In 2022 I DNSed the inaugural 270km Pennine Bridleway Challenge when a sore throat turned out (with a positive test on the morning of the race) to be covid. I entered the 2024 edition with the same plan: a sleep-deprived walking holiday as six-day training. And again I got ill the week before, first a urine infection (which was knocked on the head with antibiotics) and then a cold. It wasn’t clear I was in a fit state for a multi-day event. But it was close to home, with very generous cut-offs, so I decided I’d start and pull out at checkpoint one if I wasn’t feeling up to it.

Trains weren’t running properly so the OH gave me a lift to registration in Hayfield. As we drove through the Peak District it hailed heavily, covering the roads in slush and I changed my kit plans for stage 1 to include a heavy-duty waterproof. After a night in a B&B up the road I hauled my drop bag back to Hayfield for breakfast before the bus ride to the start at Middleton Top. While waiting I got talking to a woman who I initially assumed was another entrant but was actually the partner of one of the runners. The Spine Race came up in conversation (tbh it was probably me that brought it up, I’ll probably still be dining out on it in decades time in an OAP home). And we had ‘the Spine Q&A’. It usually goes:
Other person Q1: So you’ve done the Spine?’
Me: `Yes’
OP Q2: ‘the full race?’
Me: ‘Yes’
OP Q3: in Winter?’
Me: ‘Yes’
OP Q4: ‘And you finished?’
Me: ‘Yes’.
This time I pre-empted questions 2 and 3, but question 4 still came. I sometimes feel like wearing a badge/T-shirt with the Q&A on plus ‘Yes really, I know I don’t look like the archetypical Spine finisher, but I did’.

The first section on a disused railway should have been nice and easy, but a headwind, runny nose and lack of fitness made it a bit of a slog with a lot more walk breaks than normal. As usual for day one, I was close to the back of the field. I think there were 2 people behind me (one of whom dropped out early) and the other 3 women were fairly close in front. I backed-and-forthed with Lizzie (and she held gates open as I struggled to keep up with her on uneven terrain) before passing her for good when she stopped at a cafe. Deploying my shuffle on flat sections, I started pulling back the other 2 women, but they pulled away again as the route into CP1 at Hayfield got hillier and more uneven.

Thanks to a quick stop at CP1 I headed out first into the night, feeling surprisingly pretty good. I had a few small navigation issues when the route deviated from the Bridleway around Glossop for safety reasons. It was sometimes difficult to follow the alternative route ‘on the ground’ using my 1:40,000k Harvey’s map (in retrospect having a 1:25,000k OS map for this bit would have been helpful).

The night was chilly but generally pleasant, apart from when the route went down a footpath which was ankle-deep in icey water to avoid the parallel road. As usual, I started struggling to eat, but as the morning went on dried mango and rolos went down OK and my appetite came back sooner than usual. The morning was nice and Sunny, but a storm I’d been warned about at the mid-stage waterpoint came in a couple of hours before I reached CP2 at Hebden Hay. At that point, the rain wasn’t heavy enough to require waterproof trousers, but I put them on so my running tights wouldn’t get wet and unusable for the next stage. At this point the field was still fairly bunched; there were a handful of people getting ready to leave when I arrived and the rest of the field arrived before I left.

After eating a jacket potato and cheese, I had a dorm to myself for a couple of hours of sleep, before kitting up to head back into the storm. The weather in the valley wasn’t bad, but I was warned it was much worse up on the moors. I got my poles out, as the steep stoney descents towards the end of the previous stage had made my knees sore.

The poles and rain, combined with middle-aged long-sightedness, caused some issues. I like to navigate mainly by map, using GPS to find turns. However, with poles in my hands, I no longer had easy access to the map. When sorting kit before the race I discovered that the ‘holding the map/GPS at arm’s length’ trick no longer works, in particular in the dark. I panic bought some bi-focal orienteering glasses and up to this point they’d worked well. However I hadn’t thought about how to keep them dry in a storm, and I struggled to follow the route across a pathless section of boggy moor using my GPS (fortunately I had a handheld GPS, with just my watch it would have been even worse). I also suddenly started feeling extremely sleepy. This was very unexpected; usually on multi-day races tiredness hits me just after dawn and bad weather wakes me up. I was also finding it harder than usual to stay warm and put on all the spare clothes I was carrying. I never felt unsafe, however, my margins were far smaller than I’m comfortable with. I decided that if I didn’t start feeling better and/or the weather didn’t get better I’d drop out at the water point at the next roadhead. In the meantime, there was nothing for it but to keep moving slowly forward in roughly the right direction. I did however fantasise about an alien spaceship (a stereotypical 1960s ‘flying saucer’) landing and giving me a lift.

Navigation got easier once the race route rejoined the Pennine Bridleway. The storm also eased so I could stop and eat some Kendal mint cake which perked me up. I was plodding along quite happily when a pair of headlights started coming towards me. Who on Earth else would be out here at this time of night, in this weather? Two of the race safety/support team in search of me it turned out. Apparently, my tracker wasn’t working and they’d been expecting me to arrive at the water point much sooner. I told them I’d had a tough patch, but was now fine, just slow. Quite how slow only became apparent when, having checked I wanted to continue, they sped away from me back to the roadside. At the roadside, I sat in a camper van and ate some snacks while my tracker was changed. There was also a hot water incident. I asked for some hot water in one of my bottles. I took a big mouthful, not realising it was in fact nearly boiling. I spat it straight back out again onto the floor, but still ended up with a very sore tongue for the rest of the race.

