The concept behind the podcast is to reintroduce artistry and ‘old fashioned’ storytelling into outdoor media - no lengthy interviews or influencer promotion - just a yarn spun around a campfire crafted around a slow adventure in the outdoors. The first few episodes have been brilliant, all quite different in their focus, pacing and creative response, and it’s refreshing to listen to more of story-focused podcast. Don’t get me wrong, I do love me an hour long nonsense chat or an interview, but they all do start to blur into one and for the most part nowadays, there just doesn’t seem to be anything that original coming out in the outdoors space any more.

I knew instantly what I wanted to write about. I wanted to build outwards from a piece I wrote on here called ‘porridge pots and the privilege of getting to know your dad by bike’, and begin to articulate some of the complex thoughts I’ve had about my evolving relationship with my dad more coherently and poetically. I’ve started this idea several times over the years - having at least 20,000 words of unintelligible babble stored on my laptop - and thought ‘I know what will make all of the challenges of this project go away - a firm deadline!’

Alas, dear reader, as I have experienced countless times, yet seemingly failed to have internalised, the deadline is not a magic wand. The deadline does not-eth make-eth thee great.

Firstly, my confidence in my writing ability has taken a cataclysmic nose dive this year. I’ve had zero freelance work since January - part driven by the rise in AI in media, part driven by a desire to preserve what little mental health I have left while also working a full time job - and that’s made it more difficult to practice my skills. After all, writing is a skill that does require the frequent flexing of its muscles to retain shape - and consequently mine are looking quite spaghetti-esque as it stands.

Secondly, writing about a relationship with your parent - especially when that parent is still very much alive and that relationship is still evolving - is really, really hard. Plagued by worries about how my dad might feel if he were to listen to it, and seized with fear that I was both misremembering and misrepresenting experiences, I grappled with words, sentences and language that felt inadequate and unsubstantiated. 20,000 words seemed to swell to 40,000 and slimmed down to 10 or 20. Everything sounded clumsy. Nothing flowed. I was bored. Bored, bored, bored of it all, bored of myself. This was right, but that bit wasn’t. This was right but now it isn’t. The delete key pressed, pissed off by my own pretension, start again, fresh document, fresh page. Too white. Put it in dark mode. Maybe I need a notebook? Ink is too black, ink is too blue. Hate it all.

By the time the deadline swung around and Rich sent me a polite ‘where are we up to’ message, I had little to play with. Or, I had something, but it was square and I was sure he was looking for a circle. Probably looking for the most perfect circle he’s ever seen in his whole life, and he’s expecting me to create it for him, and I’ve not so much as even seen a circle, let alone known how to draw one.

It wasn’t until I’d ignored Rich’s message for a few hours that I finally saw an email from Ruth Allen’s substack. The title was something like ‘Don’t make perfect the enemy of good’ or similar. I didn’t even click on the link - just looked at the title.

Don’t make perfect the enemy of good.

Ok, I thought, Ruth’s sending me a message through the universe. Let’s do it your way then.

And so I took my little delusional mind, and with Ruth’s (entirely imaginary) reassurances, I started cobbling. I cobbled harder than that slow moving figurine in Timpson’s window, and pulled it together.

I recorded it in virtually one take. I sent it off. Here it is.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

If you have 24 mins, I’d love for you to listen to it or - even better - subscribe and listen to the other episodes to support writers who perhaps have wrangled just as hard as I have to produce something for your ears.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

I am very aware both of these platforms are doing horrible things to the world, free speech, the environment, creativity and music. At the moment, I am not sure where else the podcast is available, but I will update when I find out.

You ever do something so wonderful, so beyond what you thought was capable for yourself, so eye-opening and transformative that sharing it - with anyone - feels as if you’re flattening it? Like you don’t want to share any of it. Words feel cheap, paper-thin. Describing the water in Slovenia as quartz cut, horse teeth yellow, white-gold, deep gold-green, cobalt, the veined hatching of lapis lazuli, quartz-glittered, lime-white, chalk specked and diamond dashed. Turquoise, topaz, shifting in frothing white tipped foam tossed over dolomite and limestone. Did you know limestone is always trying to be something other than itself? Do you know it’s always pulling on, drawing out, swapping in the chemicals from everything it touches - trying to become more stable - from everything around it. Limestone doesn’t realise it alters the environment just as much as the environment alters it. I screw up this last metaphor and toss it in the bin behind me. Too obvious.

I wrote this huge thing on the panic attack I had up the side of Triglav mountain. What a place to have an anxiety attack - I can tell you. What a place to feel yourself float out of your body and out into the big, endless sky. What a place to stop breathing and to die. What a place to just accept that you weren’t good enough, that you were right - just as you have always been right - about your pathetic inability to succeed. What a place to give in. The very peak of Triglav is sharp and white above me - a perfect mountain shaped mountain if ever I’ve seen one, like a mountain you drew when you were a child, all right angles and pointy. Except it’s not white at all. Now I am looking at it, as I am unable to breathe and am dying, it is not white, but ammonite, slaked lime, egyptian cotton, dimity, satin slipper, wevet - oh wait, hang on, aren’t those Farrow and Ball paint colours?

A woman’s body holds me tight and I feel myself coming back to life. Breathing stills. Her skin smells hot and like suncream. It is 35 degrees celsius and she’s wrapped herself around me, telling me you are safe, you are safe. I have no recollection of my mother ever doing anything quite as kind as that, but I suppose it felt motherly (I cross that bit out, it always makes people uncomfortable when I insinuate my mother wasn’t the gentle, warm presence mothers are meant to be). The woman’s generosity at my most vulnerable moment still brings a lump of emotion to my throat, but I am not sure how to explain this to anyone without it sounding contrived. I had a panic attack half way up a mountain, here’s what I learnt! Get ready with me to have a panic attack halfway up the mountain in Slovenia! I just finished a huge mountain ride in Slovenia, here’s how I did it. I hate that everything’s a learning experience now, ready to be packaged up into bite-size chunks of feel-good propaganda, but I did learn that when you feel you feel you can no longer trust yourself to exist in reality, sometimes putting your trust in someone else feels safer. The woman asks me to put my trust in her. She holds it for me, gently.

