SPORTS REPORT: Heptonstall Fell Race, 17/3/13

by theimpliedreader

There is a surfeit of sporting blogs and running blogs and blogs which chart one’s progress throughout a series of races and events and blogs which connect one’s personal physical activities to a nascent sense of spiritual well-being and whilst I have solid amounts of respect for these kinds of things and indeed nearly all personal and creative endeavours, the desire to sustain and add to this canon is not what this blog is for.

Running has not made me closer to God or Gaia or Grayling and it isn’t my gesture against the military-pharma-industrial complex. I run because I lack the talent or patience for team sports, I’m not bad at it and entering a few races revealed a heretofore unrealised appetite for competitive sports. It gives someone such as me with grown-up adult friends who may not be free every weekend an opportunity to spend time in a way that the judgmental eyes of society would look upon favourably.

So now that the uncalled-for rationalisation is out of the way: I am at the foot of the final climb in the Heptonstall Fell Race at around 14.5 miles in at a little tourist destination called Hardcastle Crags where I once had a lemon ice-lolly and went paddling with a female friend of mine. The woods form a tight guard against the River Calder, steep sided and auburn, extending beyond what can comfortably seen by tilting one’s head.

photo by kipp2k6

My right leg is cramping a little with every step up the side of the hill and to compound matters they are they kind of heavy stone steps which are a little higher than domestic staircases which is pretty annoying but also please factor in 14.5 miles of running and oh yes there are about 150 of these steps rather than the customary nine to twelve you might find at home.

Tiredness and the reality of physical pain sever access to emotions so the rolodex of feelings I might ordinarily feel at this juncture are not present: annoyance that my team-mates have eaten into the lead I built only to waltz by as if out on a Sunday stroll, pleasure that the end is in sight, joy at being out in the splendour of the Yorkshire hills and valleys on a pleasant day, pessimism that the dinner I’ve promised to cook later that day will be ruined by fatigue and inability to cook dishes that require more than one pan.

The race has taken in sheep-strewn farmland, boggy heather-flanked paths, waymarkers indicating bleak horizons beyond, snow-capped hilltops, crooked verges with loose tussocks of grass, violent slate-lined slants, sludge of various gradients and thickness and gruesome upwards scrambles which become paralysis-inducing drops. Stile, gates, moors. The rushing sense of freedom in a mile-long descent toward the blank Widdop Road.

At the finish line my team-mates greet me: in shorter races it is usually I that greets them, but their experience and indefatigable natures which wins out over my youthful earnestness. One of them asks if I enjoyed it and if I was tired. A stream of consonants and vowels which did not pass for sense in any language that any of us knew fell from my mouth, which at least answered the second question.

In truth in the light of a day of rest I can still not answer the first question. Asceticism and self-flagellation has always interested me, the denial, or theoretical lengthened delay, of gratification at least has some profound political connections. That said, it was not enjoyable to reach the final stile, yards from the finish line, having run for three hours, and fail to climb it owing to searing shards of lightning in the hamstrings – and in front of a crowd of half-a-dozen onlookers, all clapping generously. “Enjoyment” is a word created for less complex situations.