry again because it would be a shame not to take advantage of the Canalside Chip Shop. Its yellow-painted front is right there facing the locks. I cross over the canal and pop inside. The Canalside Chip Shop works on a triple whammy of big portions, reasonable quality and low prices. I order a sausage supper.

Just so you know, when you order a supper in a Scottish chip shop, as in fish supper, haggis supper, pakora supper or whatever, ‘supper’ simply means ‘with chips’.

While I am waiting for my meal the two mature ladies who are running the show chat between themselves and with a variety of locals who pop their heads round the door from time to time. You could call it gossip. You could call it folk news. Whatever you call this verbal exchange of innuendo, opinion and speculation about who was drunk when and who is shagging who and who has just given their pregnant girlfriend a black eye it is much more entertaining than the career plan of the nascent project engineer.

I have my supper sitting outside being gobsmacked by the engineering wonder of the lock system and watching prowling tourists being similarly gobsmacked. It is quite gobsmackingly impressive.

The American engineering student was in the right place if he was looking for a role model. Thomas Telford was the designer, project engineer, what-have-you on the Caledonian Canal. Now I don’t want to go all tour-guidey on you but seriously, this guy was a legend. He also built the Gotha Canal in Sweden, other huge canals in England and Wales, Portsmouth Docks, the Menai Bridge, towns, more bridges, aqueducts and about a zillion miles of road including the A5, from Holyhead to London, yeah the A5, he finished it in 1826. Check him out on Wikipedia.

By the time I am struggling with my last few chips (I need the calories) my pyloric muscle is clenched as tight as a tick’s arsehole.

I walk out the other side of town along the wide, stony canalside path. The route follows the canal now and all I have for camping is a scrubby margin of land between the canal and the river. What river? I don’t know. I haven’t got a map, remember.

Once I am past the meagre outskirts of Fort Augustus I climb the fence and scratch around for a flat, dry patch of ground. I clear some raggedy undergrowth and pitch up, hammering pegs into the stony earth with a rock. I crawl inside, blow up my mattress and crawl into my sleeping bag. Pretty soon I am asleep.

Road to Endorphia Chapter 2 - Latheron to Inverness

This morning I wake with a bounce from deep, untroubled sleep. My brain has been soaking in endorphins all night. I feel fantastic. Muscles a bit stiff but otherwise I'm born again. I mean it, reborn in the spirit, brother, breathing hosannas and farting hallelujahs.

This is why I run. This is why anybody runs. So that you wake up feeling like you could jump the moon.

And I should feel good. I ran thirty five miles yesterday but it was thirty five miles I was fit for. I've been training hard this spring and I've done some serious mileage, working up to a hundred and twenty miles a week. My peak was a week of thirteen ten mile runs. And in order to make sure all my niggling training injuries are properly healed I've just had a two week break from running. I feel good, you know that I should, so good.

I have a quick wash. I don't shave. I have decided shaving is a luxury. And I have scraped a fraction of an ounce from my heavy load by doing without razors. Dressing is easy. The same running shorts as yesterday. I have only packed one pair. Truth, I only own one pair. The lightweight Mizuno shorts with the comfortable man-gusset, the drawstring tie, the ruched, elasticated waistband and rear, zippered key pocket were another endorphin-fuelled purchase from Run and Become. I mean, I love them, but you better believe I won't be paying thirty five quid for another pair of shorts before you can count the hairs on my arse through the faded fabric of this pair. I own three technical-fabric running tops but I've only brought the long-sleeved one with me, the one my sister Liz bought me for Christmas. I can wear the sleeves rolled up when it's warm and roll them down when it's cold. I do have clean socks. Four pairs of good quality running socks. When will I wash my clothes? I don't know. When I can.

I dance downstairs to find the breakfast room.

A pair of guests are already there, seated and spreading things on toast. They are easily in their seventies and manage to look both spry and sedate at the same time. They have been walking with a guided group in the North Western Highlands. The tour over, they decided to drive across country and then down the east coast to visit relatives (I lost who was married to who and when, because I wasn’t really listening) they haven’t seen since blah blah blah.

Normally I am offended by walkers as a group every bit as much as much as cyclists but the old couple seem intelligent and nice enough and if they are users of those little walking poles at least they had the good sense to leave them out of sight so I don’t feel compelled to bash them over the head with the things.

But they do insist on asking sensible questions. Questions I don't feel the need to have answers to. Sensible people make my head itch. And I don't mean my scalp. I mean the inside of my skull. As they talk I feel crystals form in the fluid part of my eyeball.

'Are you running for a charity?'

They always want you to explain yourself. You can't just do something.

'No.'

'It's a personal challenge then?'

No it isn't. I hate that whole protestant vocabulary of challenge and achievement. My brainpan crawls with an unresolved and unreachable tingling.

The food arrives.

I breakfast on porridge, poached eggs, tomatoes, toast, fruit juice, coffee and I’m ready to go again.

Not far south of Latheron, now on the A9, is Berriedale Braes, a series of long, steep, winding ups and downs. I hit it when I’m fresh enough to enjoy to the fullest a sweaty fusion of sunshine and effort. At one point I pause to chat to an Australian cyclist who has stopped to take in the view. Look how tolerant I am. He has come all the way from Lands End. Out come the iPhones. We take each other’s photographs and split.