Later in my article I try to describe what it is like spending a week amongst 16 other women, sliding together down gravel tracks into valleys so green and lush that I can literally only describe them as ‘Jurassic Park’ because the English language is so bone-dry that the only way to explain what I mean is to liken it to Steven Spielberg’s 90s film. Countless times on this trip I expected to see a pterodactyl gliding alongside the shaggy cliffs of the Julian Alps, a winter-haired Dickie Attenborough smiling serenely as we dwell upon the global implications of genetically engineering previously extinct mega-predators.

The trip winds through neat little pockets of agriculture with simple Kozoleci hay lofts, and squat alpine style cottages steeply pitched. Cows with alpine bells at their necks clang lazy as they move beneath patches of shade. Crap, I’ve gone on too long about the landscape again - no one wants to read that - and forgotten to talk about the women. The other women are always the bit most people are afraid of and the bit everyone asks me shyly about. They don’t want to admit they’re scared, but I understand. I underlined that worry with three, hard pencil lines in my notebook before I left for the trip - what if they’re too strong, what if they don’t like me, what if I say/do something stupid? What if I never click with them? What if I don’t like them? ‘You got on well with the others, then?’ people ask in a half, off-hand way - as if it means nothing to them really. How do you put a shape, colour, sound, texture to those tiny threads of human connection that eventually become the fabric of your trip? Too many. So I say that Lucy stayed by my side for the whole trip, completing every climb together, celebrating. I give them a knowing look. Do they understand that? I bought her a red friendship bracelet in a tourist shop in Bohinj. We sat on the shores of the lake with a picnic spread out between us while she unwrapped it.

The chair creaks slightly as I lean back in my chair and re-read, with tired, scratchy eyes what I’ve written. It still isn’t right. The angle feels awkward and tense - much of it reading like I had a really really bad time. I’m bad at explaining my anxiety, which peppered this trip like little inclusions in crystal (I like this simile, I’ll keep it in), and I’ve not showcased how much I enjoyed myself.

It doesn’t feel truthful to beef it up, it doesn’t feel truthful to minimize it. I’ve never been fully able to articulate that my anxiety is as much of an impulse as breathing is. It’s stitched into the lining of my skin, into the shape of my eyes, the hollow of my belly and the pitch of my voice. And so just to be able to ride in Slovenia - to book the trip, to get on the flight, to stay in a dorm full of strangers and to keep cycling every single day - laughing, celebrating - cannot happen without being marinated in anxiety. But it isn’t appealing to read that without some sort of redemption arc, or a neat, pithy I did it despite the anxiety, or here’s how you can do it too!

I sigh. It’s too late for this. I’ll begin again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll talk about the alpenglow on the mountainside - orange and pink like the centre of a creme egg. Or maybe the smell of the night as I sat out in a tangle of alpine strawberries, the sky growing dark and the stars flickering on one by one. Or perhaps waking up at dawn to pad quietly down to the lake, and slip into the water cloaked in a dense, ghostly fog - so blue-clear you could see the Perch flitting beneath you.

I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll just write that it’s the best thing I’ve ever done and leave it at that.

Komoot - the online mapping tool and app - has recently announced an integration with ChatGPT. You can now prompt Komoot to plan and deliver to you a curated list of all the routes of your dreams - replete with highlights and elevations and anything your heart could possibly desire. No longer would you need to trudge - morose, weary and inexplicably dressed in Victorian garb - through the suggested routes other users have uploaded, ChatGPT can find you everything you could need and more.

The update was not welcomed warmly. Most of the comments beneath the 20 second reel Komoot released on instagram followed the written equivalent of the middle finger. ‘Fuck you’ said one, ‘no one asked for this’ someone else added. Other users eloquently described the hypocrisy of ‘an outdoors app powered by something that destroys the outdoors’ and the bizarre treachery of an app they ‘thought was about community’.

In a world that currently seems hellbent on shoehorning AI into absolutely every single thing in our lives (whether or not it makes sense, is financially viable, or even wanted by users) and then charging us a premium for it, this latest addition to a small mapping app perhaps does not come as a shock to you. Indeed, I am mildly surprised such an integration has not come sooner. However, it feels like the first spools of smoke curling beneath a locked door, signalling a disturbing shift that I have been perceiving in the steady commercialisation of the outdoors ‘industry’.

To use a mapping analogy, I can’t figure out where going down this track leads us. What is the end game of this? When you boil it all down, what does adding ChatGPT actually give us?

Now, do not get me wrong. I am not a luddite, and I’m not decrying this usage of AI with my walking stick and fists thrown shaking to the sky and I do not believe that Ye Olde Times of some indeterminate past was quantifiably better in every respect than Right Now™.

But - QUESTION - why do we as a collective have a tendency to believe that the passage of time leads ostensibly to progressively good and positive outcomes for us all? Like, there’s this weird belief that we have much better lives than anyone else in history has ever had before1, and any technological advancement will only continue to serve that trajectory if we only allow it to happen. But you merely need to have a surface level and fleeting understanding of history to know that is a logical fallacy, and actually maybe, just maybe, we’re either in (or about to be in) a pretty shitty epoch. I dunno, I am not a persistent reader of dystopian fiction, but I do know an unchecked consumerist technocracy usually doesn’t end well for the weird future humans (Brave New World / The Circle / Fahrenheit 451 / Oryx and Crake) and I don’t really want to be part of the social experiment apparently trying to prove them wrong.

Back to Komoot.

