Spine Challenger South, take two

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Another year, another snowy Spine Race. Another year, another DNF for me.

And, this one hurts quite a bit. I said after last year (here) that I didn’t have a ‘why’, and so it really felt fine when I decided to stop. I didn’t want to continue…so I didn’t. That’s a good choice.

This year, I had a ‘why’. It wasn’t anything fancy (I don’t think they have to be); it was just ‘because I want to’. I really wanted to.

So when I picked up the phone to DNF, it didn’t feel good or right. It felt really bloody rubbish that I hadn’t been able to solve enough problems, and find a way to carry on. It came with (and is still coming with) a load of doubts about whether I could or should have done more. I feel really sad and disappointed that I couldn’t.

Here’s a time-honoured ‘things that went well and things that didn’t go so well’ rundown. And then, obviously, ‘why did you stop?!’.

The good bits

With the notable exception of actually finishing the damn thing, there are loads. In no particular order:

• After last year, I told myself that if I came back, I wanted to enjoy it, and have the proper Spine experience. I wanted to put loads of positive energy into the Spine ecosystem, which would radiate loads of positive energy back at me. I did this. I smiled, I chatted, I loved it.

• Conditions were awful great. No, honestly. After I stopped, I got lots of messages - they all said something like ‘you’re amazing to have got so far; conditions were brutal’. Which was kind of everyone…but it wasn’t the conditions’ fault I stopped, it was me! Saturday was sheer perfection, with the snow much more compacted and runnable than last year, bluebird skies, and no wind to speak of. I had one of the best hill days of my life! Sunday was certainly different - rainy and windy, but no more so than a normal wintery day. There was a lot of ice underfoot, but I didn’t seem to be too slowed down by it. I enjoyed being on my own for big chunks of Sunday, in mildly gnarly weather, in places that I remember finding tough in recces. This felt like great progress, and reinforced my pre-race feeling that the PW is a friendly, homely place to me now.

• I paced so much better! Last year my pack was far too heavy, with lots of ‘nice to have’ items and things that made me uber-safe. I also worked too hard in the snow, getting tired, but also sweaty, and then got cold at night. This year, with a lighter bag and easier ground, even less fit, I made very similar time to CP1 and arrived having expended much less energy. I was also warm and cosy right through the night.

• I remembered how to manage my hands. I have Raynaud’s syndrome, so I have to be careful to keep my fingers alive to do zips, bag clips and food wrappers. I’m good with gloves, mitts and layers, but recently I’ve been forgetting that I also have medication. I think I’d got into my mind that ‘it doesn’t make much difference’. Turns out it does make a difference! I took it every 8 hours, and was amazed to use just one pair of (insulated, waterproof) gloves for over 24 hours.

• My ankle held up! And my dodgy knee. I didn’t notice either of them, or rather I did, but only in a good way. I’ve felt for a while that I’ve been working around the bad ankle a bit, but now it’s mainly healed, I need to learn to load it properly again. Apparently you can’t run 70+ miles without forgetting that you sprained your ankle, and just running on it normally. It’s now Tuesday, and I’m moving much better than I expected - interesting to see how much endurance my body has held onto despite the disrupted back end of 2025.

  
  

The bad bits

Note: the below is going to sound like a load of excuses! I don’t mean them that way - these are the things that contributed to stopping; almost all of them frustratingly within my control and things I can and will do differently if there’s a next time.

• I didn’t sleep enough. Having not attempted to sleep last time, I aimed for an hour at Hebden. This still wasn’t enough, although I didn’t reach the point of actually falling asleep on my feet. I also confirmed what I’d suspected - I think I run too cold to ever be able to sleep outside on the floor in January. For the future, I need to aim for a longer sleep at Hebden. I’ll also take a hot water bottle; I only drifted off for a few minutes in my hour, partly because I was shivering.