Beyond the Braes the road is much as it was the day before, a freehand line drawn to roughly follow the coast.

There’s going to be three and a half days of road running before I get to Inverness and the start of the Great Glen Way with it’s mix of forest tracks and canalside and woodland paths. On that kind of mixed terrain the feet impact at a variety of angles on surfaces hard and soft and in between, tarmac and mud, packed stones and earth, grass. If your feet are hitting the ground a hundred and fifty times a minute for several hours every day you need to spread the stresses.

But running on the same side of this cambered road, my feet striking the hard surface again and again at this unnatural angle, always nagging at me is the road runners constant worry, stress injury.

During the long miles of training over the winter and spring I developed a plethora of injuries, some just plain irritating, some painful and crippling. There was off and on again Achilles tendonitis, of course, quite mild usually but sometimes requiring up to three days of rest. For a few days in early May I was bothered by a tightness of the anterior tibialis, the front calf muscles, on my right leg like nothing I've ever had before. I mean tight tight, you could have hammered a nail in there and it wouldn’t have bled. It took an hour of running before it loosened up sometimes. But during the latter half of May I eased back on the mileage and let my body heal itself as much as possible.

Right now the soles of my feet feel as if they have been tenderised by a steak hammer, as if the protective dermal sock of my foot has been peeled off from the sole and I am running on raw nerve endings. But nothing much else. Not so far.

And now it starts to rain, and not the gentle rain of yesterday. Today’s rain is proper rain. Pissing rain.

And so it goes, mile after mile along the edge of the road, slightly canted, each foot striking at an odd angle, striking and rolling and twisting, twisting, twisting, and scowling at the oncoming traffic through wobbling wet lenses.

Sometime between last summer’s trek in the southern Carpathians and today my waterproof jacket has lost it’s waterproof and pretty soon I am soaked. And the dry, sunny miles of the morning become the wet, miserable miles of the afternoon.

But I am aware of today’s target and I keep plugging away until I reach Helmsdale, eighteen miles down from Latheron, and stop for a late lunch in the Bannockburn Inn.

I have cornish pastie, chips and beans. That’s the special but, truth be told, it ain’t that special. I reload with calories while I watch what looks like the German version of X Factor on TV. When the sequins stop spinning and it cuts to the judges there’s David Hasselhoff . Wait a minute, am I watching American X Factor dubbed into German? WTF! No but, the Hoff is huge in Germany, or so I’ve heard. Maybe he is a judge on German X Factor.

The rain eases off in the afternoon. I keep plugging away.

Hours later I am getting closer to Golspie. I know this because there are signs by the road proclaiming Golspie’s Prizewinning Beaches. I’m not kidding. The North Sea beaches of Golspie in the extreme north east of Scotland, ninety miles north of Inverness, win prizes. Fantastic. I resist the urge to make a detour. Neither do I break my journey for Dunrobin Castle. I see the gate and the beginnings of a leafy driveway but that’s it. I’m not sightseeing.

And so I arrive in Golspie which, depending on whether you put your faith in Google Maps, the official road signs or the old Victorian waymarker outside the Sutherland Hotel, is either 68, 72 or 73 miles from John O’Groats. I’m going with the Victorians. They have precedence. And that means I’m averaging 36.5 miles a day so far. Hoo Rah!

The Sutherland Hotel looks a bit posh so I look around for something a bit humbler. Now, the problem with these little towns is you have to be careful not to overshoot them. Walk a bit too far and you’re in among the sheep again.

I see a young girl out walking a dog so I ask her, indicating the road ahead, “Is there much more round the corner?”

She looks a bit embarrassed, “No. This is pretty much it.”

The Stag’s Head looks more my style and John, the landlord, is happy to come out from behind the reception desk and show me upstairs to a room.

For thirty quid I have a stained carpet, a view of the bins and a tiny, windowless bathroom. But hey, there is a bath. It isn’t a great bath. It’s not a beautiful bath. It’s certainly not the bath that Cleopatra filled with ass’s milk. Though it smells like it might have been. No, wait, that’s the carpet. But it is a bath.

While the bath is filling I peel off my clothes and log my injuries. General muscle soreness in shoulders, back and legs (seventy plus miles in two days, what do you expect). Significant chafing to lower back and scrotum (Vaseline must have worn off, gonna sting when I lower myself into that hot water). Sunburnt forehead (when did that happen?). Suspicious twinge forward of left ankle (a bit worrying). Blister on sole of left foot. Fantastic.

Remember, folks. Endurance running is the socially acceptable face of self harm. Don’t let all that charity fundraising fool you. The athlete in training pounding the pavement mile after gruelling mile is chasing the same endorphin hit as the troubled individual who takes a razor blade and cuts into the soft part of his arm. The reward comes when the brain detects the pain and counteracts it with biochemical carriers of fun. Cutter and runner are the same, and equally deserving of your admiration or contempt. Whatever.

When I wake I am as stiff and sore as the morning after a marathon. The twinge in my left foot is now red and swollen and protests when I put any weight in it. I pull the laces of my Mizuno Wave Rider extra tight and hobble downstairs to the restaurant.

