Planning your day on the West Highland Way

Back in 2018 (I think) I made a series of podcasts entitled "A Tourists Guide to the West Highland Way race".  Here is a printout of Part 3, which is about planning your day........

PART 3

Hello again. This is Andy Cole, and, if you’ve already joined me earlier in the year for parts one and two, then welcome to the Tourists Guide to the West Highland Way Race, part 3.

Now old hands will tell you that there are two journeys involved in this event; the one that starts from Milnlgavie railway station at the bizarre hour of one am on a June morning, and the one that gets you to that point from the moment you sent in your entry form back in November of the previous year. In parts 1 and 2 we talked about first setting a plan and then how we might prepare ourselves for the journey up the course, that is, how to get to the start line in appropriate shape for our day out. For some people I’m sure it will have been plain sailing up to now, a nice training plan well on the way to being completed. For others I’m equally sure it won’t have been so easy. Bad weather. Injuries or illness got in the way of what we wanted to do. Family and work commitments had to be met and overall we’re doubting that we’ve put in the time or the miles necessary to make the trip. Well, I’m recording this just over 10 weeks from race day and have recently had a nudge from John Kynaston to get on with it, so hopefully it won’t be more than 8 or 9 weeks from the start that you’re hearing this. So my first message if you think you haven’t done enough is don’t worry, you will almost certainly be OK.

Your entry back in November will have been vetted for previous experience, and if Murdo and the boys let you in they felt you had enough in the locker to do this. Unless you’ve been bingeing constantly since then, that knowledge will be enough to get you home. What I didn’t admit when I set the scene for these talks back in Part 1 was that the last time I had some knee surgery it was in late March of the year in question. I had done very little for some months beforehand, and the surgeon told me I wasn’t to try running until the end of April. I did my first longish run, the 35 mile Sandstone Trail race near where I live in Chester in the first week in June and the West Highland Way Race two weeks later. It wasn’t either pretty or quick, but it was a finish. No, wherever you are now, you still have time to get ready and get this done.

A lot will depend on what you do come race day.

Nearly all ultra runners will have heard of the Spine, a non-stop race held each January along the 268 mile Pennine Way. It’s been won three times by an amazing Czech runner called Pavel Paloncy. Among other things, Pavel is well known for always running with a small towel attached to his pack. Devotees of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy will understand. The two guiding principles for the traveller are “Never go anywhere without your towel” and the two words written in large capital letters on the opening page of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy itself……”DON’T PANIC!”.

In the 2016 West Highland Way race I can remember sitting on the tailgate of our car at the Bridge of Orchy station in the bright sunshine, talking to John Kynaston who was that year supporting a friend of ours Stuart Mills. I’d just owned up to John that starting the race little more than two weeks after finishing the 190 mile Northern Traverse event probably wasn’t one of the best ideas I’d ever had. Just over 60 miles in and I felt pretty well done for. Still, I stopped for a while, had something to eat and drink and appraised the situation. It was a nice day and there were plenty of hours left on the clock. I apologised to my crew that they were going to be up a lot later than they had planned on Saturday night, then walked steadily from there to the finish, never going faster than a pace that I could comfortably manage and catching an hour’s sleep at Kinlochleven on the way.

A year later I came to the race feeling quite fit, disappointed that I’d had to drop out of the Dragon’s Back race a month or so earlier with bad knee problems, but confident that this wouldn’t be an issue on the gentler ground and much easier climbs and descents on the West Highland Way. One of my knees hurt for the first fifty miles or so but I had managed to keep on top of it by progressing fairly gently and taking painkillers now and then. I felt relatively good at Auchtertyre so ran quite a lot of the next section from there to the Bridge of Orchy. This was tiring as we had quite a squally headwind that year, but I seemed to be making reasonable progress so wasn’t too worried. I then set out over Rannoch Moor without enough clothes on, no insulation layer under a waterproof top and no waterproof trousers. In a number of heavy showers, combined with the strong wind, I got thoroughly cold and had to run a lot more than I would have liked just to keep warm, with the result that on getting to Glencoe it took a long time to recover and get warm again. On top of this the effort I’d put in was making it hard to eat and drink. Still, I made reasonable time over the Devils Staircase and on the way down overtook Ian Rae who was progressing steadily towards his twelfth finish. But at Kinlochleven it was like someone had just turned the power switch off. I had no energy left at all. I sat in the car for over two hours and felt no better. I wasn’t sleepy and couldn’t sleep. But I’ve got to the finish from here no matter how bad I was feeling, and couldn’t believe that I couldn’t do so again, so I set out. I made the long climb up to the jeep track fairly steadily, assuming that once I got up there all would be OK; it wasn’t. I could shuffle along the flat bits at maybe two miles an hour but the slightest suggestion of an uphill had me almost at a standstill. It was as if I’d used everything I had left on the climb and just couldn’t go any further. To give up at this particular point was very hard but I had no option; I turned and shuffled slowly, with many rests, back down to Kinlochleven, passing two runners who would go on to finish comfortably, Neil MacRitchie and Nicole Brown, as I neared the road.

