The Winter Spine Race 2024 – some random thoughts

This is the post I probably shouldn’t publish as its really just me trying to organise my thoughts and make some notes before it all becomes a blur. However it might be useful or interesting to someone so I will.

Where to start? Lets start with kit – what worked and what didn’t. Overall my kit was good. The issues were more down to my inexperience and lack of relevant practice than the actual kit. What do I mean by ‘relevant practice’? Well, for instance, I’d practiced putting my Yaktrax on and off – mainly while sitting in a nice warm house, not tired and not wearing 5 layers. By the time I needed them I was well into the race, it was very cold, I had a lot of clothes on and generally at best I had a rock to sit on. Under these conditions it was a very different story, I could barely reach my feet, much less stretch bits of rubber over them! I think this was why my micro-crampons were destroyed – I didn’t position the wires correctly on the shoe and they got worn through by rocks.

Obviously running 200 miles to practice putting spikes on is a bit excessive but if I do it again I would certainly practice doing everything with all my kit on, probably outside, until I was absolutely confident I could do it without thinking.

Just to go on for longer than necessary about ice spikes, I’m not sure whether I would take more sets of Yaktrax and treat them as disposable, or whether I’d persevere with the micro-crampons (which did seem to offer better security) or go for the heavier micro-crampons with chains rather than wires. Winter spine 2025 has sold out so I’ve got at least nearly 2 years to decide.

Another item I hadn’t practiced with enough was ‘the big coat’. It was awesome, totally kept the wind out and was a great piece of kit. However one of the attractions was the pit zips for ventilation – which I discovered I had no idea how to open or close the first time I tried. The hood is very protective but fortunately I didn’t need to cinch it down too much as I had never tried to put it up while wearing a head torch.

The full 30l pack sat slightly lower than the 20l one I was more familiar with. This pushed the water bottles on the front higher which made getting a drink harder. The Lhotse jacket then got in the way making it even harder. As it was winter I wasn’t drinking that much so it was an annoyance but not too much. However this is another thing I really should have thought about and checked before the event.

When I first packed my drop bag it was about 15kg. My biggest fear before the race was that I would get cold. I don’t mean a bit chilly, I was worried about hypothermia. My nightmare scenario was this: My hands get really cold. When my hands get cold they don’t really work. I can’t operate the zips and clips on my jacket and pack. I can’t get my spare layers on and so I get really cold. Race ends wrapped like a turkey in foil blankets. Because of this fear I stuffed every warm layer I could find in my drop bag. I also bought an OMM Core fleece. My starting clothing was a Gore Thermal vest, LBRR long sleeve top, ME Switch gilet, NE Firefly jacket, OMM winter tights, Runderwear pants (too much information?), Runderwear socks and Hemy waterproof socks on top. I also had a LBRR buff and a Dexshell waterproof woolly hat. I had taken advice from Lindley Chambers about gloves and had a pair of waterproof Montane Prism gloves which I wore all race. I also had Buffalo Mitts and liners in case it got really cold but I never used them. Nathan Montague pointed out to me that if I wanted to keep my hands warm I needed to keep my core warm. He was, of course, absolutely right and I think my warm core was a significant contributor to my warm hands.

This saw me through the first leg. I think I might have added the OMM Core fleece for the second but the third leg was the one for which snow was predicted (and happened). I swapped the gilet for a Haglofs zip fleece which I’d bought about twenty years ago for skiing and put the OMM Core fleece over that. I swapped to the big coat (ME Lhotse jacket) a leg earlier than planned and that ensemble kept me plenty warm for the rest of the race. At CP4 I switched to Inov-8 winter tights as they were thicker. I wore my waterproof trousers (ME Zeno) when I needed more leg warmth. The full length zips were an absolute godsend when it came to getting them on and off.

Some of my kit worked absolutely perfectly – because I didn’t use it. My plan never included using my sleeping kit unless I was dropping out and waiting to be picked up. Now I know that the Pennine Way doesn’t really care what I planned but I went for the lightest sleeping bag (Nanga Minimarhythm Zero – no, I’d never heard of them either), The lightest mat (Thermarest NeoAir Uberlite short) and the second lightest bivvy bag (Mont Bell Breeze Dry-Tec – I couldn’t get the lightest, the Terra Nova Moonlite). These all sat in a dry bag long with my spare base layer top and bottoms at the bottom of my pack along with my poo kit – which I also didn’t use.