Breakfast, which is included in the thirty quid, is an aggressively carnivorous affair of sausages, bacon, eggs, fried bread and black pudding. Eating it is an almost out of body experience. I watch myself cutting and forking and chewing as if it is somebody else. I know what I am doing is really stupid but I can’t seem to stop. My body demands that yesterday’s calorie debt be paid.

Once outside I start walking south out of town. I want to lie down. I mean I really, really, really want to lie down. I want to lie down like a snake wants to lie down. I want to lie down because no alternative is possible. All my blood is in my belly dealing with breakfast. My pack hurts my shoulders, my back and my hips. My legs hurt. I mean they hurt, hurt. They hurt in all their constituent muscles. My feet hurt. My left foot especially hurts every time it pushes against the ground. I feel like the day’s end rather than the beginning. I have no idea how to start running. I want to lie down. Did I say that already?

What doesn't hurt? My knees. Yeah, my knees don't hurt. My knees never hurt. Never. It may comfort the couch-surfing sedentarist to believe that we runners are jogging along on borrowed time, yomping toward that day in late middle age when our knees just crumble into dust leaving us wheelchair-bound and bitter. But it doesn't feel like that right now. And, guess what. The science doesn't support the crumbling knee myth either. It's looking as if running strengthens the knee joints. Ha ha. Fuck you.

I keep walking. Soon enough Golspie runs out of sidewalk and I cross over to the right hand side of the road to face the oncoming traffic. It is Monday morning. The traffic is heavier than yesterday.

So I walk. And then I run. I run till my foot hurts too bad. Then I walk again. The landscape is the same boring shit as the last two days. Fields full of sheep. Staring and munching grass. Munching grass and staring. Is that all sheep can do? Stare and munch grass? Don’t they ever do anything else? Don’t they ever dance?

I walk and I run. It is a battle. Bloody-mindedness versus pain. And I walk and I run.

And I do this for ten miles. But here’s the thing. I can force myself to run on this damaged foot for long enough. I am that bloody-minded. But I have to run on it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. And so on for a thousand odd miles, all the way to Lands End. I don’t know if it is this argument that convinces me or simply the sheer physical fatigue I am experiencing but there comes a point when I know I am not going to run again that day. And I walk.

Further south the sea strikes inland up the wide waters of the Dornoch Firth. Spanning the estuary is the new bridge. I love to run across a long bridge but I can’t push myself beyond a walk. Still, it lifts my spirit, the wide water and the shallows and wetlands and the seabirds and the wide open sky.

It’s approaching five o’clock and the next town is Tain. When I get there I will only have managed fifteen miles all day. Tain isn’t on the A9 itself. It lies parallel to it. So before I reach the town I have to make a decision whether to go further or to turn off the main road and call it a day.

I lie down in the grass by the side of the road. I am bone weary but can’t make a decision. The noise of the traffic stresses me. I snack and doze, waiting for my energy to kick back in, I suppose. But it hasn’t done that all day. I think maybe I am delaying the decision because even if I decide to spend the night in Tain there’s a walk of a mile or so before I can find a place to sleep. OK. Sod this. Tain it is. I get up and cross the road.

It turns out to be a painful mile. My feet hurt. I mean everything else hurts but my feet are the twin peaks of hurt in a whole landscape of pain. Actually, they aren’t twin peaks. The left one still hurts more that the right. Yeah, yeah, whatever. At the first guest house I find they are full up but the owner gives me directions to another. More weary walking. Now I have a room. The guest house lady gives me directions to the town centre where I can find an evening meal but although I am famished I can’t face walking another yard. I have a tin of beans in my pack and there is a selection of biscuits with the tea and coffee in my room. That’ll have to hold me until breakfast.

I have a shower then crawl under the covers and fall asleep.

Later in the evening I wake up again. I find the remote and fire up the wall-mounted television. I channel hop for a bit until it narrows down to a choice between a documentary about surveillance society Britain and Celebrity Wife Swap. I'm not feeling this is an improvement on yesterday's Kraut Factor. Doesn't anybody have Sky up here? I want Discovery Channel. I want Mythbusters.

Celeb Wife Swap is really pushing the boundaries because one of the wives is, technically, not a wife but, in fact, a lesbian partner. I've seen Rhona Cameron on a Saturday night at the Comedy Cafe in Rivington Street completely rip the room up. She was a force of nature, easily one of the greatest standup performers I have ever seen. What's she doing on this shit? Paying the mortgage I suppose. I watch Rhona and Stan Boardman bicker for half an hour and then try to get back to sleep.

I don’t enjoy the solid, completely powered-down, snorefest slumber of the nights in Latheron or Golspie. I feel off-key, medicated even. It is clear now that my left foot is definitely injured. I try to ignore the very real possibility that I might not even be able to walk in the morning. I go all new-agey and direct the healing power of the cosmos at my left foot.

I am the only guest for breakfast. However, I don’t feel alone. There is another almost palpable presence in the room. Around the walls, on the sideboard and various little tables are photographs. All of the same person. There he is as a cherubic, fair-haired infant, there again as a smiling blonde schoolboy. I turn my head and there he is once more, older now, a teenager, but still smiling, still blonde and still impeccably turned out in his school uniform. There are other poses, but always he is alone, unaccompanied by a less perfect sibling or a scruffier cousin. And there he is on that magical day in the cap and gown of graduation still smiling in all his blonde, angelic perfection.