If you’ve been involved in some level outdoors pursuits since about 2015, you’ll be familiar with the indefatigable rise in app-based navigation and the proceeding issues they’ve caused. Inaccuracies and over-reliance, coupled with a degrading of core outdoor skills, have led to both loss of life and a sanitising of the outdoors. Indeed, I’ve all but stopped using it for my cycling trips following a particularly devastating bike tour that underestimated the elevation so significantly that I genuinely believed I had hospitalised my dad. Apparently elevation in these apps can be inaccurate by as much as 50%, which it turns out, can be a huge fucking deal.

Big adventures taken on by novices, streamed, filmed, shared for clicks, likes and follows. Navigation apps sit at the heart of this shift in utilising nature for commercial gain; at one point there was nary an instagram influencer that wasn’t promoting Komoot usage and sharing their adventures with little regard for how their audience might engage with it. Blindly following the apps, eroding (or even not bothering to develop in the first place) navigation skills by outsourcing thinking to an algorithm already seems risky. To outsource it even further, to me, seems wild.

But maybe for you it’s not a huge issue? After all, it’s just simple curation - not much different from what we already do with google. And maybe this is the lesser of all evils when it comes to using ChatGPT. All we need to do is prompt komoot and within seconds you have a perfect shortlist. You tap, you sync to a navigation device and bon voyage! Not a second of excess thinking, planning or worrying wasted. Turn yourself into the little God you know you are - every whim, thought and desire catered to in an instant. The only thing you’re required for is to know what your heart wishes - and even that can be outsourced to the AI if you would like. Maybe that’s a harmless good. Maybe we are all spending a bit too much time thinking about the landscapes we are travelling through anyway. Maybe too much thinking has been the problem all along.

Sigh.

It becomes a slippery slope. What happens if certain towns, tourist boards or landowners start offering money to prioritise certain areas, or deprioritise others? What happens to access to our home landscapes then? We already know that permissive paths require the evidence of usage to continue to be a public right of way. What if those….simply disappear? Don’t think about it, it’s too awful to consider. In fact - actually, no - don’t think about it at all. See? Too much thinking has been the problem all along.

At its least terrifying, however, this next iteration in the navigation based fuckery, I think, will lead to the complete loss of creativity in route development and we are going to be all the worse for it. A few years ago I was lucky enough to interview Jenny Tough on stage at Kendal Mountain Festival for her new book Solo. Part of the conversation switched to route planning, which Jenny is known for very rarely sharing in full. ‘It is a creative act,’ she had said, ‘a big part of the adventure is in the planning before you even set off. You need to know and understand what you’re getting yourself into, and my routes and my choices should never be yours’. I could have chatted to her about those few sentences all night - it was the first time I had heard fully the planning process properly described as ‘creative’ and I loved the idea that simply settling into Jenny’s GPS line could be a form of plagiarism. Why should her choices and her route be your story, too? What would you lose in trying to follow her footprints?

Since then, I’ve seen route planning and development as an art form and a practice. The people I know to be good at it - my friend Abi for instance - have a deep understanding of the landscape, how to move across it, sensitivity towards cultures, communities (and I would argue) respect for history. Route planning is akin to storytelling. Plenty of people can tell stories, yes. More people can be taught how to tell stories. But there are few of us who have that innate ability in their soul to wield, edit, curate into an experience and know how to execute it.

Watch elderly fell runners congregate before a race to plan out a route. Note the extensive and communal map-scouring, the shaky writing of illegible coordinates on hands and arms and listen in the discussion of the various merits of various bearings. The communality of the route planning, drawing on each others’ experiences and memories of the landscape to build out the run is magical. These memories, passed between one another, help keep the community alive, and it’s this we risk losing.

Personally, I am not great at planning routes. I am not that good at reading maps, and I do like to follow other people’s GPS lines - at least initially. At its heart, do I think a simple curation tool is inherently dangerous? No, I do not. And sometimes I do fear we are legitimising AI by giving in to the fear of it taking over the world so quickly. I do, however, recognise the skills that I and others erode by relying too heavily on these things. I recognise that in seeking the perfect routes for my every need, I am not not being given the opportunity to get lost and make mistakes, and therefore am losing confidence in not knowing how to rectify the mistakes of pre-planned routes.

‘Oh, so you agree, this could help more people access the outdoors!’ I hear you cry, ‘knowing where to start in nature can increase people’s participation rates, and everyone has a right to the outdoors!’

At this point, I pinch the bridge of my nose, and sigh long and low. I need a second to compose myself before I respond to you, because just outright calling you a fucking dingbat for missing my point would be rude and I don’t want to hurt your feelings. I fear that we would need a whole new substack to discuss the numerous barriers facing people’s access to the outdoors - including (but not limited to) land ownership and trespass, disability, the cost of gear, fast fashion, the transport system, gender inequality, safety, class division, racism - none of which are adequately or even possibly solved by integrating AI into mapping apps. And truthfully, is a company that was sold to Bending Spoons (the conglomerate well known for software enshitification and mass redundancy) really interested in your access to the outdoors? Or, like with dating apps, is it just committed to keeping you dependent on them?2

In late summer 2025, two members of our local running club stepped down as race directors of the Sandstone Trail Challenge. They’d been successfully hosting the race - all 34 miles of it - for a number of years and had finally decided that enough was enough. The challenge had a number of great years under its belt with several sold-out dates, but had recently dwindled as bigger and flashier races had edged themselves into the racing roster. People seemed to want less old-school grass-roots events filled with squashy peanut butter sandwiches and salted hula-hoops from the boot of a car, and more retouched photography, branded merchandise and glittering, heavy medals slung around their necks. Our little local race had become a bit of a relic.

Upon hearing the news that the Sandstone Trail was newly director-less, my good friend Liz asked if I would like to join her in taking over the race. We had both done the race before (Liz completed it several times, while I have finished it in two halves), and both adored the route. It trundles leisurely through such a variety of forest, dappled woodland, neat agricultural land and spits you out beneath the incredibly historic Beeston Castle. With blood orange sandstone crags to climb and powdered red stone under foot, this is a landscape we know intimately. ‘I think we can breathe a bit of life back into it’, Liz said.

