If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us.
– John O’Donohue
The cloud was in, barely stirred by a breeze too soft to keep the midges down. This wouldn’t have mattered if I was moving, but I wasn’t, and I didn’t quite know why. It was 5.40am, though I didn’t know that at the time. What I knew was that I hadn’t slept since Strath na Sealga, over 24 hours ago. I knew that my legs were fine – confirmed by my numbers on the substantial climb at the top of which I now stood – but that the rest of me wasn’t, with a transitional suddenness that was and still is difficult to fathom. The liquidity of cognition turned to treacle was reminiscent of inebriation, but there was no concomitant loss of physical coordination, neither euphoria nor the near-narcolepsy I’m prone to in the state. The best metaphor might be the liminal second or two between turning an electric device off at the plug and its red standby light going out. Shutdown. Even though I wasn’t falling asleep, I needed sleep. And I needed to get off this hill. I couldn’t sleep on the ground because it was too wet and therefore too cold. And I just couldn’t handle the faff of unbuckling the rear bike bag and extracting the bivvy from it, even though I’d packed it at the top against just such a moment. I would have to force a bar down and then ride down – carefully, very carefully.
The bar was a problem. I had become nauseated by them a good 36 hours ago, whether chocolate or cereal. For appropriate context, I say this as someone who has frequently had to make an effort of decency to resist the temptation to eat the entrails of doner kebabs off city streets. In fact I had ditched about 30 bars at the side of the road in Strathcarron 10 hours previously. But bars were all I had and I knew that, while food wouldn’t cure it, increasing my blood sugar level might just get my failing brain over the next lump in the road. Ever so gingerly (don’t think about ginger!) I got the blandest one down, one thin disgusting mouthful at a time. At least I wasn’t dehydrated. That’s what I usually get wrong, but not this time; not all ride in fact. So there was nothing left to optimise. I got back on the bike and started down. Full concentration. Fingers on the brakes. Wearing everything I had.
I did at least know where I was: the top of what’s known to Highland Trail riders as the pylon climb, though we locals call it the Dundreggan climb, more usually doing it from the other side. Though I hadn’t seen the sun, it had dawned on this fifth day of the race. The prior midday, the shining, impossible idea had arisen inside me to ride through the night and all the way to the finish in Tyndrum by the following evening, still a good 13 or 14 hours’ ride from this spot. That would make it four and a half days for the route, my notional decent scenario before I’d started. And every fibre of my being resonated with the invitation. It was go big or go home; preferably both.
Although at the time I had no need of the answer to the question, “Why am I here?” it now feels the best place to ask it, at the nadir – or was it the summit? I’ve written elsewhere of the inconvenient circumstances that, in the way such things often have, led me, by way of exclusion, to biking. In short, injuries that meant that, for a while, I could neither run, climb, ski nor walk. I tell there of how it was the subsequent limitation of lockdown which led to my discovering a deep joy in long bike rides, and of the further journey into the shadowy borderlands beyond long, leading in the end to that ride of the Cairngorms Loop, now almost a year ago, while recovering from the broken pelvis and collarbone that had forced me to miss the Highland Trail the previous month.
But, almost without exception, these were solo rides, in keeping with my strong streak of loner, recognised immediately on hearing Neil Young’s song of the same name in my emotionally intense, solitary and manic depressive late teens. I was a loner for reasons both intrinsic and extrinsic. A sensitive, imaginative and physically timid child, intensely romantically inclined, makes an unwilling herd animal in a west London state school. Add to that being a believing Christian and the eldest child of non-English parents (Dad Scottish, Mum Polish, though born and brought up in Scotland) and lonerdom was perhaps guaranteed. Most of my life was lived in my mind, in books, in imagination, in undeclared loves, and later in music and poetry. An exception was the Scottish mountains. My Dad took me to them. Here, almost uniquely, was a place in the so-called real world that actually felt real, a place that stirred my deepest unnamed feelings. I sensed, long before being able to put words to it, that this was the place I belonged, perhaps even the place I belonged to. Norman MacCaig describes himself with regard to Assynt as “I, who am possessed by it,” but possession implies a time before possession. Here, rather, was something more akin to recognition, of homecoming.
Scotland was the place I needed to return to and I did, as soon as I could, aged 18. For various reasons though, the hills receded into the hinterlands, although there were an extraordinary two weeks hitchhiking around the country on a whim at the end of my first university year which took me through many more of them. The fact that this remains in my mind as possibly the best holiday of my life tells strongly of my loner nature but also, evidently, of something equally deep: the joy of curiosity about and connection with other people; the joy of serendipity; the joy of vulnerability; the joy of interdependency; the joy of sharing what we can of our experience of this beautiful, fallible world that we are sometimes able to recognise as our home. And, threading it all, the joy, hilarity and discombobulation of conversation. When you eventually get a lift, the people who pick you up are either unusually kind or just plain unusual, which makes the experience all the more compelling. (It is a great regret as a Scot that the practice has, over the subsequent two and a half decades, become almost impossible here, at least for a man on his own. But try it in Colorado.) It turns out that, loner or not, I love people, though it took me another five years to be taught, by pain and joy that were at times exceptional, that, because of this, I was to be a doctor, not a freewheeling sax player with a sideline in suboptimal poetry.
It was, eventually, again the gift of limitation that returned me to the hills: moving to Glasgow for specialty medical training at the same time as few people I knew did and many others moved away from Scotland entirely. Solo midweek days off and hillwalking were a perfect match. Hillwalking led to winter hillwalking which led to winter climbing where I discovered the heightened concatenation of solitude, companionship and life-and-death mutual dependency that exists in the climbing partnership, particularly in the high stakes of Scottish winter where, many times in a given climb, a single action by a single climber could mean death for both, and one implicitly signs on to put one’s life on the line for the other, as I have had cause to prove.
But I remained as determinedly uninterested in clubs, organised events and races as I was in the music, books and films that everyone else was into. Even when I accidentally discovered hillrunning (having previously hated running, by the way). Why, I wondered, would I throw away all the best things about it in order to race? The solitude, the delight of stopping rather than despising the gift of passing beauty, the bliss of lying in the rough grass on the top of a hill, face to the sky, the simple pleasure of inhaling sandwiches and whisky in the lee of a high rock, the meditative practice of photography. Indeed, I had an identical reaction when friends, knowing my love of long rides and the wild places of Scotland, suggested the Highland Trail to me, even as I was taking some of its lines as inspiration for my own explorations.
In retrospect, there were three things that happened, around the same time, to change my mind.
The first was getting into road cycling. This was, in large part, due to yet another experience of limitation: breaking my neck for the second time in June 2020, this time badly, meaning no riding a bike for over four months, and no mountain biking for almost a year, before which I’d need a second operation. Knowing my growing interest in cycling, someone, perhaps Mum, sent me a link to a dramatised version of the Lance Armstrong tragedy that was showing on TV that evening. I watched it on my phone in my hospital bed. I was hooked.
Not least due to the amount of time I had on my hands, this prompted YouTube searching that in turn led me to the Lanterne Rouge channel where the titular LR wryly and insightfully analyses the race dynamics at key moments in recent road cycling history. Somewhere in there I read Tim Krabbé’s outstanding monograph, The Rider. The first climb won’t be for another thirty kilometres, at Les Vignes. I’m longing for it, just like when I’m doing it I’ll long for it to be over. I was fascinated by this sport that combined intricate teamwork, complex tactics, cooperation with rivals and all-out mindblowing edge of your body-and-mind effort. Perhaps the way that riders had to give so much of themselves, and in such a responsive and often collaborative way, reminded me of the possessive full-body joy of jazz improvisation, whether playing or listening: a joy that, the more one gives of oneself to it, the more one is given of it.
Coincidentally, having bought a gravel bike to extend the range of my one day outings, on it I’d tried road biking for the first time not long before the accident and found that I was good at it. Well, good at riding fast on the flat. It was the first time I’d ever been notably good at anything physical, which made the discovery all the more… well, almost shocking. The reasons I had been comparatively good at winter climbing were almost all mental: analytical planning, an instinctive ability to understand how crampons, axes, body, rock, ice, snow and nuts/cams/Tricams/ice screws could come into cooperative relationship with one another and an accompanying ability to focus intensely on that intricacy against my considerably higher than average fear of heights; imperturbable sangfroid, punctuated by just the occasional surprised shriek; the willingness to put my body on the line, including, if need be, unto death for my partner; perhaps most of all, an ability to hear and respond to the vocation, to resonate with its joy in every fibre of my being and to pursue it with utter belief through the pain, fear and discomfort: the deep knowledge that I belonged in these beautiful and inaccessible places. The ability to get psyched out of my ****ing mind – or perhaps into it. When it came to the physicality though, I was mediocre at best, as attested by my lack of ability on rock.
Back to road biking, I got more into it still during recovery thanks to the loan of an indoor bike trainer from a friend: something I’d never otherwise have considered, being fond of riding (or running) outdoors in all weathers, sometimes the worse the better. (The inner Cairngorms Loop the previous midwinter, half of it in darkness, some in snow, some in bottomless mud, some in almost bottomless rivers, remains one of my favourite rides.) But what a gift to be able at least to be on a bike. I did first Zwift and then Sufferfest, both of which are very road cycling oriented, focusing on power numbers, zones, heart rate and so on. My body was learning the language of Lanterne Rouge’s videos.
When I was eventually allowed to ride outdoors, mountain biking was off limits so it had to be road or gravel. That’s when Will, a fellow doctor who’d become a friend during my convalescence, took me out on the road and showed me how to ride not solo, as I had always done, but in a close group, how one careful rider really will tow along and keep safe those behind, how everyone takes turns on the front, sometimes longer ones in order to protect those who aren’t as strong on a given day. And how it’s all interspersed with cake, coffee (and in my case, nachos): rather a new concept to this until-now hillgoer/mountain biker and rather a welcome one.
But there was still no club here, and certainly no organised events – until the Etape Loch Ness 2021. A friend wasn’t going to be able to use her ticket and we were able to get it transferred to me. At last, a real road race! Of course, I hot-headedly dropped myself at the first opportunity, team-spiritedly pulling too hard on the front for too long, but thereafter proceeded to have three of the most fun, intense and at times painful hours of my life, hours filled with the instant and intense camaraderie, cooperation and rivalry of strangers. How had I spent 45 years of my life eschewing this?
The second thing was my then girlfriend’s account of doing the Highland Trail. Doing it as the event, as a race, alongside others was evidently intrinsic to its becoming the commensurately stretching and revelatory experience that it was, which couldn’t otherwise have been possible. As Christopher McDougall describes in Born to Run, we were made to run in hunt not alone but together, and this is coiled in the helix of our DNA, woven in the cloth of our collective unconscious. This is, incidentally, what I think explains the remarkably common paradox of those who aver that they are not racing the bikepacking races they evidently ride as hard as they possibly can rather than ride the routes equally hard by themselves.
The third was reading a very well written account by Huw Oliver of one of his Highland Trail rides. That an experience can produce writing of this quality is sufficient reason to seek it out. Indeed I have since read his others, Lee Craigie’s too, and, favourite of all, Phil Addyman’s (2016 and 2017) who will feature later in this story. Regretfully, I will be unable here to match the hilarity of his self-disarming honesty, nor the length of his thousand yard stare at the end of his monumental 2017 ride.
So it was that I signed up to do the group start September 2021 Cairngorms Loop ride, partly for its own sake – as a further experiment in 24 hour riding – and partly to aid my chances of securing a place on the following year’s Highland Trail startlist: increasingly challenging due to its entirely appropriate growing popularity with riders not just from all over the UK but all over the world. At the time, the experience was actually a disappointment, partly due to the weather, partly to mechanical woes, partly to the discovery that every part of me wanted to bivvy in a cosy wood rather than continue into the rain and dark beyond said woes. The chief disappointment though lay elsewhere. Cooperation is intrinsic to road bike racing but is, in practical terms, forbidden in the self-supported ethos of bikepacking racing. This half-a-Cairngorms-Loop was the experience that showed me, by way of absence, how compelling, joyful and essential that element had been to my experience of the Etape Loch Ness and the subsequent Oban Sportive. In contrast, here, while not quite ships in the night, we were close to it, though I have since found that bonds were forming between us in softer, slower ways, and indeed my account of the Cairngorms Loop completion a year later is testament to this.
