Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon

As I jogged on to the little car ferry at Corran on the evening of Friday 12th June, I had a smug grin of satisfaction despite being covered in midgies. By a process of elimination I had worked out in advance that the 1998 Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon was taking place in Ardgour. Prior to details of the location of base camp being revealed at 6.30pm on the previous evening (!) the only clues given out by the organisers were that it was in a wild and relatively unvisited part of the Highlands within about 2 hours drive of Glasgow and Edinburgh. It had seemed to me that only one place could fit the bill and I bitterly regretted not having taken bets on the location before hand. I met my other half, Brian Bonnyman of Westies on the ferry together with Sue Johnston. Keith Adams was still parking the car somewhere. Brian and I were competing on the A course whilst Keith and Sue were on the C. Other Westies were Chris Speight, and Jane & Elspeth, on Elite and B respectively.

On the Saturday morning which was bright and sunny with a fine breeze to keep the temperature down and the midgies away, we had our first surprise of the day. We had been given a phony start time and on arrival at the supposed start we were informed that we were about to embark on a journey of an hour and a half to the start of the race itself. This really shook my idea that I had identified the venue. Where on earth could we be going?

The answer was a trip back across Loch Linnhe on the ferry and then a bus journey to Fort William, along the northern side of Loch Eil and eventually to Callop a mile or two short of Glen Finnan. We had been taken to the north western corner of Ardgour. Here a short walk up a dusty estate road led us first of all to the maps which were enormous and then to the control cards. The controls were feverishly plotted on to our maps and we were off!

The following 10 hours 1 minute and 49 seconds were filled with various degrees of pain. Ardgour consists of a series of deep glens divided by high mountains and our route seemed to consist entirely and endlessly of climbing from one glen over the ridge and into the next. A particularly painful moment was when Brian dislodged a small rock as we were both traversing a slab. This after a couple of bounces landed on the little finger of my left hand. Given the first aid skills we both then demonstrated it was lucky to say the least that nothing more serious happened to us later in the race! Another dreadful memory is of 5 or 6 hours into the race, on the sixth or seventh hellishly steep climb of the day, climbing up through a forestry plantation and being devoured by midgies.

Highlights were the sheer magnificence of the various and limitless mountain views, the sense of self sufficiency and achievement and the fact that Brian and I were operating well as a team. Ardgour is a truly wild place.

A steep descent off the last hill of the day and then a bog eventually led to Mid Camp where the usual tented village lay on both sides of the river Scaddle. Brian helpfully led the way through the bog and fell into all the deep bits which meant that I finished fresher (and cleaner) than he did. We were not particularly surprised to find that sixteen A pairs had dropped out during the course of the day. They were to be followed by a further 9 pairs by the end of day two. 25 teams dropping out of a total of 59 seems unduly high and judging from the results there was quite a high drop out rate over all of the courses. Martin Stone the event organiser admitted, in his comments attached to the results that "the length of some of the Day 1 courses was excessive". Even Martin Bagness, the course planner conceded that "the area was exceptionally large for a mountain marathon, and also unrelentingly steep and rugged. Perhaps I got carried away with such an epic tract of terrain - hence the slightly long courses on day 1!" "Slightly long" being an euphemism for bloody enormous!

I trotted off to the first aid tent to have my little finger seen to and suffered a merciless piss taking from the Arrochar Mountain Rescue guys, including an offer of an air evacuation to the hospital in Fort William! The final indignity of the day involved eating my evening meal with my toothbrush, having forgotten my spoon.

Much to our astonishment we didn't feel too bad at the beginning of day 2. Given the mass start at 7.30am we were able to keep up reasonably well with the pack. It was not that the ground became any easier or the climbs any less steep but the weather continued to be good and we knew we had a much shorter day in prospect. Brian's navigation was spot on, as usual, and to my amazement we had sufficient resources left to jog the last 4km to the finish passing several pairs from different classes as we did so. We even managed to arrive before the prize giving had finished and everyone had left which represented a distinct improvement on our performance on Jura last year!

Vital statistics :- Brian calculates that our total distance over the two days was about 38 miles with our total ascent something in the order of 14,000 feet I calculate we're both off our heads !

(Well done to Jane and Elspeth who won the women's race in the B Class (and just missed out on fourth place overall by a minute and a half), and Keith and Sue who were third mixed vets in the C course. Ed.)

Posted by Hamish Lean on Wed 30 Nov -0001 | comments are closed

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