Mountains of Madness
I break blog silence to quickly mention the currently breaking news story that’s currently top of the headlines on the BBC news site about “Floods strand[ing] hundreds of runners“. Quick summary: the Original Mountain Marathon is being held in the Lake District this weekend but torrential rain and extreme flooding have meant that the event got cancelled after it started and that hundreds - perhaps thousands - of entrants are still on the hills. The weathers too poor for the RAF to send out search helicopters and Mountain Rescue are, understandably, inundated (which is not quite as bad a pun as I could have gone for).
My thoughts go to the woman and her running partner who took the entries for me and my mate. I should have been up there this weekend except that my regular team-mate has been quite ill which meant that we deferred our entry for the London Rat Race a few weeks back and, subsequently, he was advised not to do the OMM either. I asked around for a replacement partner and found a woman who was keen to do it and who had a friend who was keen to do it. I deliberated for a while about whether to run with a stranger anyway but eventually decided it would be more fun for her to go with her friend and, also, that, realistically, my current fitness levels were probably not adequate and up to the task. Also, it was easier not to do it.
Turns out, that decision may have been a Good Thing.
The news, of course, is as amusing and ill informed as it always is, focussing on the reactionary “How could they possibly be so irresponsible and let it go ahead?” questioning and highlighting the fact that the local hospital has had one runner admitted with hypothermia. One. A single runner so far. More people than that (By the order of tens if not hundreds) get hypothermia at the Tough Guy event in January. They also referred to it as a “charity run” which automatically associates it with something like the Capital FM Hyde Park 10k race or your average 5k “get people who have never been running out of their armchairs” race that people get sponsored to do. (I don’t mean to sound like I’m denigrating their efforts because I’m not really - it’s just that, well, they’re entirely different) The truth of the matter is that, included in the list of required kit that you must take are a survival bag, a first aid kit, emergency rations and so on. The people taking part in this event aren’t your average 5k runner. These aren’t people who sit there and say “I know! I’ve never run anywhere for years except for the bus so I’ll just go out and spend two days running 30km+ over mountains while carrying all my kit with me.” If you take part then you have a fair idea what the risks might be. Hell, when I took part a couple of years ago, Sir Ranulph Fiennes was one of the competitors in the Elite section. You know; adventurer type bloke. Been to South Pole. Ran 26 marathons in 26 days. Yeah, him. That’s the sort of people this event attracts (and people like me who like the sound of it but are a long way off from running in the Elite class). No idea whether he was doing it this year though.
It’s also worth pointing out that the OMM (and the KIMM as it was previously known) has been running for over 40 years. This was the 41st race in fact. It’s also the first one to be cancelled. I gather, from talking to people and reading the website, that the event has previously been held in horrendous conditions up to, and including, snow (it does occassionally take place in the far flung remote highlands of Scotland). Forty years without a single cancellation or postponement due to weather. Of course they’re going to go ahead if they think they can. The news makes it sound like they didn’t know anything about the weather forecast but as it happens, I got an email just yesterday (obviously still in their entrants database as it was only a couple of weeks ago we passed our entry on) saying that, considering the forecast, they were putting the the Bad Weather courses into effect. These are contingent courses that should be fine if the weather is a tad inclement. They also made a couple of other alterations to accomodate the weather as it was forecast. These are not the actions of people who do not know what they are doing.
Final thoughts: as much as I’m glad that we didn’t end up doing it, part of me wishes that we had because it would be one hell of an adventure.
More final thoughts: the shame that I should have felt at not managing to successfully finish the OMM when we entered a couple of years ago (We got lost. In really heave fog admittedly but we still got lost) was mitigated by learning that the aforementioned Sir Ranulph Fiennes also did not complete the course as he missed a checkpoint. I’ve probably told you that before.