I didn’t use my stove either. I had practiced quite a lot with it but I never felt the need for something hot and as I was keeping warm by moving I felt stopping to make a drink or soup might be counter-productive. Anyway I had the Amicus stove (with built-in igniter) and a 650ml titanium cup, which held the stove and the gas canister. I also bought a titanium spork at the last minute which I added to the ensemble but I’ve no idea why as I also had a plastic one with each of my freeze dried meals (of which I ate one out of three at CP1.5)

My pack worked fairly well. I think going for 20l rather than 30l was a good call, but the 30l Fastpack does have some failings compared to the 20l version. The extra pockets are quite good but moving the access zip to be along the back panel is a retrograde step in my opinion – mainly because it is harder to close and (as I found) if you leave the zips in the wrong place they can come undone. However it was nice to not have to have everything perfectly placed just to get it done up – especially after checkpoint kit checks. The 1l waist pack worn backwards gave great access to my food, although sometimes getting my phone back in it was harder than it should have been. There may be better options than an old Montane Bite 1 pack but the two mesh pockets were great for short term storage, often my gloves but also litter. Whilst on this subject I would strongly recommend having an empty pocket or two that is easily accessible as you are likely to temporarily take stuff off, have empty cans or bottles etc. and its quite handy to be able to put them somewhere without having to take your pack off. My OMM winter tights had two decent thigh pockets, one of which was very useful when I bought a bottle of Coke from the Cam Lane tuck shop.

One of the definitely not mandatory kit items (and possibly not allowed under a strict interpretation of the rules, although it remained sealed) was my hip flask. I took it on the Summer Spine full of Ballantine’s whisky in honour of my deceased Father-in-Law. I decided to do it again for the Winter Spine. I meant to drink it at the finish but forgot and drank it on Burn’s Night instead. I want to get the flask engraved with the Spine logo, just need to find a good engraver that can work on curved surfaces.

One of the interesting things I found was the difference between perception and reality. I’m not talking about hallucinations, I actually did fairly well at fending those of this time. I did see one or two people that turned out to be trees and bushes (I did also see a trig point that turned out to be a person) but generally I was remarkably hallucination free. What I’m talking about relates to my pace. I think its fairly usual that the first few miles of a run seem to pass quicker than the last ones. I think I did inevitably slow down towards the end of most legs but not as much as it felt like on some of them, along the river heading to CP3 I was shaking my watch to make sure it was still working as the miles seemed to pass so slowly. What was more surprising to me was the sections I thought I was ‘fast’ on. All things are relative so I knew I was unlikely to be doing more that 4 or 5 miles an hour but it was a bit of a surprise to find that my ‘dash’ down from Greg’s Hut was only about 3 miles an hour, average walking pace. Similarly, Gaudy Lane felt much quicker than the Cam High Road (it was downhill for a start) but looking at my GPS data there doesn’t seem to have been much in it. In reality it didn’t rally matter, the point was I hugely enjoyed my ‘fast’ bits and they seemed to pass quite quickly so ‘reality’ didn’t really matter. Personally I think reality is overrated anyway.

I’ve found it very hard to put into words why I went from ‘no, never, its pointless’ to entering the Winter Spine, its complicated and involves people, so lets skip to something more important – did I enjoy it? The answer is yes, definitely. It wasn’t even all Type 2 fun (the kind that isn’t fun at the time but is when you look back on it), much of it was genuinely fun at the time. Sunrises, sunsets, deep blue skies, being totally alone in the countryside, High Cup Nick, the Post Box Pantry, every Checkpoint, every marshal, friendly faces, reading peoples words of encouragement on my phone, I probably could go on but you get the idea. It wasn’t all great of course. I don’t need to mention the Cam High Road but the riverside from Middleton to Checkpoint Three was pretty awful. In many ways it was worse than the Cam High Road simply because in summer I love that bit and so to have it as an icy dark hell was doubly disappointing. I think also in my mind I’d decided I was almost at the CP at Middleton when in reality I still had 20% of the leg to go which didn’t help. The ‘grey road’ to Byrness wasn’t great but at least I had someone to talk to and it was light. However the euphoria of having crossed Cross Fell and eaten John Bamber’s legendary Chilliwack noodles meant I was in a very happy place going down to Garrigill. Garrigill to Alston wasn’t so good because of the diversion but equally I knew CP4, Rachel, Chris and lasagne were waiting, along with a bed and a shower and clean clothes so it was OK. One of the attractions for me of more ‘extreme’ races is the way you find out about yourself when things aren’t so much fun, you know these passages will pass but have you got what it takes to get through them?