The night still had some more curve balls in store for me. Stopping at the public toilets in Wycoller I discovered my period had started (possibly the cause of the unexpected tiredness earlier in the night). It was 10 days early, but over the last few years it’s done this repeatedly during races and I now carry 24 hours worth of tampons in my first aid kit. The normal tiredness hit around dawn. Usually, a caffeine speednut sorts this out. I only managed one mouthful which I promptly regurgitated, and then struggled to keep the rest of the contents of my stomach down.

When I stopped to take my warm night layers off I messaged the OH to tell him about the broken tracker, it turned out that the race organisers had already let him know. Overall the day went better, but I suffered the indignation of being overtaken by a couple of middle-aged walkers. To rub salt in my wounds they then sat on the only bench I’d seen all day (and I was desperate for a sit down). Another snafu was stopping for a wee in some woods, and then realising that the van I could see in a nearby layby was not empty and was in fact the next water point. After endless wet fields there was a long but pleasant climb up a hill above Settle. The steep tarmac descent into Settle, and being overtaken by another walker, was less enjoyable.

At CP3 I was very well looked after; I managed a whole pizza with side salad and pudding. After a couple of restless hours of sleep (I’d stupidly packed a lightweight sleeping mat despite not having to carry it) Jo did a fantastic job of taping my blisters and sent me off into the night with some sandwiches. The 3rd night was (apart from my period throwing a big spanner in the works, more about that at the end) really enjoyable; the sky was clear and the route went across some wonderful sections of open fellside. I did have a strange experience before dawn though. Two lights appeared, moving somewhat randomly. Initially, I thought it was 2 people, potentially poachers, and I steeled myself for a potentially difficult encounter. Eventually, I realised that it was (probably) lights from houses in the valley moving in and out of view.

The Cam High road is usually a slog. But this time, on a Sunny morning with no one in sight, I loved walking up it, smashing frozen puddles with my poles. It soon became very hot, and I went from wearing full winter gear to overheating and struggling to fit the now unneeded layers in my pack. The Dales looked gorgeous and I enjoyed going past bits of the Fellsman route. I was however demoralised by quite how slowly I was moving. Despite feeling pretty good I was only managing ~2mph, rather than my usual ‘big pack uneven terrain’ minimum plod speed of 2.5mph.

The steep tarmac descent to the final waterpoint at Garsdale station was painful again, but I felt better after being cheerfully plied with more snacks and dispatched with a bag of biscuits. Eating them was a bit disconcerting though as crunchy bits of flesh came off my burnt tongue. After a familiar section of the Lady Anne’s Way, the last few miles to Kirkby Stephen passed through fields covered in slurry with a vomit-inducing smell. Having grown up on a farm I’m used to the smell of poo, but this was more like gone off milk.

As the finish came into view I was surprised to see all of the race crew waiting outside to cheer me into the finish. I sat in a comfy chair and waxed lyrical about flying saucers and slurry. I might just have been able to catch the last train home, but decided it was better to stay overnight and rest. I alternated eating lots of food and sleeping in a comfy dorm. As the first female finisher, I got a rather magnificent prize. The next 2 women were, however, only a couple of hours behind me, and I suspect I only finished in front of them because I slept less.

The race was extremely well organised and overall it was an enjoyable experience, despite the curveballs the weather and my body threw at me. The 3rd night was one of the most beautiful nights I’ve had on a multi-day race; sitting on a style eating a sandwich as the Sun rose in an almost cloudless sky is a memory that will live with me. I’m a bit disappointed by how slow I was, and embarrassed by having people come out to look for me and also by needing to ask for help to manage my period. At the time I was puzzled by why I was so slow on the last day when I was feeling so good. But in retrospect I suspect I had it the wrong way around; I was feeling so good because I was going so slowly. Ultimately what difference would finishing a few hours faster have made to anything? And I do have a long-race finish in the bag for 2024, unlike 2023 (I’m sitting at home writing this when I should have been in Sweden running a six-day race…).

The period bit at the end

Almost every multi-day race I’ve done in the past few years my period has started early during it or immediately afterwards (the one exception was ‘Six days in the dome’ where I took norethisterone and various weird things happened to my body). So I was unsurprised and prepared for my period starting ten days early on the 2nd night of the Pennine Bridleway. However, I wasn’t expecting or prepared for what happened the next night. Two hours after leaving Settle I stopped for a quick wee. Looking down I was shocked to see my thighs covered in blood and a huge red puddle inside my waterproof trousers. These days I usually get one heavy (and painful) day a month. However, it’s heavy as in ‘change super plus tampons every 4 hours’, not ‘completely soak through one and make a mess in 2 hours’.

I didn’t change the tampon. I had what should have been 24 hours worth with me, but at this flow rate, I was going to have to ration them. Plus my location (on the outskirts of a village) was fine for a wee stop, but not tampon changing. Because of my cold, I had lots of tissues on me, so I quickly cleaned up the worst of the mess, stuffed a handful in my pants and plodded on. I really hate asking for help, but I couldn’t work out how to handle this on my own. The waterproof trousers would keep the blood in, but at the cost of chafing and overheating once the Sun came up. So in the next village, I sat down on a bench, got my phone out and messaged the race organisers explaining the situation and asking if they could get some tampons to the next water point.

I got through the night with the tissues and ‘should have been 24 hours’ supplies. On reaching the water point at the top of Cam High road just after dawn, I was very happy to be told that they’d got my message and what I’d asked for was waiting on the passenger seat of one of the vehicles. The discreteness was thoughtful. But to be honest I’d have been happy (and relieved) to be greeted by someone waving a fistful of tampons and shouting ‘Anne: we’ve got you tampons’ through a loud hailer. And it wasn’t just tampons but a plastic container with towels and some wipes too. I stuffed my pockets and plodded off to find a secluded wall for a temporary sort-out until I got to the public toilets at Garsdale.