I hate him beyond reason. And I find myself hating his mother too, the guest house lady, for the meanness of the portion of porridge she gives me. Jeez. Can you even buy bowls this small? I swear I’ve sneezed bigger than this. I bet angelboy gets all the porridge he wants.

I am frustrated by the whole breakfast issue. The whole food thing in fact. I just can’t seem to find big enough sources of carbohydrates. My breakfast at home would be a helping of porridge easily five or six times the size of this baby serving. Aaaarrrgggh! I fill up with toast and marmalade and eggs and bacon and mushrooms and get the hell out of there. I hope he turns out to be a serial killer, you old witch. Dennis Nilsen was from Fraserburgh. That's just along the coast, you know.

Tain is a proper town. It has shops and pubs and a post office and a Co-op where I buy a slab of dark chocolate for the journey ahead. It has a big, granite town hall with a big clock (striking ten) and more than one street so I have to consult Google Maps to find my way back to the A9.

Oh yeah. I can walk. I’m still all stiff and sore and my feet still hurt but I am pretty refreshed and yes, I can walk. Fantastic.

It’s thirty four point two miles to Inverness from where I am now. If I get my thirty five miles done today that gets me to the other side of the city and up the hill onto the Great Glen Way. I can pitch my tent in the trees and in the morning I will wake up on familiar ground. And off the cursed A9 at last.

In the meantime there’s the A9. South of Tain it’s more of a road. Dual carriageway, heavier traffic, more freight. Less fun. Such as it was. I don’t know the area around here. Before this trip I have never been north of Inverness. But the place names, Invergordon, Tain, Nigg Bay, are familiar from stories my brother William has of building oil rigs back in the early eighties, crawling round the massive structures with a welding torch.

I walk and walk, pushing myself pretty hard. And sometimes I run. But when I run I can’t even manage the old man shuffle. Limping with both feet now, I move in a kind of rolling hirple. What do I feel like? I feel like what I am. A middle aged man with two busted feel running along the side of the road in the pissing rain. Fuck. I don’t know how to tell you what this feels like. Maybe you don’t care. There’s no reason why you should. But just in case. Imagine this. Think of a town about thirty miles from you. Now wait till a dose of the flu coincides with a rainy day and walk there. Oh yeah, and before you start, hit both of your feet with a hammer. Hard.

I don’t even have the luxury of being able to feel sorry for myself. This is entirely voluntary. I’m not a fleeing refugee. I’m not a prisoner, or a conscript on a forced march. This is my holiday. Idiot. And then the growling engine of bloody-mindedness kicks in and I realise I am enjoying this. This is fun. Haaaaah! Haaaaaah! And the harder it gets the more fun it is. Haaaaaaaah! I roar at the rain and I howl at the road. ‘Is that all you’ve got. Huh? Is that all you’ve got.' And, for a while, that works.

But defiance takes energy. What you really need if you want to keep going forever, no matter what, is not defiance, but acceptance. You close down everything you don’t need. You close down choice. There is no choice. You just keep going. Close down feeling. No pleasure, no pain. This is just the way it is. Close down effort to a bare minimum. Find the rhythm and the pace that allows you to keep going with the minimum of effort. And keep going. Close down thought. Count, chant, sing, but don’t think. Thinking reminds you how far you have to go and how much it hurts.

When I cross the bridge to the Black Isle I can see over on the left my brother Willie’s oil rig platforms. This is another long bridge. The Black Isle (actually a peninsula) is bounded on the North by the Cromarty Firth and on the south by the Moray and Beuly. The A9 will take me across the Black Isle and once over the next bridge I’ll be in Inverness.

I love bridges. Properly understood a bridge is not a noun but a verb. A bridge is a crossing of rivers and chasms. It is a joining of communities and an enabling of journey and trade. It transcends landscape while celebrating its geometry. Once, crossing the Thames from St Paul's to Tate Modern on the day of a rare London storm the wind reminded me it could toss me into the air. Inside the gallery, free of the wind's grip, everything seemed spiritless, Anish Kapoor's big trumpet thing so much bombastic junk. On the bridge outside I had been buffeted by the fist of the storm god. That was real.

Hours later I cross that other bridge and find myself in the kind of dockland/industrial outskirts of the city. In four days of trekking, Inverness is the first place I have been which is big enough to actually have outskirts. So there’s a dispiriting amount of weary plodding past warehouses and hangars where the only sign of human activity is the occasional discarded Buckfast bottle. Oh yes, the green bottle with its distinctive fruity label is a sure sign we have reached civilisation. Buckfast Tonic Wine is the preferred tipple of the Scottish urban underclass. A sweet, syrupy, fortified wine beloved of street drinkers, wife beaters and football hooligans, the empty bottle often doubles as an improvised weapon. It really is Scotland’s Other National Drink. Any History of Scotland in 100 Objects would have to have a Buckie bottle right up there in the top ten with bagpipes and shortbread.