So we set about it. We were quickly joined by experienced ultra runner Matt, and soon were elbow deep in spreadsheets, email inboxes and plans. We’d agreed the dates, rewritten the webpages and risk assessments, applied to the council for licences, paid for insurance, booked the chip timing company and the coaches, adapted the budget, planned in and developed the marketing and by the time Christmas crept onto the horizon - released the tickets. It felt like a momentous occasion as we sat back and watched the entry counter tick up to 100 within the first couple of days. We didn’t even need to threaten our friends and family into signing up!

And then we received a text message with a BBC headline that we could never have anticipated: the Llangollen Canal, the very starting point of our race - in fact the exact starting point - had collapsed. The canal. The canal had collapsed. Like properly-drained-and-slid-down-into-a-field kind of collapsed. That certainly had not been on any of our risk assessments.

The rerouting has been quite complex so far, though luckily Matt has taken on a lot of the responsibility of developing that strategy. Route building has never been my strong suit (as my dad will likely attest to on many of our bike rides!), and he seems to have 6 or 7 back ups for every plan we make, rubix-cubing our way forward. Our race takes place in May, and I am glad this has happened in December - a 5 month lead in time means we’ve got breathing space.

But do you know what? I couldn’t be happier about this turn of events. If such a thing were to threaten at work, or in any other aspect of my life, I’d be curled up under my duvet sobbing to myself and making little headway. But this seems… almost fun. Maybe I’ve just grown up, or maybe I’ve finally found something I genuinely enjoy working on - who would have thought?

Many years ago, when I first got into running, I knew I wanted to do two things: Run an ultra race and RUN an ultra race. Those of you who have waded into the dark and strangely potato-ey world of endurance sport know the glory of both of these achievements - of creating something that lives in other people’s imaginations, but also completing something that has captured your own. I’d sit and watch the Ginger Runner on youtube, huddled around my laptop screen glued to the experiences of those taking part in Tiger Claw, Squamish, Cascade Crest 100 and other suitably American sounding races. The funny little backwards-capped, colourful runners, seemingly capable of moving for hours without their smiles slipping, beckoned to me. Those videos still carry me through my own running ambitions 15 years on.

Finishing an ultra still hasn’t appeared in my cards yet - but it will be eventually - I believe in the cards! Until I turn that card upwards though, I’m hoping to create something for others.

There’s so much we want to change, build on and improve in this race. Less than 30% of the start line is women, and I am convinced some of that is due to us not having portoloos around the course. People want medals, and we would like to give them the opportunity to commemorate their achievement at this distance. We want to work closer with the local businesses and community that help us make this happen every year - often in quiet, self sacrificing ways. Running (and training to run) 34 miles is rather a selfish act really, when you think about it. We hope we can find ways to make that time and energy worthwhile for the community and charities that bolster us.

On that latter point, I’ve talked endlessly about the importance of building good community in sports and outdoor pursuits. I’ve told people how worried I am about the reliance on brands to make things cool and relevant, and how much of grass roots sports is currently being single-handedly carried by retired men and women working tirelessly to build opportunities and keep networks alive. I’ve mentioned that I am concerned my generation and below are too financially and temporally insecure to be able to continue to uphold those communities, and how I think we will see - in the next decade or two - a substantial degrading of these already-dwindling spaces. I’ve talked at length about how I am worried that community is being replaced with consumerism.

This is my tiny attempt to rebalance the scales. It’s not instagram-worthy, nor located in the challenging terrain of the lakes, the peaks or Scotland, nor is it working with an edgy brand to market something else you don’t need - instead it is pouring time and love into the countryside I get to walk, cycle and run every day and the people I don’t know yet who keep this sport alive for me.

If you’re interested in our tiny Cheshie based ultra race, we have (at time of writing!) 100 places left. It takes place on 10 May 2026, and follows the Sandstone Trail from Whitchurch to Frodsham (but we will stick you on a coach and take you to the start for free if you join us in Frodsham).

Please see here for more information: https://www.helsbyrunningclub.org.uk/sandstone-trail-challenge/

The race name is officially the ‘Joe Beswick Sandstone Trail Challenge’, named in honour of a longstanding member of the running club who poured his heart and soul into our local running scene. So loved was Joe, that he also has his own archive and a woodland trail in his memory. Hopefully we will do Joe proud.

This race is entirely volunteer-run. I am not getting a single penny to put this on, and while I wish I could earn a bit more to cover my bills, it seems my super skill is working for free. All profits will be both donated to the various charities we are passionate about and returned to our run club, in order to support more people in their running journey.

Remember: the above recording is the voice note. I am working on getting a transcript generated for anyone who would rather read - but until then, it’s an audio experience.

Hello everyone!

This is my new series where I share short voicenotes on the books I have read, been reading, loved, liked and in some cases thrown in the bin.

For my latest episode, I am chatting briefly about Thirty Below by Cassidy Randall, an incredible piece of narrative non-fiction of a virtually unknown all-women first ascent of Denali in Alaska that took place in the 1970s. Pulled from archival material, journals, interviews and the scraps of media coverage, Cassidy Randall has woven together an incredible fabric of women’s mountaineering history in this. As Cassidy Randall notes at the beginning - by the 1970s, we’d put man on the moon but women had barely stepped foot on any of the world’s highest peaks. This book tries to shine light on the women who attempted to change that.

I INHALED this book. Loved every second of it, and believe it is well worth its win (? Need to look that up!) at Banff Mountain Festival this year.

I don’t think you necessarily need to understand much about mountaineering to get this - Cassidy Randall hasn’t gone heavy on the jargon and explains basic principles without being patronising. Definitely one for those who really love a bit of outdoors history.