But the Highland Trail had got under my skin, in the way of a vocation: pre-rational unquestionability attested by the subsequent iterations of piece after piece falling into place. So I did apply that autumn and got a spot on the reserve list. That became a full place when a rider pulling out coincided with my riding a fair bit of its northern loop in winter conditions. (This sounds hard – and, OK, bits were – but the cold conditions had semi-hardened the ground between Glen Golly and Bealach Horn such that, notwithstanding the layer of snow and ice on top, it turned out in retrospect to be more rideable than this May.)
But before I go further, I should explain what the Highland Trail 550 is and how it’s ridden. It was devised by Alan Goldsmith, a mountain biker from south of the border whose love of the Scottish mountains exceeds that of most natives. He wanted a training ride for the Colorado Trail Race and used knowledge gained in Scottish biking explorations to put a route together. A great idea doesn’t stay secret for long and a training route soon became a race in its own right, first ridden in 2013 over, I think, 440 miles, and for the first time the following year as the Highland Trail 550. It has been raced every year since except 2020’s pandemic, though in 2019 the weather was so severe that only three riders finished. In spite of the hundreds of hours Alan gives it each year, there is no entry fee; rather, we each make a donation to the John Muir Trust, an outstanding organisation which I recommend you investigate and consider supporting on an ongoing basis. (I became a member after being given the second best hitchhiking ride of that 1996 trip – and arguably its best conversation – by its then chief exec, Nigel Hawkins, from Sligachan to the front door of my grandparents’ house in Scone at midnight, via gifted fish and chips in Pitlochry. Scone was well off his return route that Sunday night.) Neither is there sponsorship or prize money, other than a free meal for all finishing riders at the excellent Real Food Cafe in Tyndrum which is unofficial race HQ. It generally takes place at the end of May. May is, on average, the driest month in Scotland, and dryness is the most critical variable in the rideability of the mountain paths that it in large part follows. June tends to be dry too, and mid to late June of course has the longest hours of daylight. However, the midges are already out in late May and become more swarmy and bitey with every passing week.
The route starts and finishes in Tyndrum, initially on the West Highland Way, before traversing the length and half the breadth of the Highlands, north and south, over a mixture of paths, land rover tracks, small roads (including arguably the best in Scotland, from Kylesku towards Lochinver) and bogs. En route it passes through – often over – some of the country’s most beguiling and iconic landscapes, including Assynt, Fisherfield, Torridon and Kintail. The return leg finishes with the West Highland Way from Ben Nevis back to Tyndrum via the equally iconic confluence of Glencoe and Rannoch Moor. Most of it is rideable but some of it isn’t, even for those with the best technical skills, so pushing and occasionally carrying a fully laden bike are de rigeur. There are also stream and river crossings aplenty, so feet will get wet even in the driest years.
And it’s a race. Everyone starts together and, crucially, once the clock starts, it doesn’t stop until you cross the finish line: it keeps ticking whether you’re riding, pushing, stopped or asleep. The men’s winner will usually come home in somewhere around three and a half days and four days is considered the benchmark elite time. In the course of those days, the winner will usually sleep between one and two hours each night, and riders will often attempt not to sleep at all on the final night, finishing in one last big push.
Meanwhile, as in other bikepacking races, riders must be entirely self-supported. They must carry all the equipment, food and drink they need, other than supplies en route available to every shopper or forager. If their bike breaks, they must fix it themselves with the kit they have and without other riders’ assistance or they must leave the route to find one of the locally scarce bike shops, sort the problem, and resume their ride from where they left off. Neither is drafting allowed, whereby one rider directly behind another has to pedal less hard due to being in the other’s slipstream. Riders will often ride together for spells but, therefore, either side by side or a number of metres apart: a good idea in technical terrain anyway.
Regarding sleep, there is usually a fairly even split between bivvy bags and lightweight tents, those aiming for a faster time tending to go with the former, being lighter, more compact, far less faffy and more easily deployed just about anywhere. In terms of where said deployments take place, in benign conditions there is nothing to beat an open air bivvy by a high mountain loch. But the addition of cold, wind, midges or rain (and invariably at least one is as much as guaranteed at any given moment in any given place on the route) will tend to prompt the rider to seek shelter. A bothy is the five star option in this regard and there are a number en route, Corrimony, Suileag, the Schoolhouse, Shenavall, the Teahouse and Camban being perhaps the most used by riders. Next up is a doss. This is essentially any building (or, occasionally, natural feature) to which one can make non-forced entry. Public toilets feature prominently here, as do farm buildings. Third in line is the grade B doss which tends to provide a degree of shelter from the rain but not much else: bus shelter, awning, petrol station forecourt, under a bridge, etc. Paid accommodation can be obtained, if booked after the start of the race, but is rarely used due to the intended short hours of sleep and unpredictability of location at the end of each day.
(This stands in contrast to softpacking, where the softpacker makes as much use as possible of wild swimming opportunities, four poster beds, baths, restaurants (bonus points for Michelin stars) fine ales, finer wines and speciality coffee outlets, with commensurately less kit carried and commensurately fewer hours ridden. But I digress.)
I’ll do a kit geek-out in a subsequent post (now available here) but, for now, suffice it to say that riders may choose any bike (other than an electric or otherwise motorised one) and the race has variously been won on full sus, hardtail and fully rigid singlespeed. I chose a lightweight carbon cross-country hardtail. I’d marginally rather have had a full sus equivalent but didn’t want to remortgage the house (again! I did for my trail bike…) Dosses are cheap. Bikes are not.
While I said I’d save the geek-out for later, a couple of key modifications and kit choices are relevant to the story. If light is right is true when riding up steep hills, it’s all the more so when pushing a bike up steeper ones. So the only concessions I made to weight were in the cause of maximising the quality of the brief sleeps: full length blow-up mat (albeit the lightest Thermarest make), a blow-up pillow, a very light sleeping bag rather than down jacket and a hooped (and therefore more breathable) bivvy rather than a simple bag.
To my mind, the worst thing in cycling is headwinds. Being a Scottish hillgoer, I’m very used to 20-40mph – on benign days. So, with virtually no weight penalty, on went my aero S-Works road helmet. On went the lycra clothing (though padded shorts rather than bib shorts for ease of toileting). On went the aero calf guards, with additional threefold purpose of sun protection, midge protection and calf compression to stave off the dreaded cankles that tend to result from pedalling 20 hours repeatedly. On went the tri bars at 300 grams and under 100 quid. And off went the front roll (a rolled up bag suspended horizontally in front of the handlebars: terrible for aerodynamics) and on went the carbon Tailfin: a beautifully engineered, light and commensurately expensive version of a pannier rack that will carry not wind-blocking panniers (though a different version can) but a bag aerodynamically perched on top, behind the rider, crucially neither interfering with nor placing extra strain on the dropper seatpost which most of us mountain bikers like to ride with. All of this is a bit controversial, as the majority of mountain bikers think aerodynamics – obsessed over by road cyclists – don’t matter at mountain biking speeds. And, indeed, at 10mph they don’t – until you’re doing 10mph into a 20mph headwind: a common scenario on the Highland Trail. Now you’re dealing with a relative windspeed higher than a World Tour road racer and almost identical to that of an elite road time trial rider.
The couple of months running up to the Highland Trail were at times a little nervous. Having been denied the previous year’s event by an unlucky road biking crash, I was particularly careful on rides, runs and ski tours, even bowing out of some group rides and a paid-for sportive at one point. Meanwhile training, if something so disorganised and spontaneous could be called training, was more focused on the running part of the following month’s Highland Cross: a fairly short coast-to-coast run/bike duathlon from Morvich to Beauly where the gorgeous hillrun through Glens Lichd and Affric (glens we will return to later) is the main event. Top end power wasn’t going to matter on the Highland Trail and I didn’t think I could increase my high-end-endurance power by much more over the period. What I could improve was weight. Last year I’d got down to 78kg (albeit aided in part by life stress, COVID and then a particularly violent gastrointestinal bug) without loss of power but this year 85kg was the best I could do. No matter though: my goal was not a particular place on the leaderboard but to find out how fast I could do it while embracing as fully as I could everything that would come to me en route. With the field being the strongest-in-depth ever assembled on both the men’s and women’s sides of the draw, there was no temptation to think otherwise, though I knew I’d enjoy some out-and-out racing in the last few hours if the opportunity to empty the tank presented itself. What I did have was plenty of bike time in the bank: around 2,500 miles, 150,000 feet and 160 hours of it prior to the race since the 1st of January, plus a further 77 hours of running and ski touring. Doing the maths, that equates to over an hour and a half a day: less than our bodies were designed for but not bad for a near full-time doctor.
Perhaps in parallel with my race time, this preamble has proven to be by some way the longest of any Highland Trail account I’ve read, so perhaps I should get on with it.
But not before the eve of the race. I drove down on a sunny afternoon from my home in Abriachan, in the hills above Loch Ness. Initially I was psyched, as predicted. But as I neared Tyndrum, I noticed a subtle but then definite shift to something approaching numbness. To such a degree, indeed, that I almost didn’t go to the Real Food Cafe to eat with the other riders. I think it was probably two things: firstly, that loner streak that thinks it knows that it doesn’t fit in. Secondly though, a protective adaptation in my subconscious which knew that excitement would be inimical to the nine hour car kip that would be the most important race prep of all. But I did go to the cafe and found myself queueing in front of two people who were evidently riders. It will greatly surprise those who know me (and indeed everyone I met over the following days) that I did not immediately turn round, introduce myself and join the conversation, especially as one of them – Paul, whom I would thankfully shortly get a second chance with – had evidently just come over from Ireland. But that was the headspace I was in during the 20 minutes in the queue and the 30 minutes sitting solo by the till waiting for my food as I didn’t know which table I’d be at and evidently didn’t want to find out. However, when I finally exited the door and uncertainly approached the gang, fortune smiled on me and I saw a seat free next to Alan – whom I’d dotwatchedly met at the side of the road the previous year with my crutch – and opposite two more friendly-looking gents who turned out to be Rob Waller and Mike Toyn. I know very little about bikepacking racing but I had swallowed the book on the Highland Trail and these names will be very familiar to anyone who has done the same. Instantly I was at home.
Looking in from the outside – or, perhaps more accurately, looking out from my part of the inside – the bikepacking community could uncharitably be described as a group of loners who nonetheless crave belonging, community and relationship at the boundaries of their solitary experiences. Being charitable to that statement, it is perhaps 20% of the truth. But being less charitable, we have a word for such a statement when it purports to be the whole truth: a lie. That evening and the coming days would unequivocally prove it so. I particularly appreciated that Mike DeBernardo, a Glasgow-based north American single speeder whom I’d met on the 2021 Cairngorms Loop group ride and who put in a superb performance at last year’s HT, showed up with his gorgeous dog to see us off. As did Marcus Nicolson, gravel bike ninja, whom I encountered online after seeing his amazingly fast Badger Divide ride on Strava and who had to pull out of last year’s HT due to a mechanical; we’ve since followed each other’s progress and exchanged encouraging comments so it was great to finally shake hands in person.
Day 1: Tyndrum to Struy
There are none of us who always find a world that’s clear and bright.
– after Paul Brady
Characteristically, I slept like a baby in the car with my earplugs in. Uncharacteristically, I seemed to be about the first rider at the RFC with their bike fully ready. Characteristically, I fell into conversation with Mike Toyn and others and almost missed the start due to the requisite five minutes’ faff and unsuccessful attempt to drop the kids off at the last untimed, toilet papered loo stop of the week. Shit happens, but not this morning.