Now I reach a jumble of streets, crossing each other, going uphill and down. I need to find something to eat. Just a takeway. Chips. Yeah, chips. But I should know better than to get fixated on a particular type of food. That’s setting yourself up for disappointment. But it’s just chips, for god’s sake. That’s not asking a lot. This is a city after all.

I feel like Zarathustra just come down from the mountains. I bet he was dying for a bag of chips as well. Big fat ones. Soggy with vinegar. Yeah.

I find myself standing in the street looking downhill, wondering which way to go, not wanting to waste energy walking in the wrong direction when a door opens behind me.

‘You wanting to book in?’

‘Uh?’

I turn round and see that I am standing outside a backpackers hostel. Result.

‘Yeah. Yeah.’

I follow the young guy inside and he books me in.

‘Cheapest bed?’

What did he mean by that? Do I look cheap? Do I look like a down and out? Well, yeah.

‘Yeah. Yeah.’

‘Ten pounds please.' Nice.

Anyway he sorts me out with a bed and a key and then I am able to ask.

‘Where’s the nearest chip shop?’

‘Oh, right. Just down the hill and turn right. No, no. Wait a minute. There was a fire. On Thursday. The chip shop got burned out.’

You have got to be kidding.

‘Is there another one?’

‘No. That was it I’m afraid.’

I do not believe this. This is a city. A city for goodness sake. Surely, surely, in the name of all that we hold dear of civilisation and culture on this blessed island, in order to qualify as a city you have to have at least one working chip shop.

It grows dark while I wander the streets. I remember that I had intended to get beyond the city and into the hills today. That will have to wait until tomorrow. Tonight I need a meal and tomorrow morning I will have to shop for food for the day ahead.

I find myself missing London. There is probably more going on in Putney High Street this Tuesday evening that in this whole jockforsaken city, I decide. What do they do up here? What do they make? Yeah, yeah, OK. North Sea oil. Whatever.

Up the hill and across the road from the castle (of course, there’s castle) I find MacDonalds. Oh well, it’s got an authentic Scottish name.

I have a Big Mac Meal. The burger is pretty dried out and the chips (seriously, are they allowed to call them chips) are much too salty, but it’s all very easy to eat. And the big sugary drink is welcome.

When I’m finished eating I sit there for a while. I feel really chilled out now. I’ve eaten. I’m rehydrated. I know where I am going to sleep. And I’m doing OK. I’ve done a hundred and twenty miles of road running in four days. Thirty miles a day. That’s not bad. That’s good. I’m tired though. Woooo, I’m tired.

Ten Miles Before Breakfast - Richmond Park

Up and out at 5am. I see a fox, a grey heron. I see masses of deer, both red deer and fallow deer, bucks, hinds, calves. I see jackdaws, pigeons, rabbits, squirrels. I hear woodpeckers but can't spy them in the high bare trees.
I do my ten miles then it's a bath and a breakfast of porridge, peanut butter and banana.
Perfect.

Road to Endorphia Chapter 1 - John O'Groats to Latheron

I start running.

It is slightly uphill out of John O’Groats, south towards the A99. There is the barest smirr of rain and a breeze just above stillness.

I have escaped. I am on the run. For however long this takes I won’t have to read a newspaper or pretend to have an opinion or listen to endless whining about the economy, the avarice of politicians and the unavailability of on-street parking in the Inner-London Boroughs. And however long this takes, if I narrow my focus sufficiently, is forever.

My spirit rises. My worship commences.

The single tenet of my atheistical faith is this: The Body is the Spirit.

By this simple truth you can judge all religious traditions. What your church requires you to do with your body, that is what it would do to your spirit.

Where the emphasis is on bowing and kneeling you can be sure that what is expected of you is submission. Walking in procession, chanting in unison, singing from the same hymn sheet, all instil the discipline of conformity. Sitting still, acceptance.

Submit, conform and acquiesce all you want, you truth-in-a-book, text-bound children of Abraham. Your soulless, iota-splitting, argumentative, mean-spirited, fearful creeds are not for me.

This morning as my heart pumps and my blood heats and my muscles flex I look to the gods of the east. And I chant to myself and the universe.

Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha.

I invoke the Lord Ganesh. God of Doorways, of Entrances. God of New Beginnings. Remover of Obstacles. I invoke you Lord Ganesh in each of your hundred and eight names. Elephant Headed One. Pot Bellied One. Holder of the Broken Tusk. I invoke you from the bottom of my infidel heart.

I filled my three litre CamelBak water container before leaving John O’Groats and my pack feels heavy. With the full load of water I am carrying about fourteen pounds but I ran most of my training miles without a bag and I am finding it hard to get my rhythm. What can you do? I keep running.

It is still gently uphill. Then flat for a bit, downhill, flat, uphill again. Undulant.

Beyond my pumping left shoulder is the North Sea, swollen and sighing in a great, grey sulk. Buffering the sea’s swell is sometimes sand and sometimes rocks and sometimes both mixed in with hillocks of tussocky grass and, as the more regular line of the road moves nearer to and farther from the ragged line of the shore, sometimes the margin is filled with fenced-off fields where sheep graze. Mostly sheep but sometimes cows. At my right shoulder always there are fields and more sheep and more cows and sometimes a bruiser of a bull and in the distance there are hills. Sometimes too an old church, sometimes a farmhouse or a barn, sometimes a row of houses with cars parked outside, once a roadside war memorial.