What I’m trying to illustrate in these two little stories is that however well or badly you’ve prepared for the race, it’s often the decisions that you make on the day that determine your ultimate success or failure. In 2016 I found that I clearly hadn’t recovered fully from a previous event, but by recognising this early enough and changing my plan to allow for it, I was able to get to the finish, slower than I had intended but still with well over four hours to spare, and with another goblet in the bag.  A year later, although I found I was tired from halfway, I believed I was fit enough to keep up a reasonable pace and was unwilling to accept that my planned schedule was no longer possible so I stuck to it for too long without thinking of the consequences. Just one better decision, such as taking the time to wrap up better for Rannoch Moor so that I could take it at a gentler pace, taking a longer break at Glencoe, taking it easier going up the Devil’s Staircase, hanging on a couple of hours longer at Kinlochleven, any of these would almost certainly have saved my race. As it was I continued making bad calls until I had well and truly blown it. I stopped, unable to go any further, a dozen miles from the finish and with 7 hours still on the clock. A pretty amateur effort.

Now as I quoted the military guys saying back near the end of part 2, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”. You have a plan for the West Highland Way Race and you have prepared diligently, all you have to do is execute it on the day. And if you’re lucky, that will be that, job done. But normally, stuff happens. And when it happens, how you deal with it will be the single biggest factor in the outcome. So in this, the third part of our Tourists Guide, we need to think about how we make good decisions once the race has begun. Let’s look at some of the things that may change the game for us once we have become one of that long, bobbing row of headlamps heading northwards through the night from Milngavie.

First, what could have happened to affect your plan even before the start?  Well, the weather for one. Another race that I’ve run a few times now is the Lakeland 100. It starts at 6pm on a Friday evening and at somewhere around 4pm the Race Director Marc Laithwaite gathers all the competitors together for the race briefing. Marc’s a born showman and it’s always hilarious as well as informative, but most years he makes at least one serious and telling point about the prevailing conditions. In 2014 the Lakes was in the middle of a mini-heatwave; Marc’s message was something like “Well, whatever time plans you have for this event, throw them way right now and don’t think of them again. This year is going to be about survival”. Last year 2017 the district was already waterlogged from several weeks’ rain and more was forecast for the event. The message was again crystal clear “Look after your feet from the start. If you don’t, you probably won’t finish.” This sort of stuff sounds too simple to talk about, but it’s often the difference between success and failure.

Sean Stone’s classic weather briefing for the West Highland Way race, delivered in the station yard at around 12,30 am on race day, normally goes along the lines of “There will be weather, if it’s sunny you’ll get hot, if it rains you’ll get wet, if it’s windy there will be fewer midges”. Sounds a bit flippant but it’s nothing more or less than the truth. The big advantage here with the West Highland Way is that you’re not relying for 100 miles on what you carry on your back. The possibility to meet with your crew at fairly frequent intervals means that you can react to whatever the weather does as you go along the course  - so long as you don’t mess it up as I did last year. The forecast from a day or so previously will give you some idea of what to expect – whether you’re going to need a hat and sunscreen or 4 or 5 changes of clothes, but once you’re under way it’s important that you keep on top of things. In the 2012 race it rained I think pretty well from start to finish. It didn’t seem too bad at first and most people started lightly clad with maybe a light waterproof top. When we reached the bit of road from Gartness to Drymen, about 10 miles into the race, it was under water to a depth of several inches for long stretches and the rain was starting to really hammer down. That’s the way it’s going to be then, I thought. At Balmaha I put on a light fleece under a good waterproof, picked up my waterproof hat and gloves, and kept things that way for the remainder of the race, wet but warm, with plenty of changes of clothes along the way. A lot of runners dropped out that year with hypothermia because they simply hadn’t brought enough warm clothes with them. We know there will be weather. We just need to have enough of the right stuff in the car, and use it when the occasion calls.