So what does it take to do the Spine Race? Debbi Martin-Consani gave a brilliant interview on the Spine Facebook page before the full race started (if you watch it you can see me standing in the queue for kit check in the background). Apart from describing perfectly my feelings and activities in the lead up to the race she said ‘You can’t train for the Spine – you just learn on the job’ which I think is very true. On thing you don’t need to be is quick, from my Strava data my average moving pace was about 23 minutes per mile and I finished with over a day to spare so speed is not necessary. What is absolutely necessary is desire, I always tell people the main reason for not doing an ultra is because you don’t want to. In order to finish an ultra I believe that you really have to want to finish, it’s that desire that pulls you through the dark sections of the event. For the Spine Race you have to really, really want to finish it. In my view the answer to ‘what does it take to do the Spine Race?’ is the same things as to do any other ultra race, just with much more intensity. It is a really hard physical race but it’s your head that gets you to the finish line.

Will I be back? Well I’m already entered into the Southern Challenger with Sharon. I’ll probably have another go at the full Summer Spine. 2022 was redemption for 2021’s DNF but having now done the Winter one I feel I could improve on my Summer performance. This leads to another question which is always asked, which is harder, Summer or Winter? Generally the conditions will be better in Summer but it isn’t guaranteed, I would prefer a dry Winter event over a wet Summer one any day. However the one thing which is definitely different is the length of day and for that reason I’m going to say Winter is harder. Running in the dark can be a little harder than in daylight and seeing stiles across fields is harder but visibility can be reduced to zero by mist and rain in daylight so that isn’t the issue I have with less daylight. I left Checkpoint One at about twenty past one in the morning. If I’d done that in Summer I’d have had about two hours before it started to get light. In winter it was about six or seven hours of darkness. Daylight wakes me up and resets my body clock. By the time it was daylight I was flagging a bit, in Summer I don’t think that would have been the case. I think I did pretty well at making as much use of the daylight as I could but I do feel the lack of it adds an extra challenge to the Winter race, which is why I would say it is the harder of the two. When I first tried to do some pace calculations to come up with some sort of race plan, I allowed myself a fairly easy pace for the first leg. When I looked at my overall timing I seemed to be in checkpoints for most of the daylight hours. I rescheduled based on what I thought I should be able to achieve on the first leg if I pushed on a bit and all the subsequent timings improved greatly. How close were my predictions to reality? Well, I’m and engineer and stats geek so obviously I have a graph.

So Leg 1 was fairly spot on, Leg 2 I was quicker than predicted, Legs 3, 4 and 5 were about as predicted and Leg 5 was quicker, possibly spurred on by the impending bad weather.

Before I lose my audience by boring them with graphs and stats, I do need to say thank you. If you are reading this blog you may well have watched my dot, you may even has sent me a message before, during or after the race. Thank you, I said earlier you need more of everything for the Spine and one thing I’m very aware I have no lack of is support. The support I get doesn’t just mean a lot to me, it means everything. I think a lot about people watching my dot, I read messages when I can and I try and send out the odd update – thanks to Terry for taking and posting some videos of me too. At the end of the race I was handed a very long piece of paper, the man who gave it to ne said I appeared to be quite popular as it was a print out of my messages from the Open Tracking Trail Mail system.

Being an engineer and stats geek I’ve just measured it, its two and a half metres long! On top of that I had literally hundreds of comments on Facebook posts, WhatsApps, messages, texts, just simply huge and humbling support – thank you.

The very last word has to be saved for my biggest supporter, without Sharon I wouldn’t have even made it to the start line, and not just because she drove me there. She has put up with endless Spine talk (as have many others, sorry) and kit all over the house as I tried to go from panicked to packed. Kirk Yetholm had many things I wanted, the finish, the Wall even a phone box but as I said you have to really, really want to finish the Spine and I knew exactly what I really, really wanted.

I think that’s the end of the blog for the 2024 Winter Spine Race. As I said I’m still doing Spine Races so, sadly, I expect the blog will continue. I may have finished the race but the Pennine Way is still there and as we all know, The Only Way is Pennine!