Another lovely touch was HT finisher Nick Carter being there with his daughter Lily to see us off. I’d met them a few months previously via road bike pal Will (who loves people even more than I do) and, indeed, been regaled by Lily’s rather good violin playing. I prevailed on them to photograph me in my pre-race cleanliness just before moving up a few places to the mid-pack location where I expected I’d want to be for the first hour or so.
And we were off, under grey, slightly damp skies, though with the knowledge of stellar/solar improvement en route. As anticipated, I was soon briefly off the bike, with many sorries to those behind. As also anticipated, the power meter was a godsend over the next few hours. Although everyone knows that they shouldn’t go off too hard, without a fully objective measure of how hard you’re working, it must be very difficult not to. For those interested in such things, my aim (with regard to the entire race, indeed) was to keep it comfortably within the upper part of zone 2 and this worked really well, especially in stopping me draining the glycogen from my legs on the punchy wee climbs out of the many stream crossings. As also anticipated, my feet were soon wet. I usually ride flat pedals on MTB and one major reason for doing so is the ability thereby to wear lightweight, tough, super breathable hillrunning shoes which are amazing for hike a bike and would hopefully be equally amazing for avoiding the trench foot that a lack of drainage predisposes to. The power meter also encouraged me to pedal on descents, which gained me quite a lot of ground (and a lot of fun) while not touching the glycogen.
Onto the road in Glen Lyon, it was my first chance to let the aero setup do its thing. The results were just as good as I’d found them to be on a previous ride with buddies on their gravel bikes: as soon as I got on my tri bars, I would effortlessly pull away from them on road or track, riding my hardtail and 2.35″ tyres. Near the bottom of the Balgie climb, I reeled in my antithesis: Carl, evidently a real mountain biker (unlike yours truly) and a hardy one at that, wearing only a flappy t-shirt on top and no gloves in these rather dreich conditions. His measured performance on the subsequent climb would have inspired a bet on a high finish had Ladbrokes been involved, but I’m not sure either he or I would at that stage have placed money on his incredible subsequent 3:17 finishing time.
Time is different on the Highland Trail. I had ridden this section before, a little under a year ago, at reasonably similar pace, but this time it seemed to go far quicker and with less mental effort. I started eating and drinking on cue and kept going all day: 450kcal an hour (cereal and chocolate bars plus energy drink on this first day) and 500ml to drink, worked out from previous experiences. Bars are good as you can eat them with one hand while riding, they’re compact, tessellate well in your race vest/frame bag, and they’re available at least in some form in almost all shops. And they give you carbs, protein, fat and fibre, albeit not quite in the appropriate relative quantities.
The first descent was fun. One of many, indeed, that were accompanied by an indecent amount of whooping and belted snatches of songs, Straight Down the Middle being a staple at this juncture, if I recall correctly. (Better still on full sus through rock gardens, that one.) I did though have to stop halfway down as my top tube bag was wobbly. It turned out that the knotted ends of the elastic cord that attach it to the steerer had pulled through their retaining rings. Sending too hard. A few minutes of fiddling sorted this out and I soon found myself down at Strath Rannoch having made excellent time.
Highland Trail time was something I unashamedly knew a lot about thanks to my spreadsheet on the subject (sorry folks, no hyperlink) made during poor weather on the previous month’s ski touring trip to Norway. It included split times for three previous riders, gleaned from Strava, along with adjustments for year-to-year route differences and the relevant multiplications to give 4, 4.5 and 5 day schedule times-of-day for each key location en route. The three rides I’d chosen were Neil Beltchenko 2017 (the course record), Liam Glen 2021 (in my view, the greatest ride ever ridden of the HT, slightly longer than Neil’s but on a substantially longer course, fully rigid singlespeed and in rather suboptimal weather) and Alex Berry 2022, whose pacing I felt was the best of all the top riders last year, possibly excepting Huw Oliver, though I don’t think he’s on Strava, his tracker didn’t work for much of the race and he didn’t sleep at the end for a very long time, so less likely to be relevant to me – or so I thought at the time.
In terms of how long I’d take to do it, it was very hard to say. Physically, based on comparing my times to those of other HT riders on bits of the HT, bits of the Cairngorms Loop and all sorts of other bits of riding around the country, I’d arrived at the conclusion that, if things went very well, I might be looking at 4.5 days. If extremely well, 4 days. And if anything didn’t go well, 5, 6, 7 or scratch: the term used in bikepacking racing for withdrawing from the race. (Even in a year with benign weather, around 30% of the obsessively motivated participants will find themselves scratching, whether due to accident of bike, body or mind.) What I knew I didn’t have any conception of was how I’d feel in the race, even as early as a few hours in, never mind after 2-4 hours’ sleep following a 20 hour day in the saddle. The longest solo race I’d been in was the Oban Sportive at four and a half hours; I’d never been in a solo MTB race ever (the only non-solo ones being 10 Under the Ben – pair – and the Puffer – mixed quad, with manflu – both in the past year). And, while I’d ridden my bike for 24 hours straight, I’d never tried to do it again after a couple of hours’ sleep in a hedge. I was quite curious to find out though.
My first water stop was at Ben Alder Cottage. In spite of its idyllic location, this reputedly (but, I’m informed by many first hand witnesses, not actually) haunted bothy is a bit of a shithole. However, as I faffed with my energy drink powder and took advantage of some relative privacy to reapply Body Glide and chamois cream, at least a couple of other riders arrived and I very much enjoyed a chat with Georgie and Peg, both over from New Zealand for the event. Georgie had an alternately awful and wonderful story of having her bike and homemade bike bags stolen out of her hands by some Leicester youths, and then being lent the lovely full sus she was now on by Dawn, a local HT finisher (whom I was shortly to meet with a couple of pals, come out to cheer us on) plus bikepacking bags by various other kind riders. She did later confess to taking over a day (was it two?) to realise that it had a second, smaller chainring, which slowed her down somewhat! I enjoyed the fact that she was riding a borrowed bike with considerably more technical finesse than I was riding my own.
But up ahead, a longer chat was waiting, and a hug with it – much to Peg’s envy. Phil Addyman and I had met via the Cairngorms Loop Facebook page last summer and he’d stayed with me for 24 hours during a bikepacking trip a month or two later. I think to our mutual surprise – as two riders used to riding their ridiculous long routes solo – we each realised that we’d found a likeminded individual. Or maybe it was that I appreciated his writing and he my pizza making skills. Phil, a teacher, suggested a Scottish bike-bothy trip in the October half term. (This was the extent to which he evidently trusted my appetite for misery.) I saw his offer and raised: Montañas Vacías, an amazing-looking gravel route in the most remote part of Spain, evidently put together by the most passionate and helpful man in bikepacking, Ernesto Pastor. We had a cracking week during which I downloaded much Highland Trail wisdom from this bona fide HT legend, while Phil’s superb Italian (having lived and worked there for Bianchi) came in handy, as did my residual Spanish accent, ready access to Google Translate and ability to charm the old ladies we met in the sadly near-abandoned villages. (To be fair, Phil was rather charming himself, as only an adopted Italian can be.) He was up on a softpacking trip with some buddies from down south and had engineered a rendezvous on the way up to the Bealach Cumhann. Our greeting was definitely more Italian than British, but I don’t think either of us shed a tear, which was just as well at this stage in the race: if you’re crying on day 1, you’re probably ****ed.
Meeting Phil at that juncture was rather good timing as the next section was the first technical descent of the route and therefore my first opportunity to get psyched beyond my bike handling skills. I mentioned the gift of psych earlier, but like all strengths, it has a flip side. My favourite illustration of this is this wonderful vignette from the UK Climbing logbook for Point Five Gully, the most famous steep ice gully climb on Ben Nevis (and whose second pitch I rate as the best of its type on the mountain) which I will quote verbatim:
A bit spooky crossing avalanche debris field and steep approach. First two pitches went okay seconding. So much so I got psyched and when asked if I wanted to lead 3rd pitch replied “Let’s have it!” … Managed to get to top of the pitch where the angle changes, ice turned to snow and I can’t climb snow. My foot step collapsed, axes pulled. I shouted “oh no!” and I fell from the top of the pitch back to the belay. 15 meters? 1 screw blew out and the one that actually caught me was only partially in before it had hit rock. Landed upside down on my back (pack cushioned the impact) I dropped both my axes but they were tangled in belay so didn’t lose them. Fairly uninjured. Lots of giggling. Had fallen close enough to the belay that Ed passed axes back to me. Rest of the route was fairly uneventful and made it back to track with the dregs of daylight.
While this does not describe my approach to winter climbing – far too focused for anything like this to happen on the climb itself – it does describe some previous approaches to mountain biking, though thankfully, when psyched, concentration is such that I’ve never significantly injured myself in the numerous falls. Having said that, one such incident was railing a road descent in Spain with Phil behind me. I trusted Garmin a little too much regarding the acuteness of the angle of a corner and found myself needing to bail, cue 360 degree summersault and a broken S-Works helmet. (MIPS for the win, neither for the first nor last time.)
So this was an excellent reminder to beware the psych. And indeed I did. No sending occurred.
Following a wee chat with Dawn and her pals thereafter, it was on to Kinloch Laggan: first a rutted, boggy section where I was predictably overtaken by Danny on a sturdier setup followed by doubletrack where the aero setup equally predictably brought him back. I immediately noticed his all-Restrap kit and was honoured to find myself in conversation with their product designer, enabling me to compliment him on my favourite piece of bikepacking luggage, the Restrap Race top tube bag which I use on every single bike ride, road, gravel or mountain. Included in his setup was the Restrap hike a bike harness which, judging by Rigs of the Highland Trail, was evidently kit du jour – along with the Tailfin (tick) and Sonder titanium Broken Road. It seemed I’d missed the memo on two of the three but I had presciently commented to Rich Rothwell (another HT legend whom I’d met in person for the first time on the eve of the race) that, although ridiculous to a big strong mountaineer such as myself, I suspected I’d be eating my words when someone strolled past me on the Fisherfield hike a bike wearing one. I do though stick to my view that titanium is for aesthetes but carbon is for winners – confirmed a day prior to the race, indeed, by Phil’s Facebook post showing off his purchase of said titanium Broken Road, perfectly paralleling his shift from one to the other.
OK, I’d better reel in the bromance now, though not before assuring Phil’s lovely lady that nothing was exchanged in those Spanish bothies other than urbane intellectual chat, bad memes and a lot of Mug Shots. Indeed, though a little disappointed on my own account, I could not have been happier to hear he’d be spending this October’s half term not with me in the Spanish hills but at a goth convention with her, where the quantity of make-up deployed will no doubt exceed his total bike weight on the MV.
At Kinloch Laggan, I stopped to phone ahead for some supplies and took the opportunity to clean and wax the slightly bogged chain. I hadn’t sensed anything amiss but, for some reason, gave the cranks a shoogle just to reassure myself that the (from new, only 600 miles old) bottom bracket was holding up. To my horror, there was a major wobble. Immediately, visions of redlining it to a bike shop in Aviemore began scrolling across my mind, before I realised it was only the right crank. Being pretty new, this is the one bike whose crankset I’ve not disassembled myself, so I was mightily relieved to find that all that was required was an 8mm allen key. Back in the game.
The first warming dapples of sunlight appeared on the up-and-over to Glen Spey where a welcome headwind spelled a tri bar reeling in of Philippa Battye, whom I recognised from her Mason Raw bike. I knew Philippa by name – even if I couldn’t pronounce her surname – from her extraordinary ride of the 2021 GBDuro which even I’d heard of. This was the year that Angus Young – who at that moment was, I think, leading the race a few miles up the road – had torched a strong field only to be denied by bike failure, en route doing some damage to some local Strava leaderboards with which I was familiar. It was on that basis that I knew that, if he got a HT ride right, he was capable of taking the record, a conclusion that was soon to be proved correct. Indeed Philippa was the first of a few GBDuro all-stars that I was to have the pleasure of meeting on the HT and I immediately began downloading bikepacking wisdom. Said download was interrupted by another energy-drink-powder water stop faff followed by an encounter with two very welcoming dotwatchers who were excitedly pointing at an object in the road. As I slowed, I saw it was a tumbler containing at least a double shot of whisky. Race instinct said no, but the better angels of my nature said yes to this superb gesture of hospitality. I compromised with, “I’ll have half.” They were delighted, commenting that I was only the third rider to take them up on it. Said half went down, on which I was amazed by its quality. It would have been sacrilegious not to see off the remainder.