Trying to nap in the loo at Gargrave

• I didn’t eat enough. I’m normally pretty good at eating, but ended up feeling nauseous for a fair way, and struggled to make myself keep eating. A few unappetising food choices (packing in a hurry unexpectedly due to Friday’s travel disruption) didn’t help. Between Hebden and Gargrave, I think I ate around 1200 calories - not enough! Tellingly, I arrived in Gargrave very unwilling to eat, illogical thinking which is a pretty sure sign that your brain is suffering from lack of fuel. Instead, I tried having a sleep, but was too cold to drift off.

• My feet got battered. As with food, I’m usually good with feet. They rarely blister, and I’m careful about taping. This time, I have a lot of blisters. On reflection, my ankle-enforced months of road training meant I haven’t been spending my usual long hours with wet feet in fell shoes, which is what I normally think helps my feet be resilient. A lot of time in microspikes won’t have helped, and nor did taking the tape off one foot at the bottom of Jacob’s Ladder (!) because I’d got a crease in it that was pressing on my little toe.

  
  

What happened in the end?

When it went downhill, it felt like it happened very fast, but it was really the steady accumulation of all of the above. I could feel my mood dropping, and knew I likely needed more food - each bit perked me up briefly, but then I’d plunge back into over-thinking and worrying about the next leg.

Somewhere in between Hebden and Gargrave, we’d received a bit of a garbled message via one of the safety teams about the route onwards from Malham. I didn’t fully understand it, but the gist was, it’s too icy even for 4x4 access on the roads, so if you go past there, you need to be super-confident about getting to Horton, as we can’t reach you quickly. Chatting with another runner, this got into his head a bit too. I checked the forecast, which showed winds gusting up to 45 mph on Fountains Fell. That’s around my personal ‘getting blown off my feet’ level (I’m not very heavy), and our feeling was ‘it’s icy, dark, very windy, and I’m knackered. I don’t feel super-confident!’

I was anxious about putting myself in a stupid situation. I have a low risk threshold at the best of times, and Fountains Fell in those conditions is certainly possible (as many people proved), but the way I felt at Gargrave I didn’t feel that I was capable of safely making the good decisions necessary to negotiate those conditions. The things I can see now (warm, dry, well-fed and thinking clearly!) are:

• In stopping when, where and why I did, I made a good, safe decision based on a dynamic risk assessment of my condition and the weather and ground conditions.

• But - if I had eaten and slept more, my condition may have been different, and I may have been able to make a different decision.

  
  

I can also now see that I had more options. I could have gone to the pub in Gargrave, tried to eat a big meal and have a nap, and then made my decision. To be honest, I’m still adjusting to the Spine way of utilising all these options on route, and it just didn’t occur to me that I could/should do this. Top tip if you are considering the race - find someone who has done it, and get them to tell you every single pub, shop, bus shelter and public toilet along the way!

I can also now see that I could/should have continued to Malham. That section of the route is low-level and not hazardous. I’d have delayed the point of having to decide about Fountains Fell, and much could have changed by that moment. I don’t know why I didn’t do this.

As you can see, I’m an over-thinker, and have a low tolerance for risk. I’m always three steps ahead, worrying about the consequences of decisions, and wondering ‘what if?’. Although these can be positive things, helping me to plan and anticipate problems, sometimes I create problems that aren’t there. I think in this case I would have benefited from being more able to hold these thoughts and decisions at bay until it was the correct moment to consider them - which would have been Malham. I can also tackle this problem by intentionally getting more exposure to rough conditions, to move them further inside my comfort zone.

I’m not sure yet whether I’ll go again. Part of me really wants to - I get frustrated when I find something I can’t do! My worry is that although I believe I have the fitness and skills to complete this thing, I don’t have the brain for it. I want to (and maybe need to?) complete feeling safe and basically in control throughout. But I wonder whether successful Spiners have the ability to keep going even when they feel they are past their own limits.

Thoughts from Spine-folk would be gratefully received!