Audiobook - give it a swerve. Get yer mitts on a physical copy if you can!

It is midsummer. Nearly 10pm but the sun is still less sunset and more a denim crease in the sky and it is oppressively warm. Far too warm to be indoors, and much too hot to begin thinking about sleep. My skin is sticky and I want to claw it from bones; so instead I am standing in the garden barefoot, wearing little more than a linen camisole and boxer shorts, toes curling into the too-hot sandpaper patch of parched lawn. I am looking up.

I am looking up because I think, for perhaps the first time in my life, I can hear bats. I can certainly see them; flitting and flickering in and out of sight, like torn bits of bin-bag blown into a breeze. The evening is starless; the heat so thick it seemed to occlude both stars and moon and settled like a heavy blanket over the housing estate, yet once you get your eye in, the arched wing of the bats - inked blacker than night - are unmistakable.

To call it ‘hearing’ is an overexaggeration. It’s more like a pressure deep in my ears - so deep it is almost palpable as a thrum against my vocal cords - not exactly comfortable and hardly a ‘sound’ I could point to anywhere external. It’s highly disconcerting. The closer the bats fly, the more the thrumming pressure increases, but they are disinterested in my presence and so wheel away. The pressure then rises and falls in my body like soft waves. It’s not overtly perceptible, but it’s enough to tell me that something is here and to warn me to look for it. Had I been sitting on my phone, or talking to a friend, I doubt I would have noticed it. Or, at the very least, I’d have brushed it off as a pulse of anxiety or maybe even a touch of acid reflux.

But here, outside and bare foot, the bats tap out a rhythm on my bones and I listen.

I am writing this in December. The bats are long off hibernating, and our street is currently glittering and twinkling in draped fairy lights and ‘Santa Stop Here’ Signs. Next door’s children are bundled in bobble hats and red scarves, small fingers pulled reluctantly into knitted gloves and feet into Wellington Boots, even though it is barely single digits in the mercury. The rest of the summer passed without another dialogue between the bats and I, which is sad, but also understandable. The bats have better things to do than commune with me.

I am thinking of this now because the author and naturalist Stephen Rutt and writer Claire Todd have recently collaborated to produce an audio journey across bat landscapes in their podcast series Echoes and Whispers. It’s beautiful: Weaving interviews and field recordings to tell the story of four British bat species, and including their clicks, squeaks, calls, and layered with impassioned words from volunteers attempting to bring them back from the brink. I am listening to it as I work late into the evening, and as Stephen speaks, am reminded of the myriad of ways we experience nature that are beyond just seeing and witnessing.

Throughout my childhood, I spent more time reading books or watching nature documentaries than I ever did outside actually experiencing it. Though fascinated by animals and plants, the occasional glimpse of a fox, squirrel or bird while out on late sunday countryside walks was the best I managed. The advice from my parents at each interaction was always to stay still, be quiet and just watch. Watch with your eyes. Just observe. Remember, we are separate beings, unique and independent entities - to be experienced only through rational, scientific observation. We have nothing in common, the foxes, squirrels and I.

Bats staccato against my own fingers, tapping out words on plastic keyboard beneath yellow light.

Years ago, I worked in Chester at an old Steam Mill. Steam Mills tend to be a bit of a penchant of mine, favoured throughout my career for their character, atmosphere (and ghosts!). I’ve worked in three of them so far - all have been near impossible to reside in once January sloughs off its dampness and dons frigid gloves, but cheerful enough if you come prepared with hats, scarf-blankets and a good attitude.

Opposite this particular Mill is an abandoned building called the Shot Tower. It had been earmarked for demolition some years prior when a developer took over the site, but just as bull-dozers rolled in to raze centuries of brick dust to the ground, two peregrine falcons were discovered nesting atop the tower and all work was immediately ceased. It has since has stood, abandoned and untouched for this nesting pair to return to ever since, a pencil line on the horizon, stained red-brick from centuries of industrial pollution: a peregrine’s dream home.

For my four years of working in those offices, the peregrines became a core feature of my day, punctuating meetings and coffee breaks with their familiar call. Flying above the mill, I’d see their shape loom larger in the skylight, and the sudden paper-crackle of hundreds of pigeons taking flight. My skin would crawl as the screams of the adult birds swelled in the office; the vibrations seemingly meeting something very ancient and somewhat unknowable inside my chest. Hair would prickle along my forearm as my body responded involuntarily to the noise, back stiffening, ears pining towards it. In those brief seconds, I’d forget I was a modern woman at her laptop responding to pointless emails about pointless issues, and I would become, almost entirely, an abstract form of mammal cowering beneath a rock as danger passed overhead.

It was completely bizarre. I once awkwardly joked in a meeting how unsettled the noise made me, and was met with blank stares from almost everyone in the room. One colleague, dispassionately looking at their nails, replied apathetically ‘I didn’t even know there were any birds there’.

In the summer, we began to renovate the roof terrace space our offices led onto, hoping to use it to work outside in the warmer weather, or to host evening get-togethers. Sweeping, cleaning and the purchase of heaters and garden furniture with chains to weigh them down soon commenced. We found quickly that the plan had a huge peregrine-shaped hole in it, however, when one lunch time, one of the pair dropped half a pigeon carcass into my colleague’s tupperware box as she ate. She sat frozen for a second, staring in horror at the plucked and bloodied chest cavity and the spiral blue veined intestines swimming in her cous-cous, before catapulting the box, with previously unknown athleticism, right off the roof and screaming her way back into the office. It took us a full hour to calm her down and she pointedly refused to eat her lunch out there ever again. Judging from the piles of bones and feathers we found on the terrace, the peregrines had long been using the site as their garbage disposal, and we’d just moved in.