(Dotwatching is an integral part of bikepacking racing: a map of the route with riders’ GPS-tracked dots is available online and supporters will often use this to come out to the route to encourage the riders. Practical support is, as I’ve said, not allowed, but a bit of what the Americans call trail magic generally is. This quintessentially Scottish example was next level.)
The headwind continued up the Corrieyairack climb. This is the shorter, rougher side, which I’d descended three or four times but never climbed, and in these conditions the tri bars were superb as I gradually caught back up to everyone I’d recently overtaken, catching Philippa in time to share a chat on what suddenly became a sunny descent of the far side.
I couldn’t quite believe how quickly I’d got to Fort Augustus, notwithstanding headwind, minor mechanicals and impeccable power metered behaviour. 6:45pm and on the four day schedule. The petrol station shop was heaving and I quickly got to work buying about 10,000kcal of food, plus treats for the forecourt where Gavin, a local MTB exploration legend, was waiting to greet us. A host of riders were there already, including GBDuro Alice. More kept coming, and I fully indulged in the camaraderie. Too long, in fact, leaving not my intended 20 minutes later but 45 instead.
In retrospect, this is where the race-and-time focus departed. Given that I had spent over a year obsessively building it, attributing it only to the eclipsing pleasures of achievement, company and petrol forecourt banana milk is obviously inadequate. Something was undeniably shifting within me and I began recognising it almost immediately – well, what it was shifting away from, not what it was shifting to. This was hard. It is always hard when a call that you have felt deeply and which has drawn you strongly falls silent. You can feel yourself in that moment bereft, abandoned – not by someone else but by yourself. By life, even. This is what happened to me, on a much larger scale and over a considerably longer period of time, with considerably more unacknowledged grief, with winter climbing. But one thing I learned in that journey was that, when one call falls silent, another is often beginning to sound, waiting to be heard. A new invitation is waiting, perhaps one that can only be known when we release our failing grip on what we had falsely come to think was ours, integral to our identity. But that is not the way of it in this mortal life whose gift is both the intensity and ephemerality of the present moment.
I have been taught, not least by my mental illness alluded to above, that, when it is hard, it will get better. Maybe not right now, but probably soon; and if not soon, then later. For now, I needed to keep turning the pedals. My mood was too low for music, so, between my teeth and my left hand, I got my phone out instead and downloaded that day’s Lanterne Rouge podcast review of the day’s extraordinary Giro d’Italia mountain time trial stage wherein Primoz Roglic, a rider whose inchoate depth of character and commitment I have found deeply inspiring and moving, fought and won against the ghosts of a previous failure at the Tour de France, notwithstanding a dropped chain at the most crucial moment. That kept me company until Invermoriston where I began a section that I had been looking forward to riding, very familiar to me in the other direction but never ridden in this: the Great Glen Way up to the Viewcatcher. New too for the HT this year, and a wonderful improvement over the Glen Moriston road. (Thanks, Adrian Hodges, the local rider who suggested it.) I knew for sure that I wasn’t racing when I got off my bike at the Viewcatcher and took this photo, both the same and different to so many I have taken there before:
The evening light was too beautiful not to stop and acknowledge. The deeper call of beauty was still here. And my broken and healed body was here too.
I had first ridden the next track, up onto the moors of Levishie/Balmacaan, on a lockdown foray from the front door. It leads to a vast wind farm. I’m sure I’m not the only cyclist to have an ambiguous relationship with wind farms. On the one hand, to ride under a blading wind turbine is to experience the power of sculpture on a numinous scale. And the accompanying tracks allow us to go by bike to places we could otherwise only run – or, being frank, bog-walk. But their scale overwhelms and despises the subtle beauty of their moorland surroundings, as though we were saying to the land, You are good only for this, for our instrumentation, our convenience. Windfarms are a boon in our struggle to free ourselves from climate-distorting electricity production, but they properly belong in city parks where they might rekindle awe in the greater number of electricity users who live around them, not on these moors.
In the moment though, these were not my most pressing thoughts, which had a lot more to do with how cold I was getting. I stopped only a little too late and relayered, sorting out a water refill concurrently. (I was still being reasonably efficient at combining stop tasks.)
The Fort Augustus dilly dally meant arriving at almost pathless Loch Ma Stac just a few minutes too late to see my way, which doubled the time taken to traverse its rough shore. (Future riders, don’t do this.) Now warm though, I began to feel the embrace of what Bruce Cockburn calls the charity of night, descending to well kent Glen Urquhart and Strathglass. Conscious of my potentially startling effect on fellow animal night prowlers I stayed off the tri bars and kept the brakes covered along the gentle undulations of the back road to Struy where I’d decided to stop. The racer should be getting over to Marybank, but the conversation with Philippa had convinced me that trying two hours’ sleep for the first time at this juncture might not be the best idea. Four hours it would be. I didn’t want to wake other riders that I presumed would be in the standard Struy doss so was delighted to find an excellent spot in the lee of the bridge. Night routine of wet-wipe-feet, sock change, TEDS stockings, mini toothbrush and earplugs was efficient and I was soon cosily head down with alarm set for four hours. Before I drifted off, I took my phone off flight mode and was greeted by a flurry of lovely messages of support from relatives, friends and colleagues. Thanks to dotwatching and a last-minute post of the Carters’ startline photo before go-time, mine wasn’t the only head in my race.
Day 2: Struy to Drumbeg
On a bike your consciousness is small. The harder you work, the smaller it gets. Every thought that arises is immediately and utterly true, every unexpected event is something you’d known all along but had only forgotten for a moment. A pounding riff from a song, a bit of long division that starts over and over, a magnified anger at someone, is enough to fill your thoughts.
– Tim Krabbé
By my usual lethargic standards, the reveille the following morning wasn’t too bad. Reasonably efficient pack-up, and I knocked back two caffeine pills in lieu of hand ground speciality coffee. In retrospect, two was at best half the equivalent dose as I was on a go-slow up the Track of a Thousand Puddles – never drier, though still utterly soaking. This was another section I’d ridden a couple of times in the opposite direction. In fact it had been part of my first ride on the gravel bike back in 2020 and therefore my first with clipless pedals. The inevitable did, of course, happen on that occasion in one of the deepest of said puddles.
It seemed to take an absolute age to get from the crest of the hill to the dam, at whose far end there looked to be a couple of dotwatchers, or was it photographers? In case of the latter, I got ready to assume my best impression of riding elegantly out of the saddle, until realising it was my road bike pals, Will and Kris. I could not have been more delighted. I begged their indulgence as I reapplied bum creams (while, efficiently, concurrently munching some Polish sausage, much to fellow Pole Krzysztof’s approval). Will had an issue with his tubeless tyre’s valve core. I had a spare but had better not give it away, so the obvious solution was to harvest one from his spare inner tube. Unfortunately though he’d already de-beaded the tyre from the rim and no-one’s pump was going to be enough to sort that. It was only later that I remembered about my two CO2 cartridges (carried in case of pump failure, as I once experienced in the most remote part of Glen Kinglass, rather than the other way around) but I’d have had to keep those too. So we exchanged hugs before they got to work throwing a tube in and I carried on with Peg, the descent allowing plenty of conversation to Contin where there was already another rider stopped.
Notwithstanding the legendary microwave burger option, I went for a couple of pies and a large mocha, followed by Coke and some strawberry milk. Annie was there when we arrived, riding the HT this time on her hardtail singlespeed. She’d won in 2021 before going one better the following year with a winter completion and was now on her way to beating Gemma Baird’s remarkable singlespeed record of the previous summer, completed solo in high-midge shorter-daylight August after COVID put paid to her HT plans. Seeing Annie now, everything about her said that she was taking this seriously. It was, I think, the serendipitous combination of a requisite amount of caffeine and this vibe that reignited the workmanlike rider spark. She and Peg set off in turn while I took the short but very welcome detour to the public toilets before meeting my pal Matt and his dog at the Puffer trails, come out to cheer us on.
What descended on me over the following hours was indeed the flow state that many riders describe, usually not beginning before the second day. My power meter had stopped working towards the end of the first day but I was glad to be without it: I didn’t need it. Hundreds of hours of riding meant that I knew the texture of the edge of the first lactate turn point like the back of my hand, in the depths of my quads, along the canals of my bronchi.
I found the words for it the following day, walking the Ledmore traverse. When you ride, you push against the pedals and you push your head and body down, under the wind, and the terrain and wind push back in degrees that, on an offroad ride, change every few seconds, more frequently still on a technical climb. In this state, by constantly adjusting your gears, cadence and position, you find and remain at that equilibrium within yourself of pushing at the amount that is just right, fully sustainable, contained – which doesn’t touch the glycogen mentioned earlier but neither does it coast or rest or slack off. Going back to Christopher MacDougall, this is, as humans, our physical superpower, that which enabled puny men and women, over hours and collaboratively, to hunt down to exhaustion much larger, faster and stronger animals. Meanwhile, when the terrain and wind push back lightly, you go fast. When they push back strongly, you go slow. The balance between these two opposing sets of forces determines your speed; and not just speed but speed with direction: a vector. You become the vector of equilibrium, in balance with yourself and with the land, the terrain, the wind. It permits you passage and you move forward into it.
As testament to the flow state, I only got off the bike for two conversations for the rest of the day, though I enjoyed a good few more from the saddle.
The big glens were windy that day and the tri bars got a fair bit of use, especially all the way up the Glen Cassley road. The aero strategy was working: headwinds were indeed putting me in a good mood as I brought back rider after rider: first Peg, then Annie, then Emily (another GBDuro all-star) and then Martyn, who had my sympathy (for the time being) on his singlespeed. My neck was sore, as, since the latter break, it always is on rides longer than a couple of hours, but varying the position between bars, Innerbarends and tri bars helps a bit, as does stretching it every few seconds, as I’m sure those who’ve ridden with me will have noticed. Ibuprofen helps too, though only if you stay well hydrated as kidney injury may otherwise result.
Speaking of the neck, the first gravel ride I did once allowed back on the bike after the break was one I’d plotted from my hospital bed and now I was riding some of it again: Glen Cassley, what HT riders call the power station climb at its end and Strava more eloquently names Mur de Cassley, Merkland, and the track to Gobernuisgach Lodge. Normally these days I’m very cautious on road bike descents, after that Spanish incident and always anticipating a car around the corner, but in locked-in race mode and good visibility, I railed the descent from the Mur in a time that would put me second on the Strava leaderboard if my GPS hadn’t glitched.
The rough track to Gobernuisgach was perfect terrain for the HT setup and I was soon at the Glen Golly junction where I met Jaimi, another GBDuro all-star, getting layered up and some hummus down. Eager to keep it moving, I pressed on up Glen Golly, first on the bike and then on foot as the steepness kicked in. In the equilibrium state, you know immediately when to get off and it’s no discouragement at all. What was a little discouraging was the state of the peat hags on the descent into the cauldron of An Dubh Loch (The Black Loch) below Bealach Horn. I’d anticipated dry, unrutted earth after the drought but instead it was deeply rutted mud and all-in bog. Definitely worse than winter. Some of the bike hefting manoeuvres lower down were utterly hilarious though, so there was a lot of giggling, and soon I was pushing uphill into a headwind towards the bealach. A chap was walking down towards me with his camera out, so I was disappointed when he didn’t take my picture. I evidently wasn’t looking miserable enough. I could see he wasn’t going to say hello – a disconcerting faux pas in such a place – so filled in the blank with, “Dreich weather to have a camera out in.” This did get a response and it turned out he was looking for Jaimi, being on a photography job documenting some of the female riders. I guessed she was twenty minutes back and carried on where I met his partner who greeted me with a warm smile, if still not prepared to waste memory card space on this too-cheerful-not-gritty-enough rider. I would have to do something about that, but it would take me another 58 hours to achieve the requisite photographable state and, when I did, photography was not uppermost in what was left of my mind.