The rain continues. The lightest of rains, just at the point where the heaviest of mist becomes subject to gravity. As I say, a smirr, a feathery drizzle. Here at the north east limit of the British mainland Scottish words seem to come more readily. And I am grateful for the word smirr which I now etymologise in my head. Smirr. From smear? Like the marks this lightest of rains would make on window or windscreen. Or on spectacle lenses I now notice.

I am not convinced of my speculative derivation for smirr but refrain from googling for further insight. O yes, brothers and sisters, I have not embarked on my thousand mile journey without internet access. I am wired up and plugged in. My iPhone is attached to the hip-belt of my Salomon XA 20 back pack and is protected from the rain by a thing called an Aquapac. The Aquapac is a little watertight plastic pocket designed to hold a mobile phone. It has a jack for my earphones so I can listen to music in the wet (they claim you can swim with it). The plastic is transparent and flexible so that I can access icons and keys without taking it out of the protection. I bought it from the big yachting shop by Embankment Underground station. At thirty five pounds it is the most expensive plastic bag I have ever owned.

I think about plugging in the earphones now but again I don’t want to slow down. I don’t usually listen to music on the run anyway.

Although I feel like a schoolboy on the first day of summer holidays with an impossible number of weeks between today and the next school year my running is sluggish. The pack on my back and the breakfast in my belly are slowing me down. Oh yes, the breakfast.

This morning when I arrived in John O’Groats it was already later than I wanted it to be. I had slept the night before in the Stroma View campsite which I stumbled upon in the dark after a long, disjointed journey from Motherwell by train, by bus and on foot. From the campsite you could see Stroma, the most southerly of the Orkney Islands (figured that out from the name, huh?) and in the morning in my lightweight sleeping bag in my lightweight tent I felt as if I had been baring my arse to the Arctic Ocean all night long. It took me forever to convince myself to get out of bed for the start of my Big Adventure.

Once I had made it to Britain’s Most Northerly Mainland Town I wandered about, vaguely looking for a steaming bowl of porridge with maybe several slices of toast and marmalade, orange juice and a big mug of tea, a mixture of fast and slow (simple and complex) carbohydrates. The only place I could find for a sit down meal felt a bit chichi for my simple requirements. I looked at the selection of croissants and sandwiches behind the glass, grunted and walked back out.

I looked around. You can pretty much see all of John O’Groats without moving from one spot. There’s a carpark, a signpost giving miles to a selection of exotic and not so exotic locations where you can take your photograph if you want (I did), a derelict Victorian hotel, a pier where you get the boat to someplace even more remote, the aforementioned chichi restaurant, some kind of half-arsed heritage museum and a snack van. Oi Oi, I thought, and headed for the van.

At the snack van, eager as I was to be underway, I settled for a roll with fried egg and square sausage. The square sausage is a peculiarly Scottish item. It comes in a big square cross-sectioned slab maybe three and a half inches on the side. Actually it’s slightly trapezoid rather than square but never mind that. The slab is cut into quarter inch slices, I dunno, maybe they’re a bit thicker than that but again that’s not important. What is important, and distinctive, about the square sausage is its fat content. The fat content of the Scottish square sausage makes Polish food look positively Californian. And the preferred method of cooking this four-cornered fat feast is to shallow fry it in fat.

A second after swallowing this nutritional black hole my pyloric sphincter shut like a trap.

I belch and continue to run. The rain stops. The sun burns off the clouds and the day warms up.

The minutes are mounting on the digital face of my now aged Timex Ironman Triathlon Speed and Distance System. I must have had this watch for eight years now. I know I’ve replaced the battery three times. I got it from Run and Become in Palmer Street, Victoria and it cost me a whole week's wages. Tony Smith himself sold it to me. I remember asking him, 'Is this good, then?' I was about to hand over two hundred and fifty quid. I wanted reassurance, and I reckoned for that kind of money I was entitled to it. But Tony Smith wasn't a salesman. He was a believer. He was a follower of Sri Chinmoy and running was life to him. He smiled and inclined his head to the side. 'Well.' He said, 'Some people find them useful.' That was good enough for me.

I fashion my buff into a headband to keep the sweat out of my eyes. Sweat trickles down my back.

The Timex tells me I’ve been on the go for more than an hour and I notice a shop coming up on the left. Everything you carry weighs something and I have to carry water, a tent, sleeping bag, inflatable mattress, waterproof clothing and spare socks, so I can’t carry too much in the way of food. My rule of thumb is no more than two tins, so I’ll have to eat from shops and caffs and pubs along the road. I don’t know this part of the route so I can't assume there'll be a shop when I want one.

I stop. This place where I stop, the place with the shop, isn’t working very hard at being a place at all. It isn’t a town, that’s for sure. And it would be pushing it to call it a village. There’s a single street of what looks like municipal housing between me and the North Sea. At my end of the street is a shop. I would call it a corner shop but to make a corner you need two streets meeting at an angle and, as I said, there’s only one street. Wait. The street meets the road I’m running on. Right. That’s a corner. It’s a corner shop. OK.