OK, you’ve got the conditions dialled and are prepared to face what’s out there. What can possibly go wrong? Well if you’re not careful, the first three or four hours can compromise your whole race. I remember Dario Melaragni, the West Highland Way Race director for many years once saying that this race cannot be won before Balmaha, but it can certainly be lost before Balmaha. What he was meaning is that the first twenty miles contain the easiest ground in the whole race, and it’s tempting to take these at a pace that just takes far too much out of you. Even on a tourist plan it’s possible to get caught up in the enthusiasm, go with the flow and not realise how fast you are going. The thirty minutes you may save by going too fast here can set you back many hours towards the end of the race. The mantra for these first few hours is look at your watch and run your own race. It might feel that the race has gone somewhere else and you’re just running on your own along the trail; don’t panic, for a Tourist that’s how it should be.

Once under way at a sensible pace, another thing that can really mess up your day is if your feet start to fall apart. The West Highland Way is generally a hard surfaced and mostly dry track. You’ll cover lots of stones and gravel with very little naturally wet ground, and this in itself can be hard on your feet. If you’ve done a bit of research you’ll know this and hopefully know what you have to do to keep your feet in reasonable shape for 30 hours’ worth of this type of going. I could do a complete podcast on looking after your feet but the basis of everything and the key things to remember are:

Firstly, blisters come from friction. There is no other cause. If your shoes fit really well there will be no internal rubbing and you’ll get no blisters. If your shoes are less than a perfect fit you may get some.

Secondly, everything gets worse when it’s wet. Wet socks and shoes increase friction, so blisters not only happen sooner but they’re harder to keep under control because all the stuff that you’re likely to put on them to make things better will be adversely affected by the wet.

You should know whether you’re prone to blisters or not from previous races or longer training runs, and by now you should have worked out your system for dealing with them, but here’s where the third and most important point comes in. As soon as you feel anything at all that’s not quite right, stop and fix it immediately. Leave it and it could end your race.

On the Lakeland 100 course there is a long steady climb which goes on for over two miles out of Buttermere, gaining nearly 2000ft of height along the way. But its main feature is that it traverses a steep hillside as it climbs, and the track is continually sloping away to the right. During the race one year, as I climbed this path I was aware of a slight hot spot under my right foot. I knew what was happening; my shoe was not laced tightly enough for this particular ground and my foot was sliding slightly to the right inside it on every step. The solution was simple, stop for twenty seconds and tighten the lace. Except I couldn’t be bothered. I was going quite well and I didn’t want the interruption; besides, it was dark and the path was a narrow alleyway through high bracken with little room to manoeuvre. I would sort it out later. I was conscious of some discomfort but I eventually left it for about 30 miles until I changed socks at the halfway point of the race, an action which revealed a neat blister just over an inch in diameter right in the middle of my sole. I was very lucky, the rest of the race was dry that year so I was able to drain and dress it and carry on to the finish. Had there been any amount of wet ground it might have been a different story. And yet it need not have happened at all. All I needed to commit to was the few seconds to tighten the lace at the right time. Just another example of the bad decisions that runners often make under the conditions of being out for a long time.

So please, if you want a good tourist experience, look after your feet.

The next thing that may not go according to your plan is your nutrition. We talked a bit about strategies in part 2 and by now most people starting the race will have decided what they think works for them, and practised it in other races or at least some long training outings. The two things that might mess with this though are firstly, you’re starting at 1am, and secondly it’s fairly unlikely that you’ll have done a training run that lasted 30 hours. It’s somehow not really surprising if something that tasted delicious mid morning at Rowardennan doesn’t have quite the same appeal at midnight in Kinlochleven. If you are unlucky enough to get to the “I really can’t eat anything” stage, and this is more likely to happen in the later stages of the race, then there are a number of tactics you can employ to get by somehow.

Number one of course is DON’T PANIC. No one has yet died of starvation while taking part in the West Highland Way Race. If you don’t feel like eating anything, then don’t eat anything. If it’s not affecting your ability to keep moving towards Fort William, then keep moving. If your support team or well-meaning fellow runners or bystanders tell you that you must eat something or you’re going to fall apart, then politely but firmly tell them to direct their advice elsewhere. It’s very likely that if you take it easy, slow down a bit and don’t force things for an hour or two then your appetite will return.