The descent was utterly fabulous. Five and a half minutes slower on a hardtail than the alloy XC full sus I’d ridden it on in winter, but far more intricate for the lack of rear suspension and therefore feeling faster. I whizzed past the barn at the bottom, where a pessimistic outlook in the morning had forecast I’d spend the night, and onto the road. The tracker showed me that Philippa, Paul and Alice had got to Drumbeg. This was clearly where the party was at, and I only had one wee hike a bike, some excellent rough track descending and a dark, steep road to go.
As I say, steep road. Pitches of 25% had me glad of my 28 x 52 lowest gear: an amusing contrast to the last time I’d ridden it, racing (unsuccessfully) for the Strava record between Kylesku and the junction with the Stac Pollaidh road on my gravel/road bike. I’d made the mistake that day of gunning it up the Quinag road climb first, so my legs were actually probably better tonight. They certainly felt OK and, riding over a couple of bridges I’d scouted on Google Streetview for doss spots against rain, I felt yet another wave of gratitude for the benign conditions though, if I were being pernickety, I would have preferred a breeze. The Bealach Horn headwind had inconveniently died. I knew that the pros ahead of me would have taken the best doss spots in Drumbeg so decided to stop short at the side of the road and the midge net went on immediately.
Arriving an hour or two after the others, and having felt so good that day on four hours’ sleep, I knew this was the time to try two. It was a gamble, but also an important experiment for future nights – and, indeed, future races, perhaps. I had no problem falling asleep with my trusty earplugs.
Day 3: Drumbeg to Strath na Sealga
Nietzsche said, What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But Nietzsche wasn’t a doctor.
I felt good getting up, good even with the midges. There was a half light in the 4am sky as I mounted the bike and got going, this time on a double dose of caffeine pills. The route takes an intriguing diversion from the road before Lochinver, routing you via Achmelvich and Badidarach on a mixture of singletrack – much of it rideable – doubletrack and a bit of road. I was disgorged into Lochinver inevitably far too early for the pie shop, as predicted more by sod’s law than race time optimism, and, fuelled by a Wispa instead, got on my way up the track towards Suilven. My brain felt good today and I put the tunes on. I sensed I wanted to hear female singers and the song that Garmin’s random number generator served up more than once over the subsequent increasingly shitty hike a bike – albeit in a stunning setting – was Claire in Heaven by Capercaillie: as rhythmically and harmonically stirring as it is tragically and prophetically beautiful, sung from the point of view of a girl who died soon after birth, looking down on our lives here on the mortal coil. I am an obstetrician, so for me this song resonates deeply, resonates with the lived and unlived lives of babies and their parents whom I have cared for. And with the lives of friends and their lost children more deeply still.
One feels a thinness in this landscape, beloved of and celebrated most eloquently by Norman MacCaig. It is not the thinness between this world and the next; rather, the thinness between the world which passes for real and that realer one whose depths reach into our own, which we begin to know here.
It is a landscape I first saw from the best ride of that 1996 trip. I was picked up in Durness, after an hour and a half’s wait, by a recently retired American couple in their campervan which they were driving around the world. This was long before the NC500 but they’d done their homework and I was delighted that it had told them they should take every possible diversionary twist and turn of the northwest coast. They fed me, dropped me off at the Gairloch youth hostel and collected me the following morning en route to Elgol in Skye, from where I walked to my lift home with Nigel Hawkins. The Cuillin was clouded in that day, but neither Assynt, Coigach nor Wester Ross had been the day before.
However, in the here and now, while my soul had evidently become more porous on the back of two hours’ sleep and two days’ riding, so had my legs. I was going slowly and, once in signal range towards the end of the traverse on the beautiful shore of the Cam Loch, confirmed my impression: on this of all sections, the big bloke with his long hillwalking legs should have gained on everyone else, but he hadn’t.
This is also when the distaste for bars began to kick in. It was a relief to get to the road, and a relief too for my neck that there was such a strong tailwind, enabling me to sit fully upright all the way to Oykel Bridge. I was though in some trepidation about the hotel, which has gained a reputation of late for not being very helpful to HT riders. I say trepidation as at this point I was really starting to need some real food. And certainly a coffee. Preferably a Coke too. When I arrived, it was under the bright sun that would watch over us, by and large, until the end of the trail. It was, I think, 11.45am and I saw with a sense of finality the sign saying that the bar only opened at 12.30pm. But to my left was the laundry room and a woman in it. I needed to chance my arm. She responded encouragingly, suggesting that I go into the hotel and ask. My mud caked shoes felt awkward on the plush carpet in the shade beyond the front door. I rang the bell and a friendly woman answered. I think what I asked for was something along the lines of food, any food, cold food would be fine, a pie? A cold pie? Leftovers? Basically I’ll eat anything. Even crisps. And a coffee if at all possible. Instant. I don’t mind. Just anything. The reply, Bacon roll? Egg roll? eclipsed the finest music. I’ll have one of each please. And definitely the coffee. And a Coke.
So I set off for Ullapool in better spirits, hoping that the food would go some way to compensating my legs for the lack of sleep. When I got there, I’d gone no faster – and that last climb before the town was a bit pish, though the descent overwhelmed by the aroma of gorse flower under sun was some compensation. I headed straight for sit-down burger and chips, feeling the need for a big recharge more than ever, and got a Feast in the petrol station on the way out of town. In retrospect, I should have gone to Tesco, ditched the bars and stocked up on sandwiches, wraps, sausage rolls and cold pies. But I hadn’t yet realised that the bar aversion was semi-permanent, for now chalking it up to lack of sleep.
More tailwind on the road out of town and then it was on to the infamous Coffin Road, one of the few sections of the HT new to me and therefore of some interest as well as of some concern, given the reputation of this hike a bike which turns out to be fully justified. And it’s one of those. Yes, one of those where the quality of the descent does not even begin adequately to compensate the rider/pusher for his/her efforts. (Incidentally, how many times did I hear Curtis Mayfield sing Pusherman over those days and not join the dots?) Having said that, bits of it were rideable and some whooping did ensue, and there was a lovely stream at one point for a refill. But I did feel rather low nonetheless at the start of the climb into Fisherfield, sun notwithstanding. I’d been slow all day despite my best efforts and Paul, Philippa and Alice weren’t coming back.
That’s when I met my strangers on the road to Emmaus, or perhaps I was theirs. Being familiar with the rather alarming sign about the bull in the field, I’d gone cautiously but confidently through the cows, but two others, a young couple, had diverted above them and were now re-joining the path that was still just about shallow enough in gradient to ride. I could see it was going to steepen ahead though and started pushing alongside them. They looked like climbers, or hill runners, and were going in to Shenavall to traverse An Teallach the following day. We shared wonderful conversation all the way up the hill. He is Finnish, she Polish, from near Kraków, which is where the better part of my relatives live. I was particularly pleased that she knew the ridiculous Polish song snatches of whose chorus I’d been belting out at what seemed like appropriate moments over the preceding days. We swapped stories of university, of rock climbing, of the hills, bothy tips, etc. They were worried they might be slowing me down but they weren’t: further confirmation that my body wasn’t doing what it was supposed to today. So I was content to walk with them to the point they branched off to the right while my rough track dipped down into upper Strath na Sealga. I’d been this way before by bike but in the opposite direction, on my first MTB trip after being allowed back on it. I’d planned that route from my hospital bed too. On the day in question, I’d awoken in my bivvy by the Fionn Loch-Dubh Loch causeway in the heart of Fisherfield after an idyllic unmidged sunset the previous evening. It was hot that day, very hot, and I’d developed heat exhaustion riding my bike ever so slowly up this section I was now about to ride down so memories of it were abbreviated at best. It turns out I was in for a treat. Unkempt, lumpy track is meat and drink to a hardtail and it was time to send, paused only by what was unfolding to my right.
The ride from the bottom of the track to Shenavall was the only point of the route I’d have preferred my MTB helmet instead, with its visor, riding into the low, late evening sun.
I briefly considered the bothy, although it wasn’t that late yet. I’d be out of the midges. But I knew it would be full to bursting and didn’t fancy waking up ten people at 4am with my alarm so reckoned I’d press on and get the crossing of the Abhainn Strath na Sealga under my belt so that my shoes would have a chance to dry out overnight. This is an infamous obstacle on the HT which, in high water conditions, can be prohibitively deep and turbulent. Indeed, on a previous climbing visit some years previously in early spring, a friend and I had elected to belay each other across the river further up its course in two pitches, having found an island with a tree in the middle. I knew it would be shallow this time though. Or at least I thought I did: on reaching the shore, right at the entrance to the loch where the river is shallowest, I was a little perturbed to find that I could see the bank getting steeply deeper underwater and then disappearing. No bottom! But I trusted the facts, got my socks and calf guards off, re-sheathed my feet in the shoes, shouldered the bike and stepped in. Mid-calf. That’s how deep it was.
I found an almost unmidged spot out on the edge of the loch under the moon rising over the bulk of Beinn Dearg Mor and settled down. This time it was going to be at least four hours. I had a notion about the next day and I’d need my legs.
Day 4: Strath na Sealga onwards
Oh, to have been a rider then. Because after the finish all the suffering turns into memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you.’ Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lay with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately. That’s why there are riders.
– Tim Krabbé
The alarm sounded. It had been four hours but I didn’t quite feel ready yet. My half awake brain is not usually a good judge of these things but I trusted it this time. One hour more till full charge. Not being by a road, I’d slept for the first time without earplugs. This was a mistake as I was half-woken by one, if not two freewheels during that hour, being under a hundred yards from the crossing. As I blearily stumbled out of the bivvy, I heard a third and then a voice, “Is it deep?” “It was about mid chest on me, but you should be fine,” I hollered back, leaving only a too-kind two seconds before adding, “Only joking. Below your knees.” “Is that Jaimi?” (As I say, bleary eyes.) “No, it’s Emily!”
It was a cool, clouded, damp morning. My shoes hadn’t dried that much overnight after all, and I could smell them within a half metre radius. But I did have those clean socks on. More importantly, I knew the cloud would burn off, sooner or later, and I’d an inkling my lie-in might pay off in this regard. But first I’d have to get up the hike a bike. It turned out though that there was a more pressing problem. In spite of regular Body Glide and chamois cream ministrations, my nether regions had been getting more and more painful. I’d been needing a number of between-pedal-stroke adjustments each time I got aboard the bike to identify the least-agonising arrangement; also when rotating my pelvis forward to get in knee-ribs tri bar position. I’d had this early in the Colorado Trail last summer (my consolation prize for missing a ski touring trip to Iceland along with the HT following that pelvis/clavicle incident) but I’d been less assiduous with the ointments that time and the temperature had been solidly in the mid-thirties centigrade for days. Well, I was here to learn and, although I loved the speed, weight and, to a point, the handling of this hardtail, mine clearly wasn’t as hard as its. Every pedal stroke was agony. Stroke was a misnomer. Every pedal chafe didn’t quite do it either. Every pedal stab, every pedal grab, every pedal rub, every pedal pinch, every pedal grind. As I ouched past Larachantivore I couldn’t help but think that if Paul Simon had been a bikepacker, he wouldn’t have bothered with 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover and instead the world would have 550 Ways to Say Ow My F***ing Arse Hurts. Sorry, Ass. He would still have been American.
To be honest, I was a little worried about it. Was one of those sore points developing into an abscess? I hadn’t packed a mirror. The thought occurred to me that I could ask the next rider I met to have a look. That would be awkward. And what an awful thing to lay on someone who’d probably only had three hours’ sleep, in the middle of Fisherfield, getting midged. It would likely be a female rider too. I mentally tried out various forms of words but none of them came out sounding anything other than inappropriate. And I couldn’t find a way of inserting the fact that I was a gynaecologist and therefore used to being on the other side of the fence (this is actually true, for the record) that made it sound like a mitigating rather than an exacerbating factor.