Early summer. Hatched light: the dappled leaves of beech, ash and hawthorn knitted into a tunnel on this old back road I am travelling. It is early morning, the sky still woozy and wibbly-blue as the sun burns off the early spring mist. Green, gold, yellow, pink flash past, dew drops hesitate on bare branches and robin sit bristling in the undergrowth. I am cycling my bike up a steady incline, happily singing to myself in the silence - it promises to be a beautiful day.

This year, I have ridden my bike on exactly this route almost every morning, and I have begun to know it intimately. In later years, this habit will waver and die as I experience one too many close passes by sleep-dragged commuters haring along in expensive Audis, but at this very moment, I am alone with strong quads and cold fingers and very much in my element.

Alone. Very much alone.

Or, wait…am I?

There’s a prickling beginning in the nape of my neck, familiarly uncomfortable and distinct enough to tell me that someone is watching me. So, I stop. I am not too proud to take a breather on a hill, and besides, I can hardly get a good look at a possible voyeur from my position on the bike. As I slow, squeezing my brakes, I notice that the road has suddenly become stiff and still. Expectant, pregnant, weirdly silent - you know like that moment seconds before a play begins? The birds have stopped singing. Even the light breeze seems to be holding its breath in anticipation. There’s something going on.

But there’s no one here. Really, there isn’t. I swing my head this way and that, rapid-fire, craning over the winter- flayed hedges. I really am alone. Surely I’m alone?

I stay very, very still for a second, listening with all my might for a cough, or a shuffle, or a ripple of jacket that will betray (what I imagine) is a man in a long trench coat and harbouring a balding pate, a bag and some rope hiding behind a tree. Nothing.

Oh well, I think, exhaling. I take a swig from my bottle and move to push the bike forwards, and that’s when I see it.

From the corner of my eye, there’s a movement in the trees - almost like a bundle of cloth dropped from the upper branches. As I turn, I know immediately what I’ll expect to see - and there it is. From a crumbling gate post sits, upright and full chested, a buzzard. Her - and don’t ask me how I know it is a her, but it is - bright yellow eyes trained intently on me. She is, without a doubt, watching my every move. We look at each other for a moment, eye contact direct and strong. I feel a fizzing begin in my fingers as my heart wallops the inside of my rib cage: I have never, ever experienced anything like this before. She is observing me silently, completely unphased by our proximity and - I write this now, almost arrogantly - perhaps curious of this strange creature appearing in her territory. I can see the darker edges of her feathers, the gnarled creasing of her beak on the face plate. We are close enough to see the slightest movements in each other’s muscles. Her claws tighten on the cracked, decomposing wood beneath her.

Seconds pass. Or maybe it is minutes, hours, lifetimes, aeons - I can’t say. But we stay spell-bound until she breaks it suddenly, and lazily spreads her wings to half mast and lopes off up the road. With nervous, shellshocked hands, I take after her slowly, cursing the slight clicking my bike makes, and fumble to find my phone for a video. She drops to the road a few meters ahead, and turns again, with frightening intensity and appraises me fully. I do not hit record. I stay still. We stare again at one another, and I am unsure that whatever is passing between us could ever be described accurately to another human being. This is something just between us - a conversation that she began for an unknowable reason, but one that cannot be continued with human language.

Our dance repeats for another few meters. Her rising languidly into the trees, and then dropping down again, leapfrogging each other as we move along the hill. She is curiously following my progress with her lamp-like eyes, and I am trying desperately not to scare her off, willing this interaction to last as long as possible. Eventually, she becomes bored and melts back into the thicket beyond the hedge. I hear her call pee-hew far in the distance moments later, and the road seems to roar back into life again in my ears. It was as if she was never there.

The rest of the ride continued in a strange half-dazed state. I felt as if I’d been stripped naked, fully picked over by a bird a quarter of my body size. To be appraised, perceived and considered by another animal felt almost jarring. Was there an understaining between us? A recognition?

I was reminded on that ride that I’m just another animal myself. Maybe a slippery, weird, hairless ape who worries about her made-up job, and cares about a very expensive and resource-sapping nest, but one that should be in the wild, just as she was.

We can experience in more ways than just watching.

Stephen Rutt and writer Claire Todd’s podcast Echoes and Whispers is available on Spotify or Youtube. I’d really recommend a listen. Thanks for inspiring this substack!

More information on the project can be found here: https://stephenrutt.com/echoes-whispers/

If you don’t want to listen to my preamble and just want to get into BOOKS, please scrub to 1:37.

Hello everyone!

The audio above is the main point of this article - it’s not a voiceover but a little voice note about the book below. If you don’t like listening to me, that’s totally fine - just skip this newsletter.

The big idea

As mentioned in the above recording, this is going to be a ‘series’ of ‘voicenotes’ where I discuss the books I have read, am reading, that I have loved, liked or hated. The intention is that they will be informal and unedited, just like my voice notes to my friends are. Hopefully over time I will develop a bit of a structure so that they’re not PURE waffle with syrup on top, but until that time, please enjoy my brain dumps.

The idea came about following some presenting work I did at Kendal Mountain Book Festival over the weekend (see below picture!). I’ve been lucky enough to have this gig over the past 4 or 5 years and have interviewed some incredible people in that time, often lamenting that I wish this was my full time job. Who wouldn’t want to gab about books all day?1

But this is the era of information and as my friends rightly told me this weekend - I CAN just shout my thoughts into the void now. So here we are!

Episode 1: Your Absence is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Starting it off strong with a fiction piece - highly unusual because I normally hate fiction - Jón Kalman Stefánsson takes us on an Icelandic journey through existentialism, death and some incredibly moving writing.

I picked this up in the library as it was on the ‘just returned’ shelf, and drawn to it mostly because it had a picture of a mountain on it. That’s it. Incidentally, this is rather a dangerous book selecting tactic; as Super Hans once said ‘People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people’. I’ve picked up some proper duds this way.

