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.
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