I have found that there is wisdom in accepting, and indeed letting slip out of consciousness, the things I can’t change. For whatever reason, both my tail end and my neck by and large stopped hurting over the course of that day. Something similar happened around day 4 of the Colorado Trail and my neck didn’t hurt for the rest of that trip.
It was most certainly atmospheric, and not long after this photo was taken, perineal relief arrived in the form of hike a bike. This is a pretty fun section to ride down, in the beating sun on a full sus, though I had by no means cleaned it on that trip two years previously, already riding more cautiously after the neck break. Today, up high, where the ground begins to level out, it was mostly rideable, the bogs increasingly intermittent. I remembered the beautiful loch to the left and its wee beaches from previous trips. Not for the first time, I mentally bookmarked the bivvy spots. If only MacCaig or Yeats had been here, what poetry we’d have!
And then it happened. Just as I crested the high point, the cloud ahead began to thin, unweaving its cloak of Carnan Ban*, and I became aware of a warmth from above, a honeying of the sky. I hadn’t known it before but I knew now: this was what I had come for. I set the bike against a rock and waited, waited as the sunshine warmed my shoulders and everything unfurled and unfolded beneath me.
Twenty minutes, at least, I stood there.
Brimming over with beauty, there was one thing to do now: send it. This was another descent I’d waited two years for, knowing from that 2021 trip that most of it would be rideable. I walked the steep, loose, exposed upper part at the turning of the corner where that magical causeway comes into view, but everything else got ridden, eyes almost spilling with wonder, lungs breathlessly declaring some chorus or other in hymn to the rocks.
Near the bottom, I found a young couple getting water at a stream in an extremely large carrier which I remarked on. It turned out they were looking after 15 teenagers and were here both to get water and to wash a sleeping bag which one of said youths had enchundered. In the course of our ten minute chat, they were curious as to what I was doing there so I mentioned the Highland Trail. “Oh, I think my friend did that,” said the bloke. “Who’s your friend?” I asked, wondering if my HT lore would be up to the answer. “Liam Glen.” I think I made some sort of I-am-not-worthy gesture and we talked about Liam’s rides of the route and what he’d been up to since. Referring to the sleeping bag ministrations, I left them with what I hoped sounded a convincingly prophetic, “You’re storing up treasure in heaven,” before proceeding to the next conversation, this time with an older couple camping on the near side of the causeway who were as delightful as the previous one. I asked them if they’d seen other riders. “Oh yes,” said the lady, “But you look like you’re enjoying yourself a lot more than some of them.” Evidently the most charming person I’d met on the trail, I prevailed on her to take this picture:
This was by some margin the best compliment I got all week but, without burdening her with the medical details I’ve just laid on you, I did in all conscience have to emphasize to her that it hadn’t been universally true.
On the far side (yes, this is unquestionably in the top five bivvy/wild camping spots in Scotland, mountain tops excluded) I met another couple, as congenial as the previous two: young vets from Inverness who’d biked in from Poolewe. Towards the end of the conversation, I noticed with great enjoyment the big D-lock they’d brought with them. As a Londoner, I immediately sympathised. It still takes an effort of will for me to leave any bike out of sight for more than five seconds, and indeed my Colorado Trail bikebivvy setup was essentially designed around this quintessentially urban paranoia.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, doctors and vets don’t generally mingle, so it was a particular treat to meet these two. (The fact that my one vet friend at medical school is still known to all of us as James The Vet is testament to this.)
* Going back for a moment to Carnan Ban, on its far side is one of the most fantastic wee buttresses a climber could wish for, above a lochan that is one of the best spots I’ve ever camped. Tent-side multipitch on one of Britain’s most remote crags.
Having had my fill of shared delight, it was time to get down to the serious fun of the descent to Poolewe. Of everything I’d ridden in the opposite direction through Fisherfield in 2021, this was what I had been longing most to come back for. Even in ascent it was stellar; perhaps all the more so having just hiked, carried and heaved my bike around the coast from Diabaig to Redpoint. (I did it so you don’t have to. I’ll add the same of the Barisdale to Kinloch Hourn path. Possibly too of Glen Dessary to the Mam Meadail beyond Sourlies.) Although the Tollie Path from Poolewe along Loch Maree has become utterly awful, as I was soon to witness, I can appreciate Alan’s calculus of leaving it in so as to include this, one of the best descents of the HT, instead of the shorter Postman’s Path around the northwest flank of Slioch which would miss out both. This is the kind of riding that Percy Procaliber (yes, the bike has a name) was put on this earth for, and it was time to grind his tyres’ shoulder knobs into the corners and properly give it some, though not entirely at the expense of the views over my right shoulder:
Onto doubletrack lower down, the route entered the trees. Experience teaches that the transition from steeper singletrack to less-steep doubletrack is the time a crash is most likely: you’ve let your guard down a bit but are still fair flying along and everything feels ridiculously easy. Sure enough, a fallen tree appeared across the road as I rounded a corner, just beyond a group of late teenage boys who offered a standing ovation as I ducked low and rode straight under it.
I met a gorgeous spaniel and his owners a couple of miles outside Poolewe, so that was at least another ten minutes. I’d become aware that, now smelling of half of Scotland, I was a rare treat for a dog, which made the interest almost mutual.
If I’d listened to Frank Sinatra though, I’d have known that the best was yet to come. From putting together the resupply subsheet of that spreadsheet (yeah, it’s got subsheets) I’d a dim recollection of a well rated cafe in Poolewe and, glancing around speculatively at the junction with the road, I saw it:
By this point, it had to be real food. Lots of real food. Smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches, mushroom soup, a fresh fruit scone with an unresolvable choice of toppings, leading to an all-in request for clotted cream, butter and both types of jam. And two or was it three coffees? An hour and six minutes of bliss.
Back on the road, the sun was out to stay and I felt like a million bucks. I was on the best holiday ever. And then I saw a rider up ahead. Pulling alongside, it was Annie. “What are you doing back here?” she said, “You’re a fast rider!” I had to admit she had a point. I talked about the sleep experiment gone wrong, yesterday’s go-slow and then the BEST time I’d just had in Fisherfield. But that’s also, I think, the wee jolt that sent the notion I’d had the previous night down the helter skelter of the unconscious and into my gut. Did I tell her about it? I don’t remember now. But I’m pretty sure that’s when I suddenly knew what was waiting for me: a ride through the night and all the way out to the end of that five hour sleep, these great legs, this stupefying joy – preferably to Tyndrum tomorrow evening. It was an invitation that, once issued, could not be refused.
We took to the path together and I showed willing by romping on up the hike a bike. Beyond was a huge mess, albeit with Loch Maree and Slioch as its glorious backdrop, and a semi-rideable one at best, especially on this steep-headed, long-stemmed loaded hardtail with a rider aboard cautious enough to risk nothing that would dent the rim of his golden vision. I still rode a fair bit of it and was surprised to find another rider at my elbow again fifteen or twenty minutes further down: Annie’s superior biking skills had caught up with me and I gladly put her on the front to find our way through the bog.
At the road, I said something about seeing her at Kinlochewe as I’d be stopping at the shop, but she gently reminded me that this bit was what my tri bars were for (and her singlespeed certainly wasn’t) so that shouldn’t be happening and I took that as my mission instructions. Fantastically, Loch Maree somehow engineered a tailwind at this point and I was soon cruising along, dropper down, shoulders back, Easy Rider style, getting on the tri bars on sheltered bends to keep the speed up. And it was a quick stop at Kinlochewe where I had the foresight to buy a sausage roll for later although, already planning my pre-night feast at the Strathcarron Hotel, nothing more in the way of greasy goodness.
The tailwind had to end at some point and it turned out to be Glen Torridon, but that was easy tri bar tarmac. Once on the doubletrack and at the far end of Loch Clair, I instinctively crossed the bridge, as on previous visits, before thankfully realising my mistake after 50 yards and doubling back for the HT route on the north side of Loch Coulin which is, indeed, superior, if a little longer. At its far end, I met the white horses that I recall someone else writing of, and helped a boy who was staying at the adjacent house to say hello to one of them. Then on to the Teahouse. Though I’ve never slept here, I am firmly of the view that it is one of the most beguiling bothies in Scotland. Surprised not to see any HT rider entries (though I saw Mike Sheldrake’s, in conversation with that of a previous guest about MacCaig’s poetry – a conversation we were able to continue subsequently in Tyndrum) I scoured the cabin for a pen to write one, finding only a snub nosed felt tip. That’ll do.
Even on a good day and a full sus, I don’t have the skills to clean the route from here to Coire Lair but much is rideable, even at equilibrium pace. The slabby sandstone lower Coire Lair descent that follows (known locally as “Bike Park”) is justifiably considered one of the best in the country, but it looked at least five degrees steeper today. I found it hard to fathom that it was the same route as that which I’d first ridden three winters previously. A bunch of us from the club had gone up to Glenuaig Lodge on the other side of Glen Carron for some ski mountaineering. The conditions were a bit rubbish though and, having ridden a decent route on the Friday and then biked up to the lodge in the dark, I’d taken the opportunity for a lie-in. By afternoon though, I had itchy legs and, with the others gone, decided I’d ride down the hill and up into Coire Lair, as far as I could get in the daylight, before coming back down this famous line. I messed up the ascent, ending up in the rhododendrons which necessitated getting the new carbon trail bike over a high deer fence: an essential skill in Highland biking. I pushed up into the almost-frozen rain, wind and gathering dark, perhaps a kilometre beyond the junction with the Teahouse path, before deciding I’d better get on with it while I could still see something. I rode pretty much everything except that steep left-facing slab due to its ending in a very tight right-hander, demanding of nose pivot skills which I do not possess. Today though, on a very different bike, a very different mission and with a further broken neck, pelvis and collarbone under my jersey, it looked like a different route. I can’t have ridden more than 50% of it – and wasn’t at all bothered. Getting rider and bike to the finish: that was the overriding priority.
The headwinded road though saw the setup back on home turf and I made quick time to the Strathcarron Hotel, dreaming of fish and chips. And burger and chips. Maybe an ice cream. Yes, definitely an ice cream. And probably two Cokes and an Irn Bru. Late May, full sun, high tourist season and I’d be arriving shortly before 6. Perfect. Well, you’d have thought so. The Strathcarron Hotel had other ideas. Kitchen not open till 6.30pm. And not even a sandwich or cold pie on offer. I reduced my offer still further: Crisps? “Salt and vinegar OK?” “Yes, two please.” Cue some rummaging and, a couple of minutes later a rueful, “I’m sorry, I’ve just sold the last two.” “Yes! You’ve sold them to me! I need them!” “No, I mean to someone else an hour ago.” He offered me cake but I’d gone right off anything that so closely resembled a bar so I went with a couple of fizzy drinks instead. “But you could try the Carron Restaurant down the road. They should be open.” OK, now we’re talking. Back on the bike. Not even off the route. Perfect. Until I pulled in. An enormous sign: CLOSED. (The Strathcarron barman was correct: the Carron Restaurant themselves had updated their opening hours with Google four weeks previously, very much including Tuesday 10.30am – 7pm.)
By this stage, I’d known I needed to ditch the bars – well, most of them at least. But I didn’t want it to be in a bin. So I’d formed the idea that I’d ask for pen and paper over dinner and scrawl something along the lines of BLOOD SUGAR TRAIL MAGIC (You have time to think of such witticisms when riding) in order to leave it all in some obvious place on the subsequent route. Now though, I just needed rid of them. There was an upended whisky barrel outside, evidently a table, and that received the contents of my frame bag. Thank God for that sausage roll. Everything now rested on Dornie as the Inverinate petrol station would be closed by the time I arrived.