However, I sort of struck gold - or at least pyrite anyway - with this translation. Containing themes of time, love, community, nature and identity, nihilism, Stefánsson weaves together complex ideas through a very character-driven storyline. Do I like it? Did I love it?

It’s certainly an interesting one!

Have a listen!

What do you think? Have you read it? Would you like to?

Please note: the voiceover has some attempts at Welsh words. I am learning, and they are not great, so if you find that kind of thing annoying, please just read! The audio quality isn’t that great either, but I didn’t have time to fix it.

Ink blot sky, daubed sodden brush strokes of greys and blacks, weepy, forlorn, melancholy. The crows circle, scudding overhead, their cawing clear and strong above the skitter of dry leaves on tarmac. A short traverse across a waterlogged field, hedgerows still bright with vermillion berries where beetle-eyed birds take shelter, their songs stoppered in their throats. Grass licking at my boots, broad and fat like cow tongues, I push ahead. My socks are wet, my bones are chilled. There is a howl curling about the oaks that edge this field, the remnants of last night’s storm blowing itself out: it’s loud, but the ferocity has all but dissipated now. It whips and furls, coils and tousles, before exhausted, falls back into a weary silence. I am safe in its breath.

At the stile I look back towards the fields, a uniform little patchwork tumbling down to the inlet of the river Mersey. I can see my house from here and on the very far horizon I can just make out the faint bruise of the Welsh mountains. They are usually lit blue in the height of the summer glow, but are now a squat brooding band of anthracite barely visible. I squint, trying to make out the crest of Moel Famau - mother hill - with its familiar stubby memorial on top. Today it is shrouded by a low cloud cover and a sheet of driving rain. So I press onwards, up the lane to the postbox.

I love this season.

Perhaps it’s because I am northern, perhaps because I was born in November, or perhaps because I read too much 19th century gothic literature in my teenage years, but there’s nothing I enjoy more than the drawn nights of October, November and December. The girdle of summer is released, and I can breathe again as the leaves fall and turn steadily to mulch. I’ve never much minded the cold, the wet, the dank.

As Emily Bronte shared in words far more masterful than I could ever conjure:

I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

Every year, I feel my feet become earthier and mossier as I wonder whether I’m really built for this world. I don’t want to sit at a desk, I want to feel cold. I don’t want to do performance reviews or write strategies or send emails that find you exhausted but on your third coffee of the day. I want to sit and listen to the wind. Maybe this is ageing; realising that time is drawing us back to the sodden earth. This is how we make peace with our mortality, by practicing our place in it.

Recently, I’ve started to pick up Welsh. I am not Welsh, but it is the country my grandparents laid down the roots of their lives and where their bodies - in death - still remain. It is a landscape steeped in my own memories and that one that genuinely feels like returning home, though I have never lived there. Can colours, smells and contours be home?

Last week I listened to a podcast in both Welsh with spatterings of English to help inform the context. The guest was discussing gardening, and I realised with a jolt that I knew what she was talking about. She mentioned llysiau (vegetables) that she liked bwyta (to eat) and described moron (carrot), cenin (leek), tatws (potatoes), blodfresych (cauliflower) and betys (beetroot). If you’d have asked me earlier that morning what any of those words were in Welsh, I wouldn’t have had a clue. But lurking somewhere in a dim, dusty corner of my brain, I recognised those words. I’m sure my grandmother must have taught me those words at some point whilst helping in her kitchen, but I don’t recall the moment. But hearing them again, and feeling no need to struggle to translate those words to English - just knowing them as well as I know the words in English - it was like coming home.

The Welsh language, I think, is one of the most beautiful languages in the world. With 29 letters in the alphabet, it is alien to most English speakers, having evolved along an alternative branch of language to the Germanic English. It is aural and poetic, a language rich in lyricism. Designed to be spoken and sung aloud, mutations and inflections litter nouns and adjectives, allowing you to imply, shape and change meaning with the slightest adjustment of sound. Welsh is a language formed along the spine of the mountains and the hollow belly of the valleys, forged through the hands of communities who layered meaning into words. It is a language that cannot exist without the history of its people.

And so as I am walking through the fields in my small Cheshire village, where our toponyms have largely faded from historical usage into cheery marketable nomenclature: Cherry Tree Lane, Waterside Drive, Bracken Street, I am feeling like I know even less of this land than I ever have done. On an old map of the area I have from 1874, the only notable landmark in this part of the village is the path I am walking to a well, and ‘Mary’s Cottage’. Otherwise this is 3.86 acres of common land, defined by its commonality and ordinariness. Now it is in private ownership, Mary’s cottage is long gone, and the path is a permissive route often blocked by bullocks.

I recite the months of the year I am learning in Welsh aloud as I walk, because Welsh is designed to be spoken loudly into the fields. I get to October Hydref, then to November Tachwedd, and finally December Rhagfyr. Unlike their latin loaned counterparts earlier in the year (Awst for August, Mai for May, Mawrth for March for instance), these words have echoes of their history in them.

Hydref, for instance, roughly translates as the stag’s bellow, the period of the year that the stags begin their rut and their call would have been most familiar. Tachwedd has its etymological roots in the ‘slaughter’ of livestock, or ‘Tynnu tua’r diwedd’ the ‘pull’ or ‘lead’ towards the end - you can see how those two ideas may have once intermingled. And finally, Rhagfyr, the ‘foreshortening’, in honour of the days shortening to darkness.

What does knowing the etymology of those words in Welsh do? Nothing - really. But they remind me again that we did, once, live in a rhythm of cyclical seasonality, and our language evolved to reflect our landscape and our place within it. And I imagine that was cyclical too. The language affecting place and place affecting language. But I lose sight of that in English. I stop being able to see as well in these words I am so bedded into. I think that’s why I like learning languages so much. It helps us see, these words. It ties us to our history, and the commonality of humans and our connection to earth.

