What if a single weekend could quietly reshape your entire relationship with the mountains?
For me, that weekend came in the summer of 1998. I was 20, a university student with a love for scrambling, mountains and maps. I thought I was just going for a run in the hills. I had no idea I was stepping into something that would define the next three decades of my life.
There are some periods of life that only really make sense when you look back at them. This is the story of one of mine; told through the pages of an old diary and the lessons I missed the first time around.
There are some periods of life that only really make sense when you look back at them.
The summer of 1998 was increasingly becoming one of those summers for me.
I was 20, still at Warwick University and spending as much time as I possibly could in the outdoors. There had been the Welsh 3000s, trad climbing, sport climbing and training towards my Single Pitch Award (what would now be called the Rock Climbing Instructor qualification).
At the time, none of this felt particularly connected.
I was simply doing the things I enjoyed: climbing, running in the mountains, navigating and gradually becoming more confident and independent outdoors.
Then, somewhere in amongst all of that, came a weekend in Galloway that I had been invited along to by my father.
The event was called the Capricorn.
And looking back nearly thirty years later, I think it may have been the moment all those different threads started joining together.
What is slightly wonderful about finding an old diary is how little your younger self sometimes understood the significance of what was happening.
My account of the weekend begins like this:
Friday: Drove up with Mum and Dad, I slept all the way. After checking in to the hotel we drove to the event centre to register and then to the shop to buy food for running. Then bar, restaurant and bed. My room was huge and the bathroom was bigger than my room at uni.
Which seems about right for a 20 year old assessment of priorities.
The event was a solo event and my father and I were both running in it separately and not wanting to miss out my mother came along too for some sightseeing. So rather than staying at the event campsite, we had booked into a hotel.
So while some competitors were presumably putting up tents, I was enjoying a room that felt enormous compared with university accommodation and preparing for the following morning with a proper night’s sleep.
There was no great sense in my diary of embarking on an important sporting journey. I was just going running in the hills. Except it wasn’t really running in the conventional sense from my days of cross country running multiple times a week at school
The Capricorn was a two day mountain orienteering event organised by Pendle Forest Orienteers.
It had been created by Gerry Charnley as something of a summer, lightweight cousin to the Karrimor International Mountain Marathon.
That connection is significant. Charnley had also been behind the original mountain marathon in 1968. The event that eventually evolved into what we now know as the OMM, the Original Mountain Marathon.
The Capricorn took some of the same ideas but removed one of the biggest complications.
On a traditional mountain marathon you carry everything you need for two days in the mountains: tent, sleeping bag, stove, food and compulsory equipment. You navigate through the mountains on day one, camp overnight at a remote location and then do it all again the following morning.
The Capricorn allowed competitors to return to a central base each evening.
Or, in my case, a hotel. Thanks folks! That made it considerably more civilised.
But it didn’t make the actual competition straightforward.
You still had to navigate between controls scattered across mountain terrain, decide your own route between them and cover substantial distances over rough ground.
There were no arrows telling you where to go, the map showed you where the controls were. Everything between them was your problem and that turned out to suit me remarkably well.
Saturday:
Saturday began with a full English breakfast. I got my kit together, said goodbye to Mum and Dad and I headed for the start.
The weather was almost ideal for running in the hills and according to my diary:
“My navigation was pretty much spot on every time, although running over the terrain was not up to much.”
Reading that sentence now makes me smile.
Because it probably tells me more about where I was as an outdoor athlete in 1998 than anything else I wrote that weekend.
I already knew how to navigate. The previous few years of hillwalking, climbing and mountain training had given me a reasonably good feel for maps and terrain. I could work out where I was and, more importantly, where I needed to go.
What I couldn’t yet do particularly well was run quickly across rough mountain terrain and to be honest I am not sure this is ever something I was amazing good at. Running through heather, tussocks, bog and broken ground is a skill in itself.
You can be perfectly capable of running on roads and still discover that the hills have an entirely different definition of running.
But the interesting thing was that the navigation worked. I could navigate accurately while trying to move quickly across the mountains.
That was something new.
My verdict at the time?
“A good day in all.”
Followed by the equally important observation:
“Helped by not getting bitten to death by the midges.”
Anyone who has spent a summer evening in the Scottish hills will understand that this was not an insignificant detail.
Sunday
Sunday provided a rather different introduction to mountain running. I got up early at the hotel, returned to the event centre and headed back out. My diary begins the day’s account with three words:
“Started soaked through.”
The weather had changed completely. There was low cloud and poor visibility. Heavy rain was being driven across the hills by strong winds. The ground was saturated.
I wrote that I was finding it difficult to run even on tracks. And yet:
“Found the orienteering markers without too much bother.”
That sentence seems more significant to me now than it did then.
Navigating accurately across the hills on a pleasant summer day is one thing.
Doing it when visibility has disappeared, the wind is driving rain into your face and everything around you is becoming progressively wetter is another.
One of the controls lay on the other side of a stream. Except after hours of rain it was no longer the small mountain stream suggested by the map.
In my diary I wrote that it had:
“massively swelled up due to all the rain.”
I looked at it and decided it was flowing too quickly to wade safely. So I jumped it!
Which is one of those decisions that makes considerably more sense when you are 20 than when you look back at it almost thirty years later.
I certainly wouldn’t hold it up as an example of ideal river crossing technique.
But there was another lesson buried in there.
The map could tell me that a stream existed. It couldn’t tell me what that stream would look like after hours of heavy rain.
After that there was apparently just:
“a short run to the finish. To find Dad waiting. Then back to the hotel and bar.”
Another impressively understated diary entry.
Looking back at that summer
The Capricorn wasn’t a full mountain marathon.
There was no remote overnight camp and I wasn’t carrying a tent, sleeping bag, stove and two days’ worth of equipment around Galloway.
But the DNA was there.
Map. Controls. Route choice. Running. Weather. Fatigue. Independent decisions.
It was mountain movement transformed into a competition and in the years that followed I would find myself doing more and more of exactly that.
There would be the Saunders Lakeland Mountain Marathon, the Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon, the RAB Mountain Marathon, the Highlander and eventually the OMM itself.
Events where the challenge wasn’t simply how quickly you could run.
It was whether you could keep making good decisions after hours in the mountains.
- Could you still read the contours when you were tired?
- Could you choose the faster route rather than simply the shortest one?
- Could you move efficiently over rough terrain?
- Could you navigate when the cloud came down?
- Could you look after yourself when the weather deteriorated?
- Could you do all of that again the following morning?
Those questions became a recurring part of my life in the mountains.
And I think Galloway in 1998 was where I first encountered them all together.
Nearly thirty years later
The diary entry for the whole weekend occupies little more than a page.
There is no great declaration at the end.
- No: I have discovered my sport.
- No prediction of mountain marathons to come.
- No realisation that this would become part of a much bigger story.
On Monday I simply wrote:
“The day was spent heading back home, dropping Dad off at Stamford.”
And that was that. Back to normal life.
Yet looking at it now, against everything else I had been doing during that summer, the Capricorn feels like a small but important bridge.
I arrived with the skills of a hillwalker, climber and navigator. There was still plenty to learn. My own diary makes it very clear that my ability to run quickly across rough ground required some work.
But the important part was already there.
I could find my way. Even when the weather turned horrible.
And somewhere in the Galloway Hills that weekend, without really noticing it, I had begun the transition from someone who ran and went into the mountains…
…to someone who ran through the mountains.
My 20-year-old summary was considerably simpler:
“A good day in all.”
Nearly thirty years later, I think it was rather more important than that.