I buy Mars Bars and Irn Bru. I munch on one of the chocolate bars and store the rest in one of the belt pouches of the Salomon backpack. I am liking the backpack. It is relatively new. I bought it a couple of weeks ago from Field and Trek in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. There were a few packs in the same twenty litre size but what sold it to me was that you didn’t have to open up the main compartment to get the water bladder out (or in). The CamelBak fits in it’s own separate zippered and padded section so it’s easier and quicker to fill up. Nice.

I slug on the Irn Bru for quick sugar. Irn Bru is, of course, exactly the right thing to pour down on top of the still undigested square sausage since this carbonated drink is, depending on the vintage of the slogan, “Made in Scotland From Girders” or “Scotland’s Other National Drink”. It is too fizzy, too sweet and utterly repulsive. While I am belching out the gas from the first half of the bottle I shake up the remainder to deaden the fizz. It is a truly, truly horrible drink.

But, notwithstanding how it got aboard, once I start running again the sugar does the trick. I get my rhythm and, for a while at least, I start knocking out the miles.

Three and a half hours out of John O’Groats and seventeen miles south along the A99 is Wick and when I get there I stop for a late lunch of chicken curry in the Bridge Cafe. Tea is also welcome.

As I eat I mull over where I'm at. My daily target is thirty five miles so I’m just about halfway there for the day. I’m not carrying any maps on this part of the journey. Well, I do have a little half page thing I ripped out of a magazine which shows me how to get from John O’Groats to Inverness (117 miles). This is the only bit between the start of the run and Glasgow that I don’t know, but I just need to follow the A99 and the A9. What could be easier?

As soon as I get to Inverness I’ll get off-road. There's a long distance walking trail, the Great Glen Way, from there as far as Fort William (73 miles). From Fort William I’ll follow the West Highland Way, another walking trail, as far as Glasgow (96 miles). And from Glasgow I’ll just run through the streets to Motherwell (13 miles). I’ve walked or run the route from Glasgow to Inverness in full or part, up or down, any number of times and Motherwell/Glasgow is familiar to me.

Once I get to Motherwell I’ll figure out what route to take next. Yeah I know, maybe some people start a thousand mile journey having done some rigorous route-planning but that isn’t my way. I like room to improvise.

My big concern at the moment is where I am going to sleep tonight. There are a number of options for sleeping. Most expensive is bed and breakfast at, maybe thirty or thirty five pounds a night. Then hostels, between twenty and ten pounds depending on quality and location. Campsites are cheap. The chap at Stroma View the night before charged me four quid. But cheapest of all, and my preferred option for nocturnal slumbering, is wild camping. Wild camping is pitching your tent on a hillside or by a river, any spot that takes your fancy. Wild camping is flexible and it’s free and, in Scotland at least, it’s even legal.

Well, mostly legal. You can’t just camp anywhere. There are rules. Not in somebody’s garden and not, I think, within 100 yards of a road, not on forestry land and not in a field being grazed or under cultivation. Now I’m quite happy to camp on forestry land, and often do. But I won’t camp in somebody’s field if there’s a chance I’ll be interfering with the primary purpose of that land. So far today every square inch of land I’ve seen that wasn’t road or beach has been growing or grazing something. From Inverness down to Glasgow I know I can wild camp all the way. But until I get to Inverness, unless the landscape changes, and from Google Maps it looks like it won’t , I might have to pay for three nights of B and B.

Still, no worries. If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.

I linger a while over my tea but the shop starts to close as it approaches five in the afternoon. This morning’s late start is having a knock on effect. In the bathroom I refill my water bag. Out in the street I shoulder my pack, clip the belly and chest straps and start running.

I continue down the A99, the coast road, running on the right hand side facing the oncoming traffic which doesn’t seem heavy. Now and again an approaching vehicle flashes its lights at me. If you are running south on this road carrying a pack you are probably headed all the way down. Are they applauding my enterprise, my adventurous spirit, or are they pissed off that I am straying too far into the road. I interpret their signal as encouragement rather than reproach.

The hours pass. The road winds along the coast. I alternate between walking and running. Sometimes it rains a bit. Once I found I had lost my buff. Now a buff is a thing of great beauty. A plain tube of microfibrous material, it can be used as a scarf or a headband, or ,variously, depending on how you fold, twist or wrap this magical scrap of fabric, a cap, balaclava, turban, ski mask, scrunchie (not with my hair), and on and on (check the how-to videos on YouTube). On a hot day it will keep the sweat out of your eyes, on a cold day it will shield your face from the wind and in your sleeping bag at night it will minimise heat loss from your head. Once I convince myself that it is not in any of a dozen pockets or wrapped around either of my wrists (yeah, it’s a wristband too) I stand at the side of the road cursing for a bit. Then I turn and jog back the way I came. A good chunk of a mile later there’s my buff lying by the side of the road.

Along the road there are more Mars Bars and more Irn Bru. As I tire I feel resentment at the extra distance travelled in search of the lost buff. Uphill sections feel steeper. I feel resentment at the engineers who couldn’t be bothered to plan a flatter, less winding road. What’s wrong with people?