Riding up the steep track beyond the Attadale estate buildings, I consoled myself that forthcoming Glen Ling/ming would be a walk in the park compared to the nigh-on nine miles of mostly pathless boggy hike a bike that ensued the last time I had come this way, between the far end of Loch Calavie and upper Glen Strathfarrar, ending in a long, utterly pathless steep heather slog, bike somewhere round my ears. I think it’s still the hardest hike a bike I’ve done. In fact, Glen Ling turned out to be pretty good, so comparatively dry was the ground. I say comparatively: my feet had been comprehensively re-bogged by the end. But now I was on the road and I could almost smell Dornie.
At Attadale, the tracker had told me I’d passed Emily somewhere and was catching up with Jaimi – and indeed everyone else. The legs seemed to be working as well as they felt on that luxurious five hour sleep – plus all the snacks. Near the road-end, I saw two people talking beside a campervan, one of them on a bike. I arrived just after the rider rode off. The vanner turned out, if I’ve remembered rightly, to be a dotwatching cousin of Emily’s. “Have you seen Jaimi?” “That’s her!” The rider who’d just left.
Jaimi was in the enviable position of experiencing these landscapes for the first time – and on a bike too. Imagine waking in Shenavall and, in a single day, being introduced to the intimacies of Fisherfield, Torridon and Kintail – via Eilean Donan bathed in the evening sun on our right. However, en route she’d been struggling to find vegan food, and the fact that Inverinate would be closed was not good news. We pulled into Dornie. It was only the inn open but it certainly had a crowd, so I was hopeful. (To be honest, I wasn’t hopeful. I was desperate. The only way this all-night ride was happening was if I procured a sufficiently large amount of the stodge my body was craving, pronto.) Jaimi wasn’t though and elected to crack on while there was some light and I headed inside, straight to the bar. Could I get some food? “The kitchen just closed.” No more Mr nice guy. I laid it on thick, including what time I’d got up that morning, how far I’d ridden, where I was going, how far I had to go and the fact that it needed to happen right now. Moreover, the fact that I really would eat anything. Cold chips, leftovers, desserts, the lot. And the Red Sea parted. “Fish and chips?” I was as effusive as the portion was large: two decent sized battered fish, large chips, tartare sauce and a goodly amount of mushy peas. Plus a Coke and an Irn Bru. As the kitchen was being reanimated, I started on the drinks and got my phone out. I wanted to see how far away Philippa, Paul and Alice were, if I had any chance of joining the party that still seemed to be in full swing. As I did, I saw that Phil had messaged and started replying. As luck would have it, also biking somewhere in the middle of nowhere, he’d gone online simultaneously and seen that I was. The phone rang. It was great to get a chat at what was undoubtedly one of the highest points of the high plateau of psych over which I was rolling.
I got to work on the fish and chips in the corner, on the only free seat in the house. And then the band began. Just two local guys, one on fiddle, the other guitar/vocals. But they were good. I mean really good. Proper tunes. First a good one. And then one of Brian Finnegan’s most scintillating. I was about as close to heaven as a smelly bikepacker can be. I’d found the centre of my ride, sat down right in the middle of it and was savouring every mouthful, every earful of ecstasy. And I knew what the feast was for. It was coming.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
– T S Eliot
45 minutes I was in there, says Strava. I couldn’t have told you.
Strava would also tell you the name of the ride of which the Attadale-Strathfarrar traverse was the crux:
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
– also Eliot
It was time to go into the night. But first, dusk.
I caught up with Jaimi towards the end of the Glen Lichd track and we rode together for a bit, chatting about this and that. I was pleased to be able to vouch for Camban’s status as a grade A bothy, just one steep, rocky hike a bike away, and arriving there would have made the perfect end to almost any other day, especially if there had been a fire and a dram – or, at worst, some Glaswegians and a 24 pack of Tennent’s*. But not this one.
* To paraphrase the third law of thermodynamics, the number of cans of Tennent’s plus the number of bottles of Buckfast in the bothy will be equal to the number of Glaswegians in the bothy squared.
I pressed on, up into the dark, a climb I’d pushed up twice and ridden down once. Before long, the headlight became useful. I was at the near end of the midnight hours. The mountains grew big around me under the rising moon, almost full against the deepening sky.
Near the top I began talking to myself, coaching, gently scolding, cajoling. No need for the inner voice to keep its mouth shut out here. I’d pay it more attention out loud.
Camban came, barely a sound from its stream. It looked empty, bolted from the outside, and I went in to add night layers. With surprise, the edge of my headlight glanced across two bikes in the right hand room and I heard someone stir. Shit. The bolt must work from the inside too and now I’d broken someone’s much-needed sleep. Reclothed, I was straight back on the bike. With the stream almost dry, I wanted something better so kept going down the decayed doubletrack to the confluence of the glens where the river would be fast. When you’re thirsty at night, there is nothing better than moonlight reflected in water.
Glen Affric was transformed by torchlight. I think of the ride from Alltbeithe to Strawberry Cottage as suboptimally lumpy, dull track, the monotony broken only by giant unrideable puddles. Tonight, it was a flowing dreamscape of shadowy undulations, skipping underwheel, swift-lit by my two lamps.
I sensed with sudden certainty that I was approaching the waterfall: a beautiful dipping spot where a torrent plunges off the hillside and down into a cleft under a bridge. I’d shared it with my Polish pals (including Kris, from earlier) last summer and we still sometimes post in our WhatsApp group named for the day: Affric Magic.
Even the yellow brick road along the south shore of the loch was exhilaration, belting out fragments of the tunes that were playing through the headphones. Looking down at my Garmin watch, bodged between the tri bars, I could see that I was almost down to 100 miles to Tyndrum. It didn’t sound very far, but I knew every foot of the terrain between here and there: a lot of bumps in that road. It had me think of NWA’s 100 Miles and Runnin’ and I was careful not to miss the moment when it came:
Careful too not to miss opportunities, at suitable intervals, to declare Eazy-E’s opening salvo of Straight Outta Compton to the night:
Straight outta Compton
Is a brother that’ll smother your mother
And make your sister think I love her.
– Eazy-E
I was closing in on Tomich, the place the party triumvirate had been when I’d last had signal past Dornie, and closing in on the dawn. Although it seemed unlikely that the combined psych of these three could have resulted in a decision for an early night, maybe there was a chance. So much so that I figured I’d better be ready to go when I got there. I stopped almost at the bottom of the descent, delayered in preparation for the pylon climb and forced a bar down. The rest of the track was bracing with clothes off. No sign of anyone at the bridge. Phone out. They’d gone, hours ago.
I’ve got to say, this was a disappointment. I was looking forward to the company. And I think I knew I’d need it to stand any chance of this crazy plan working. But the disappointment fell away quickly as I saw light – admittedly grey light – between the trees and still my brain was fired. I’d made it this far. Now just two climbs to Fort Augustus where unfortunately I’d be far too early for a pie, but Glengarry Filling Station would sort me out, if I could get there. I knew from having previously ridden through the night that, for me at least, the hard part isn’t getting to dawn. It’s what happens over the subsequent hour or so: make or break. For now, I had work to do. The pylon climb. It was pretty steady and the VAM on the Garmin screen stayed decent as I alternated between in and out of the saddle, suspension unlocked and locked, varying the cadence, up into the cloud which, just like in Fisherfield, I knew was on borrowed time.
Day 5: The pylon climb onwards
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
– T S Eliot
And now we’re back where we began. Now, if I’ve done my job, we both have a better idea of why, and why it had to be this way.
Whether we are greater in our ability to hold fast what is given to us in life or in our ability to relinquish it when the time comes, I don’t know. But I do know that we can’t have one without the other. Describing the first, “When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it,” is how Boris Pasternak puts it. Norman Maclean sees it from another angle: “One of life’s quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.” Our part, in the moment, is not to ask why, and certainly not to know, nor how big or how worthy or how worthwhile it is. It is simply to say yes. These other knowledges may come later, if at all, often only after we have been asked to relinquish. “Were not our hearts burning within us when he spoke to us on the road?”
For now, what was left of me had to get down the hill. But even the inner voice had hit the wall. I’ve had plenty of experiences of sleep deprivation, not least in my medical career. But this was on an entirely different level: a whole body, whole being one. I had found the edge.
The doubletrack descent was surprisingly controlled. About a third of the way down, I saw someone at the side of the track in a pickup truck, presumably an electricity company employee. I had no idea what he was doing out this early. The thought briefly occurred to me to knock on his window to suggest that I’d lie on the fully reclined passenger seat for half an hour while he kept the engine running for heating. But, notwithstanding this edge I’d reached, it was still a British one. I continued, longing for any dry building I might find my way into. And, as I rounded a left hander, I saw it, at the side of the track: an animal feeder, half full of hay. It was cylindrical, about a metre and a half in diameter. Hay was dry, right? I put my hand out. Dry! And no sheep shit in it either. I stashed the bike over the edge of a ditch, donned my midge net and, with a sense of exquisitely blissful luxury, curled up on my left hand side. I felt warm but knew I’d be cold soon so pulled clump after clump of hay out of the bale to cover myself. I set the alarm for 40 minutes.
When I woke, I needed more. Another 20.
Waking a second time, I could feel the return of some borrowed time. This would get me over to Fort Augustus. Soon I was on the second climb, reunited with Wade’s Military Road that we’d left at Fort Augustus on the way out, albeit at a crawl.
Barring an encounter with a spectral dog, I made it down to the Fort without incident. Part of my brain registered that the descent would be worth coming back for, but it was all I could do to get it done safely and slowly. I knew at least that the petrol station would be open by now. Although I was pretty convinced it wouldn’t work, and that only proper sleep would fix this, I needed to try food first. A couple of pies and some chocolate milk, nursed down propped up against the air dispenser on the forecourt, tasted delicious but didn’t move the needle. At least I’d had the sense to avoid caffeine so that I’d be able to sleep if I needed to. I started looking speculatively towards what could be a derelict alley behind the shop, but discounted it when I saw people using it as a shortcut. What I needed to do was ride a bit out of town and bivvy in the woods. But it would be midgy in there and still prohibitively faffy. I wanted a bed. Google Maps turned up one establishment a few hundred yards back up the road. I pushed the bike there, wary of getting back on in my addled state. No room at the inn, but they recommended a place on the other side of town. I walked there too, but the NO VACANCIES sign was sufficiently conclusive. Bivvy it would have to be. But more feeding first.
Then, as I was about to re-cross the canal to the petrol station, I saw it: VACANCIES. A wee hotel on the left that seemed to be more of a restaurant. A Chinese lady answered the door and I explained the situation: I just wanted a room for four hours, right now. Of course, this was peak tourist season and, if I didn’t sound desperate, I certainly looked it. She was probably thinking about the additional laundry costs too. I’d have to pay a full night rate. Fine. How much? 95 pounds. Deal. She helped me take Percy round the back and I unloaded the electronics for recharging, plus sun lotion, midge spray and bum creams.
Somewhere in all this, I think outside the petrol station, I remembered a selfie. My only consistent regret of the week was that I didn’t take one in the animal feeder.
I tried to get as much hay detritus off as possible before drawing the curtains, shutting the window against the traffic noise and lying down, blissed out, alarm set for four hours.
I awoke feeling, well, almost brand new. Especially with my mental image of the inevitable blue skies beyond the curtain. This was the one moment of the route that my Mum had allowed herself to send a concerned message so I appreciatively put her mind at rest. On the way out, it was time to settle up. The lady was keen on cash, which I expected might attract a discount. “How much will that be?” “95 pounds.” Oh well. It was money well spent. And actually just right for the £100 cash I’d been carrying as insurance. Aware though, I think, that she’d rinsed me, and taking on board at least a bit of the magnitude of the physical task I seemed to be intent on, she offered me a portion of something from the restaurant, for free. I extremely gratefully wrestled a big box of hot chicken chow mein into the frame bag and walked the bike back to race HQ on the forecourt. I propped myself against the shop and got to work with my titanium spork. Sublime. Better even than the fish and chips of the previous evening. I restocked and chatted to a few riders who came by. Rob was still in the race and headed off a bit before me. Danny needed to scratch and was going to get back to Tyndrum on the roads. And a lovely couple from the Netherlands on their laden mountain bikes, on their first visit to Scotland and starting off with the Badger Divide. They were keen to go on to the Cairngorms Loop, so we nattered about that for a bit too. (Remarkably, I met them again a week later on said loop.)