Number two is to use your support team, a facility you don’t have in almost every other race you are likely to run. Don’t just fill your car with stuff that is on your plan, but also with a variety of other flavours too that might just appeal at some point in the race. And if you don’t have what you suddenly fancy on board, there are numerous shops, pubs and cafes that your team have access to along the course that might be able to help. Teams have in past races been dispatched to find sausage rolls, pork pies, milkshakes, various specific varieties of ice cream, snack foods, fruit juices, fizzy water (that was actually one of mine), chip suppers and all sorts of other consumables which their runner hoped might get them another few miles nearer to Fort William.

Number three is to find, if you can, a comfort food that you can turn to in times of maximum distress, that you can eat under almost any circumstances. It might have little or no value as ultra-running fuel but the psychological boost you get when you feel that you’re still treating yourself right is enormous. My own go-to sustenance is tea and ginger biscuits, which have seen me through some sticky middle sections and sometimes even the final 8 or 10 hours of events where nutrition hasn’t worked well for me. This particular combination may make someone else feel like throwing up, that’s why I’m afraid we all have to find our own formula. You’ll get there eventually.

But overall, the key thing to remember is that while not eating enough will slow you down, it’s very unlikely to stop your race.

A factor that won’t affect runners at the front end or middle of the pack, but can become significant when you are nearer the back is how are you doing against the cut-off times. In a long race I was doing a few years ago I was progressing steadily through the darkness of the second night at a time approaching thirty hours from the start, when I was passed by three other runners going at a much faster pace. They appeared to head off into the distance but then one of the torches stopped and turned, and waited by a gate for me to catch up. It was a lady runner who asked if she could carry on with me to the next checkpoint, she was a bit uncertain in the dark and her companions were travelling too fast for her. Of course, I said, but why were you going so fast. Oh, she said, they had calculated that they needed to run most of the way from here to the finish or they wouldn’t make the finishing cut-off. She had decided she couldn’t do that so would have to drop out at the next checkpoint. Well, I’m going to finish, I said, and I may jog a downhill or two but nothing else. We stayed together to the finish, which we made with an hour and a half to spare. Before she encountered me, she and her companions had simply got their sums wrong.

Now this seems like a really elementary mistake to make, but when you’ve been out without sleep for a day or so, these things are likely to happen. And in a race that you’re hoping to finish but may not have a lot of time to spare, having to push hard for several miles to meet an intermediate cut-off, or worse, doing that even if you don’t need to because you got your timings wrong, is a criminal waste of your precious resources. In events like this I think it’s well worth the effort to get the cut-off times really fixed in your brain before the start, don’t rely on just looking them up on the day, and make sure your crew are fully aware of them too so they can put you straight if you start to get things wrong. It might be tempting to try to build up a bit of a cushion early on so you don’t have to think about cut-offs, but in the West Highland Way race in particular this is not a great idea as the earlier cut-offs are the tighter ones, and to build a cushion early on you really have to go faster than is wise for a steady even paced race.

While we are on the subject of timings it’s also worth remembering that as the race starts at 1am, your time on the course will always be one hour different from the time of day; close enough to cause confusion if you don’t decide how to handle it. I think it’s worth agreeing with your crew what timings you are going to work with, either time of day or time from the start, and stick with that throughout, including knowing the cut-offs in your chosen method.  More than one crew has failed to meet their runner at a checkpoint by getting this wrong in the past.

In fact losing contact with your support team is another rare but certainly possible event that can impact your race. I once reached Beinglas about 5 minutes ahead of the time I’d agreed with the team. I hadn’t seen them since Balmaha so it was a few hours back, and when I got to Beinglas there was no sign of them. I tried to phone them but I had no signal. I hung around for ten or fifteen minutes, then decided that I needed to be a bit more pro-active to keep the thing going. Fortunately, I knew the marshals at the checkpoint, explained what had happened and that I had enough food to keep going to Auchtertye. They kindly gave me some water and allowed me on my way. A bit further up Glen Falloch my phone picked up again and I was able to find out that the crew had had a puncture coming up the lochside which had delayed them, and they had arrived at Beinglas just a few minutes after I’d left. The phone coverage along the route is patchy at times, especially with some networks. Ever since then for all UK races I’ve carried a cheap non-smart phone into which I put a Manx Telecom pay as you go SIM card. The Isle of Man regards the UK as foreign country, so this phone picks up all the UK networks, and I’ve never been left out of touch since I started using it.

