Kielder Border Fell Race

Kielder Borderer Fell Race. 17 miles / 3000ft. 1st August, 2004

It’s thankfully rare to come away from a race and regret having done it. Not so the Kielder Borderer Fell race on Sunday. I wish I’d never heard of the bloody thing, and certainly have no intention of ever returning.

It seemed like the softer option, with the trials for the worlds in Aviemore several hours’ drive away, and sure to be littered with guys who train properly. A look at the OS map for the Kielder race (the checkpoint grid-references are helpfully given on the website) confirmed this. That part of Northumberland appeared well served by bridal ways and forest tracks, and the race appeared to have been designed to make full use of them. Bearing this in mind, and the fact that the Kielder Festival would be in full swing with plenty to occupy the weans persuaded me to coax Anna and the boys along to watch. I assured her that I’d only be gone for a bit over two hours. Hah – naive fool!

Even before we got there I was in trouble, for once allowing Anna to drive so I could study the route map. By the time we reached Kielder I was feeling sick as a pig. This led to major error number 1 – neglecting to pack any hill-food in my bum bag. The midges at the start were absolutely vicious. The organiser claimed they the Kielder midge is a separate species, second only to the Siberian in terms of ferocity. I believe him. They don’t appear to swarm in clouds like their Scottish cousins, and I don’t believe I actually saw any. What I do know is that they bite like bloody crocodiles, and by the time we lined up outside Kielder Castle for the off I was covered in angry red welts, which my frantic scratching had reduced to countless small trickles of blood running down my legs.

The first three miles is through forest, on small rutted overgrown tracks, and I ran with the course record-holder chatting at a sociable pace. By the time we reached the open moor below Grey Pike we were a group of five, with three of us alternating the lead and the remaining two content to tag along. The first three checkpoints passed fairly easily at a moderate pace over tricky but not overly demanding terrain (including a brief but exciting flirtation with some dense head-high bracken when, during one of my turns at the front I led them off-piste for a few minutes. And then the fun started…

The map showed a bridal way running almost from checkpoint 3 to number 4. All that was required was to drop 60m to the left to link up with it, then follow it to the head of the valley before climbing a hill at the end to Knox Knowe. Feeling chipper and determined to show that my earlier navigational faux pas had been an aberration, I pushed on ahead, clattering down through the heather in search of the path. I kept descending, thinking I must be almost on it. By the time I was sure I’d missed it, I looked back and discovered to my concern that the rest of the group has chosen a high route, following the top of the ridge parallel to where the bridal path should have been. It was too far to climb back to join them, so I decided on a long contour. It will remain for a long, long time in my memory.

Waist-high bracken and heather went on for miles, and by the time I emerged from the battleground after almost an hour of stumbling my nearly-new fell-shoes were ripped to shreds, my legs were cut to ribbons, my morale was shot to pieces and I was at the start of a massive hunger-bonk. This worsened as I climbed the hill to checkpoint 4, and on this climb I dropped from 5th to 24th position. Once again, those with local knowledge seemed to have found a runnable trod, while I hacked and bashed through impenetrable crap a few hundred metres away.

The marshal on Knox Knowe gave me a ham butty, but by now I was completely shagged, and decided to call it a day. He wouldn’t be leaving for a further two hours, and his car was an hour’s walk away, so I looked at my map for the quickest route back to the start. I was horrified to discover that, crossing the grain of the country, there was no easy alternative to the race route, and that the finish was still 8 miles and many climbs away.

I sweated and cursed through more miles of heather and boulder on what was now a pointless ordeal and just under 4 hours after starting I reached the final checkpoint where I scrounged a banana and some dextrosol from the mountain rescue squad manning it. As I munched I had to endure the ignominy of an earnest lecture on nutrition from a spotty teenager in a silly hat.

The 3-mile descent to the finish had been taped, and deliberately eschewed the obvious route on forest tracks in favour of – you guessed it – more bog and heather. My finish time of 4 hours 12 minutes was exactly double what I had predicted. There wasn’t even any satisfaction to be gained from having stuck it out and completed the course, for mentally I had given up two hours ago, and had there been the chance of a short-cut or a ride back I would have taken it without a backward glance.

As for the festival, it was excellent, and I’d highly recommend it as a day out. Just leave your fell-shoes at home.

Results: No idea, and no interest.