The ride to Fort William was hot. But now I had sandwiches to eat so all was well with the world. The current diversion(s) add(s) a fair bit of height gain but, wonder of wonders, there was a tailwind. Into the town, I hit the Coop in Caol in time for Rob to watch my bike. More edible snacks. Normally I’d go for Sammy’s fish and chips, which had provided a happy ending to many a winter climb, but I didn’t want to layer another memory on top of Dornie just yet. Or was it the fact that my body was demanding McDonald’s? Pizza Hut had actually been what was on my mind: Pizza Hut rather than the real pizza I’d always prefer and would make at home. It was the thought of that oily deep crust. But Google Maps told me the nearest was Glasgow. McDonald’s would have to do.
What with the queueing and waiting – McDonald’s evidently the social hub of Scotland’s Outdoor Capital – I must have been in the Fort for an hour and a half, and the hue and scent of evening was in the Glen Nevis air on my way out, not a walker in sight. I’d ridden down the next climb on my first solo bikepacking trip, now almost four years ago, all the while thinking how rubbish it would be to ride up but, nonetheless, how Fort Bill to Kinlochleven would be better still than the other way around. The climb was actually pleasantly consistent in gradient, though a bit loose in parts: good practice for steady out of the saddle grinding, where a back and forth motion with the pelvis evens out the force being applied through the tyres, in a similar way to the natural seated saddle bob under similar conditions. I’d long since decided that pushing through the night would be silly: I didn’t mind whether I finished in under or over five days and, with the weather this good, I’d be mad to pass up a night bivvying high, Ardgour on the reddened horizon and joined by only a handful of midges who’d ventured up from their world congress in Glen Nevis.
I knew I’d chucked the phone in the bivvy bag somewhere but could neither find it nor be bothered with a thorough search. I’d leave wake time to the sun and my body.
Day 6: Allt Coire a’ Mhuilinn to Tyndrum
I got a good six hours. And this time I had a wee doubleshot thing of tinned coffee to wake up next to. And something from the Coop bakery. This day was getting off to a five star start. The riding down to Kinlochleven was great too, almost all of the intricate descent ridden with my now more awake brain. I buzzed quickly through the town which wasn’t up yet. I had remembered it as something of a shithole, but it looked pretty good today in the sun. I knew the succeeding climb would take a while. In fact I think it may be the single biggest of the entire route. But I had those sandwiches for halfway up. And the tunes. The legs felt good too, quickly finding the familiar equilibrium. As I got to the upper singletrack section, my favourite piece of music of all time came on the headphones: Kyoto Part 1 by Keith Jarrett. John Denver opined, Sunlight in my eyes can make me cry. There was sun today, but it was definitely the music.
The Devil’s Staircase, though short, is one of the best descents of the route. Worth two punctures the first time I rode it, on full sus and without a tyre insert. Today this bikepacker took it comparatively cautiously. With the legs feeling decent, I had something else on my mind as a final fling.
But first, coffee and snacks in the sun at Kingshouse. One large coffee, two cans of juice, half a pint of apple juice and two or was it three yoghurts?
I’d ridden the West Highland Way from here across Rannoch Moor once before, en route to that puncture in Glen Kinglass a little over a year ago and strictly in zone 2 that day. It’s terrain that’s perfect for a racy hardtail, even a fully laden one: rough, rocky track and gentle gradients. First up and then a lot of down, climbing 500 feet and descending twice that. There was no one left to race – and at well over five days now, not even myself – but there was still the sun and the breeze and the bike and the legs – and all that glycogen I hadn’t been using all week. And there were bound to be a thousand people who’d ridden it on Strava whom I could race. Time to give it maximum pastry.
I almost got on the tail of a car turning off the A82 onto the short ski centre road. It felt amazing to release the body from its zone 2 comfort. And then pleasantly hard, as I began to approach the higher equilibrium of the lactate threshold: lung-heaving but not lung-bursting. Leg-hurting but not leg-ending. Going comparatively slowly on the uphill, there was plenty of time for the many walkers to give me space. And then it was over the top. No time to let up now. Only 28 x 10 as a high gear and out of the saddle, head down low, tri bars scything chin in my best aero helmeted impression of Mark Cavendish, smashing it downhill as fast as my legs could spin. The tyres must have been quite noisy as most of the walkers seemed to sense me coming a hundred yards off but some didn’t and I found a rush of glee in reincarnating the naughty teenager I’d never been. No shouting at anyone, mind you: THAT’S MY LINE! Though the thought giggled inside me. Evidently on a mission, I got a number of appreciative whoops and standing ovations from folk either side of the trail: this, it turned out, was the welcoming committee.
And then it was out on the Inveroran road and on to the very last climb of the route. One to savour, especially at the top where I met an Englishman on his first walking visit to Scotland. I was sorry only to break it to him that it didn’t get much better than this, though did find myself speculating that he might enjoy walking the Tour of the Cairngorms biking route. He took my picture against the Black Mount:
With one final descent in prospect, it was time to relax a bit and have some fun. I’d been hypervigilant all week, not wanting to do anything to the bike or to myself that would bring the ride to a premature conclusion but, demob happy, I let that slip a little. Halfway down, I waved a polite thanks to a walker who’d stepped aside what looked like a smooth, dried out waterbed to let me through – at some speed. As I crossed it, a hard clunk jolted through the bike from the rear wheel. Shit. I must have cased the rim. Or at minimum flatted. But no, not even a hint of a loss of air, never mind a ding in the dainty carbon 23mm XC wheels. That insert, wow. However, riding on, something felt a bit floaty about the left pedal, so much so that I got off and ensured the crank wasn’t loose and the pedal fully tightened. Back on the bike, something was definitely off though so I was careful not to apply any more than a fraction of my weight to it for the rest of the descent. I pulled over at the Bridge of Orchy Hotel to investigate properly and found, to my amazement, that it was the crank itself that had given way: it had cracked around the housing which the pedal screws into. Pretty bad for what should be about the sturdiest interface on the bike. On the other hand, the loaded Tailfin hadn’t even flinched.
Thankfully, it was just a few miles to limp home and, actually, I didn’t want it to end. Well, not quite yet. I wanted to savour this.
Just beyond a gate I met a mother and daughter, the former, I’d guess, in her 70s. They were keen to make sure I didn’t miss the herd of highland cows who’d secreted themselves in the shade of the adjacent wood. How kind! (They weren’t to know that I live down the road from one of the finest local herds.) Hearing their story of gently walking the West Highland Way together, taking rest days when they needed, brought to mind yet again that first walk with Dad on it, the seed from which this ride, and so much else, had grown. That time we did just two days: Inverarnan to Crianlarich (I still remember the fish, chips and peas at the station and the delicious homeliness of the B&B) and then on to Bridge of Orchy the following dreicher day.
He died eight years ago. Though I feel him often in myself, I have only once felt his presence next to me in a more tangible way, near the end of a ridiculously hard, remote and boggy hillrun on the edge of Knoydart, nearing the final summit and, as it was to turn out, the best photo I have ever taken. But there were times on this ride… I’m not sure how to put it. There was a way in which he was there, not as specifically and immediately as beside me but, perhaps, savouring it through me, as well as being somehow out there as well. One of his best and most infuriating flaws was his compulsion to interrupt even the most important sentence in order to share beauty with you, to make sure you didn’t miss something fleeting, something extraordinary. He was a great one for “worst first” too: doing the hardest task first and enjoying the best later. He’d have understood hike a bikes. And I have never met anyone so genuinely interested in people. His stop time on the HT would have been double even mine. He was rubbish at choosing presents though – so I did that for myself – but a great one at writing dedications in them. The last he gave me contained these lines, lines coincidentally sent to me on the evening of day 3 by my pal (and, I think, prizewinning dotwatcher) Ayley, on the eve of what was to be undoubtedly the best 24 hours I have spent on a bike:
I lift up my eyes to the mountains —
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
– Psalm 121
Perhaps he was dotwatching too, though I wonder if they have a better view from up there, he and Claire.
But for now, it was time to bring this one home, to rest the dot for a while. The pedal had worked still further loose and I kicked it off and mounted it on the tri bars: a souvenir of the 550 prior miles of caution and attention. And of the joy of a bit of sending.
Across the finish, sometime after midday, there was no-one waiting – I’d had my welcome back up on the Black Mount – but approaching the inn I heard a shout from my left. I’d made it. We’d made it. And the afternoon and evening that followed were one of my very favourites, glowing with the camaraderie of inchoately shared experience as well as actually shared beer, cider, ridiculous chat, smelly hugs, etc. Not since a post-med-school exam all day pub session had I been part of something like this. But this was better: we didn’t yet know what it meant, but we all knew that we’d been part of something that meant something.
Before I’d crossed the finish line, I’d already decided I was coming back for more.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Epilogue
What about the race? The sharp end of the men’s was arguably the most exciting there’s ever been, with Manu close on Angus’ heels almost till the end. It looked like they would sprint it out for the finish until Manu flatted just a few miles out from Tyndrum. Probably that stream bed. Both guys beat Neil Beltchenko’s longstanding 2017 record with Angus bettering it by almost three hours, and this on a substantially longer course. I hope Manu will be back next year and that Angus will return for the rematch. A further three riders came home in under four days, equalling 2017’s previous high: Christophe Dijkmans, Carl Hopps, whom we met earlier, and Josh Ibbett. American Andrew Strempke was first male singlespeeder at 4:01:26. He’d likely have been sub-4 on the 2017 course.
On the women’s side, the Alice-Philippa-Paul fellowship was finally broken at Fort Augustus, with Alice going on ahead and coming home at 4:04:21: a huge leap forward towards partner Lee’s women’s record. Philippa and Paul rode it in together a little over three hours later. Jaimi came in third, though I’m not sure of her time as her tracker gave up before she did. And, as previously advertised, Annie took the women’s singlespeed title and, with it, the record.
What about yours truly? 5:04:54. From a race/time point of view, what did I learn and what will I aim to do differently? Firstly, that when it comes to sleep, four hours is enough and two hours isn’t. I don’t yet know about three, and I plan on finding out during the Further road/gravel race up here in Scotland in late October. Secondly, when I’d had four hours’ sleep and was on the job, I rode at the four day pace. In reasonable conditions, that means four days should be my target.
I’ve got a new subsheet on my spreadsheet which tells me a few things. Once I’ve subtracted the extra time generated by my pylon climb adventure and subsequent crawl to Fort Augustus, and a bit more for the post-two-hours go-slow, my moving time was about the same as Carl’s and only three hours in excess of Angus’s. But there’s another sort of time that’s equally important in bikepacking racing: stop time. Angus’s was a remarkable 12:05, even less than 2017 Neil at 13:31 and 2021 Liam at 15:43. Carl’s was 18:36. Mine was …. 51:11! The above account shows where most of that went, and it was, by and large, time excellently spent, but most of it could be shaved off in favour of a four day finish.
Kit-wise, I’ll go into the details in the promised future post (now here), but I’d actually keep most of it the same, definitely aero setup included. Having something up your sleeve that makes headwinds fun is just too good not to ride with. But I’m afraid the hardtail will have to go. My alloy XC full sus will be a little slower on the climbs and hike a bikes, but much more sustainable for my fragile anatomy. And some of the descents will definitely be more rideable and therefore more fun. And 100% Tailfin for the win.
Finally, thank you to all of you who accompanied me through this journey, both before, during and afterwards. I had no idea dotwatching could be so compelling, nor my yo-yos through the field so entertaining. It was amazing to feel your support out there. This write-up is for you.
Tricadam 
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