The final thing I’ll cover here is the one that no-one ever really wants to talk about. What happens if you reach a point during your journey up the West Highland Way course when you simply feel “I’ve had enough of this, I don’t want to carry on.”

I’ve just had a look at the results for the last five West Highland Way races, and the average completion rate is 80%. Now that’s pretty good as far as 100 mile races go, far better than for example the typical 50 to 60 percent finish rate you get in events like the Lakeland 100 or the Ultra Tour de Mont Blanc. This means that a lot more West Highland Way competitors are up to the project that they have taken on, have prepared well and run a good race on the day. But it still means that a fifth of the runners starting out from Milngavie don’t make it to Fort William. Something in their day went wrong.

Now some will have seriously underestimated the task or not prepared well enough, some may have had race-ending injuries on the day, others like me last year will have made some bad decisions. But there will always be a number who will look back at the race from 24 hours later on and think “I could have done that, I really shouldn’t have stopped”. So how do we prevent that happening?

Let’s be clear about one thing. Just because I’ve called this the Tourist’s Guide, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy. Just think about what we’re doing here, 95 miles on foot, climbing the equivalent of three times Ben Nevis along the way, in under a day and a half. There are going to be times when may hurt a bit; there are certainly going to be times when you know that life would be much easier if you were doing something else. And at times like this we have to beware of the little voice in our head telling us that to stop would be the sensible thing to do. I’ve already done over seventy miles, that’s a pretty good effort isn’t it?  Certainly nothing to be ashamed of if I stop now. Or maybe I was carrying an injury at the start, I’ve done really well to get as far as I have. Or maybe just that it’s been a great experience even up to here and that’s really what I came for, actually getting to the finish isn’t so important. Or I have a life with other commitments after the race, I don’t want to leave myself damaged for weeks afterwards. You see our subconscious brain is programmed to make things fairly easy for our body, and our conscious brain is only too willing to go along with this idea if we let it. In a fifty mile race we generally know that it will all be over and we’ll be sleeping in a comfortable bed, or possibly drinking in a comfortable pub before the day is out. Double the distance and we know that the discomfort we’re feeling now may go on for a long time yet. It’s an unusual runner who doesn’t go through the odd moment of doubt in a hundred miler.

I’ll suggest two methods of trying to get things back on track, the first is active (to be worked through by you the runner) and the is second passive (to be put into action by your support crew if the first doesn’t work).

If ever I have any thoughts of stopping in an event, the question I ask is what exactly is going to happen over the next day or so. I focus precisely on how events will unfold. Yes, it will feel great to  stop,  maybe get a shower,  have a sleep.  The support team will be sympathetic, supportive. Then I’ll wake up with the knowledge that I didn’t finish. The event may still be going on, runners will still be finishing.  I’ll have to meet and congratulate those who did. Will I have the courage to go to the prizegiving. How will I explain my decision to stop? What has all the time that I have invested in this enterprise over the past months been for? I find that this sort of talking to will normally get me focussed again.

But what if you go through this process and you’re still convinced that you can go no further?

James Thurlow is the Race Director  for several events including the 190 mile Northern Traverse, which doesn’t allow support teams. In such a long spaced-out event any runner dropping out is reliant on the checkpoint marshals to get them back to base, and James’ briefing to the marshals (which he also explains to the runners before the start of the race) is very clear. So long as they can physically make progress, no runner is allowed to drop out on entering a checkpoint. If they say they want to stop, they have to remain in the checkpoint for at least two hours; food will be available. They then have to carry on out onto the course for at least one kilometre beyond the checkpoint; if at that point they still say they want to drop out, they get a lift home. It seems a pretty good system to me, one that has prevented numerous premature DNF’s, and maybe one you might think of agreeing with your support team before the race.

So that’s about it then.

Stay comfortable in the weather, go at a sensible pace, look after your feet, eat what you can, keep aware of the time and in touch with your crew, and don’t give up. And then you should have a successful, satisfying, and maybe even enjoyable day or so the West Highland Way.

See you in Milngavie.