I grudgingly acknowledge approaching cyclists, winding their loaded panniers along the road, half a day’s cycling in front of them and the long slog, nine hundred miles by road, from Lands End behind them. Yeah, go on you pedal-pushing bastards, I know your kind. You’re all smiles now but I’ve seen you back in the Big Smoke, jumping red lights, mounting the pavement whenever you feel like it, ‘look at me I’m saving the planet’. Fuck off, you handlebar-hugging, tofu-munching scum.

You think cycling is like running. Well it ain’t. You’re sitting on a mechanical gadget which has a history of maybe a century and a half. It’s a Victorian contraption in twentieth century dress. See, here’s the thing. Running isn’t just running. Distance running, endurance running, is the engine which drove human evolution. And you know something, there’s more truth in that last sentence than all the bibles ever printed. We are the monkeys who learned to run. We are what we are because of running. Every muscle, tendon, gland, organ, bone, vessel in the human body is geared towards running long distances. You ever ask yourself the question why we’ve got so little hair? How many bald land-mammals are there? It doesn’t make any sense. You stand outside naked and, apart from the finest tropical weather, you’re cold. But start to run and it makes sense. We lost our monkey hair so we could shed heat faster as we ran. So don’t give me the old fellowship-nod from across the road you two-wheeled bastard.

My nomad spirit revolts at the wheel. And it resents running on a road built for them. But hold that thought, buddy boy. That's your own fault. My own fault. I could have researched a cross-country route south from John O'Groats, but I didn't. This road is my choice.

I convert my aggression into effort and hack away at the miles ahead of me, yard by yard.

I’m digging now. I run and I walk. I flinch from closely passing cars. I count. I run for a count of a thousand then allow myself to walk for a bit. I lie to myself. I promise a walk break after counting to a thousand, then make myself do a second thousand count before giving in to the promised walk break. I run again. I run in the ragged rhythm of the old man’s shuffle. I keep going.

In my weariness I should be appalled at the distance ahead of me but somehow I am not. I take pride in running through my fatigue. I am making my target. Even with walk breaks and sitting down breaks I am knocking out four miles every hour.

But my walk breaks become more frequent, my thousand counts shrink to five hundreds and by the time I reach the little town of Latheron, thirty five miles from John O’Groats, I am completely done in. It is half past nine and coming on for dark. OK. Now that I’ve got here how do I find a bed and breakfast. I’m not kidding about being done in. I really am. I just want to sit down and whimper. Yeah, whimpering would be nice. Then lie on my side, curl up and close my eyes.

But first I need to find a place to sleep. No. I haven’t googled for guesthouses in Latheron and called ahead to book a room. I was busy running, OK! Googling is what I try to do now but the internet is running like molasses and the more I whimper the slower it gets. There is a row of shops back off the road on my right. I give up on twentyfirst century communications and browse the adverts in the darkened newsagent’s window. The last thing I want right now is a pilates class and I’m really not up for a bring and buy sale. In the right circumstances I can see myself buying a labrador puppy who I’m sure will grow to love me but first I need a place to sleep. Please.

And there it is. An A4 sheet with a picture and information. The Old Manse Guest House, Latheron. That sounds good, not only is it a guest house it’s in the Old Manse. The manse is the minister’s house, that’s like Scottish for vicarage. Fantastic. There’s a telephone number. I’ll give them a call. And I suddenly feel edgy with suppressed panic. My big fear now is that I have somehow passed some kind of guest house cut-off time and that I have left it too late. Nobody will answer the phone. Or they will tell me there are no vacancies, not wanting to organise a room for me at this late hour.

No, wait. There’s a map. I’ll go there. I’ll go there and knock on the door. When they see me, when they see how little and harmless I am and they hear how far I’ve come they’ll take me in. They won’t turn me away.

I figure out the map and it turns out that I am just a few feet from the corner I need to turn. Up the hill on the right and there it is ahead of me, a big square house, the Old Manse.

I am lying in bed now between cool, crisp sheets. I have washed my sweaty body and my salty face under a hot, hard, soapy shower.

My legs are tight and my back is a slab of aching muscle. I am exhausted. But exhaustion is a good place to be when effort is no longer required.

The chemicals in my brain which earlier had me snarling at cyclists and all but blubbing outside a shop window now have me sending out to the universe waves of cosmic gratitude. I want to give thanks for this weariness and the day which brought me here. Yeah, I know. But you can put the book down. I have to live with this shit.

But where to direct that gratitude. The Lord Ganesh again? No. Much as I love Ganapati, I know he is not real. He’s just a great, big, cuddly, Vedanta-flavoured Dumbo, no more real than Jehova or Jesus or Jay Gatsby.

My iPhone on the bedside table is plugged in and charging up. I fumble with earphones and thumb menus and find some music.

If I can’t find an authentic god I can at least tune into an authentic prophet. I touch play and the scratchy remnant of Blind Willie Johnson’s growling, lisping words reaches me across the gap of eighty years. I listen in wonder to the unique sound of Willie’s blues guitar, his gruff voice and the sweet harmony of the woman’s voice coming and going and the rough, honest pain in the words.

'I want somebody to tell me. Help me if you can. Oh, won’t somebody tell me. What is the soul of a man?’

Jeez, I don’t know. I’m knackered.