And so I am in the season of the stag’s bellow, the slaughter and the foreshortening, and I wonder if I think a little bit more along those lines what will we learn?

I am standing in a climbing gym looking upwards. The air is chalky and smells slightly of feet and sweat, indistinguishable music pulsating just below the steady buzz of laughter, clinking plates and the whine of the auto belays. A woman I don’t know is repeating a phrase and showing me how to tie a figure of eight knot. Make the alien, tie a scarf around his neck and poke out his eye, she is saying. Her hands, much older than mine, are thickened with callouses, rope burn and age, but she is moving her hands slowly so I can see her movements clearly. I copy clumsily on my own rope, my muscle memory unformed, the weave unfamiliar and unyielding. Good, she says encouragingly, now follow the knot.

This woman will repeat the demonstration three more times to help me learn. When we are done, she shows me how to belay, utilising the rope and leveraging her stance to keep her partner safe. After this, she will nod, smile, and walk away without ever telling me her name. An investment into a complete stranger, the transfer of wisdom and knowledge offered entirely for free, time given without the expectation of anything in return; I do not realise this now, but I have entered a gift economy that will see this process repeated again and again and begin to shape who I am.

I’ve recently finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry. A tiny little gemstone of a book that argues powerfully for a rethinking of the economy in only 108 pages and pencil drawings, it’s part poem, part hymn, part mantra, and it’s thrummed around in my head since I closed its final pages.

If you’ve never read it (and I heartily endorse you do so, along with RWK’s first and second books Gathering Moss and more famously Braiding Sweetgrass), The Serviceberry explores the idea of gift economies and how these little interconnected networks help us survive and deepen our connection with each other and the natural world. It’s a compelling and reassuring subject, especially amidst this disturbing post capitalist hellscape we are finding ourselves in, and I’ve cast my mind around for evidence for gift economies in my own life. What can I find that embodies these networks of sharing and giving? How does Robin’s indigenous wisdom show up in my daily monotony of a small Cheshire town?

The funny thing is, when you start thinking of knowledge, experiences and things as a collective, and you reframe them as gifts, suddenly you’re in a veritable melting pot. A melange, if you will. Awash with the richness of it all. From the blackberries I’ve plucked from hedgerows with my grandmother, to the language I speak, the hobbies I've been introduced to by friends, to the tangible gifts of spare inner tubes from passing cyclists. Viewed as kind gifts from others rather than transactions or responsibilities, your life glitters. Kind people appear in every corner of your life, and protecting those networks becomes paramount.

Closing The Serviceberry, I realised I could write about so many instances of the gift economy. What about when my friend Thea took me cold water swimming in the lochs of Scotland, or when an elderly man sat next to me on the train and gave me his last chocolate mini roll because I was crying, and then listened to me talk for two hours? All full of the warm fuzzies, but all instances. I wanted to think about the systems, networks and mechanisms that exist to prop up a gift economy. Daydreaming, my mind returned to that woman in the climbing gym all those years ago.

Rock climbing as the gift economy

Let’s start by sharing the fact that climbing is based almost entirely on the sharing of experiences and knowledge. It’s technical, relies heavily on equipment and - if you’re climbing outside - an understanding of weather, terrain and rock. I know climbers that can read the surface of a rock as if it’s pages of a book; that takes years of experience and dedication to achieve with authority. Entering climbing mostly requires dedication to a semi-mentoring relationship, with more experienced climbers sharing their expertise to guide and shape newer incumbents. Both experienced climber and newbie need to be connected by a thread of interest and a commitment to keep sharing and receiving this knowledge.

Doesn’t that sound lovely? And it is, generally. But it also contributes heavily to the inaccessibility of the sport. The gift economies exist, but are historically, and even frequently, exclusive to men. We all know that women - holding more than 60% of the caring obligations in the UK - rarely have the free time and financial availability to make such commitments. Their routes into climbing are often through costly courses they only infrequently undertake and so learning and confidence is slower1.

In Dorothy Pilley’s 1935 book Climbing Days, she dedicates almost 6 chapters to essentially describing her humble climbing beginnings in the early 1900s. Almost all of the mountaineering and climbing she completes is garnered from a handful of men willing to impart time and knowledge to teach her. Repeatedly she is reminded by other men that her training is a waste of time, though she takes all of it in her stride and in 1921 goes on to set up the Pinnacle Club (the first women’s climbing club - still in existence today!). A pernicious perception not entirely faded from popular consciousness.

Perhaps in large part thanks to Dorothy, I am lucky, and slightly unusual, in that almost all of my rock climbing and bouldering endeavours have been under the guidance of other women. I recognise how unique this experience must be: most of my peers come to climbing because a father, brother or (male) partner has introduced them to it, and so their grounding in the sport is heavily biased. In a world where an ‘easy’ move on the wall is determined by a specific wingspan or height, the knowledge, wisdom, and gear shared in these gift economies - when a woman is finally accepted into them - is skewed entirely towards the experience of one group of people alone. I’ve known really strong climbers who genuinely believe they are rubbish because they’ve always climbed with blokes twice their height who are able to brute force their way up routes.

My experiences of climbing are different. All the knowledge I have acquired have been from other women - women climbing instructors on women-only days, women’s climbing symposiums led by women olympians and the elite of the sport, women friends who have spent years within the climbing community and women at climbing festivals. Entering into the sport, the names that dominated my sphere of consciousness were Lynn Hill, Beth Rodden, Catherine Destivell, Shauna Coxsey, Molly Thompson-Smith, Akiyo Noguchi, Sahsa DiGulian, Katie Brown, Jain Kim, Janja Garnbret, Gwen Moffat, Emma Twyford, Hazel Findlay. Even now, I know more women climbers than men, and climbing still feels highly feminised to me.

I learnt to climb where a different language was spoken. When you first get into climbing, you’re befuddled by the different grading systems that exist to explain how challenging a climb is. These vary between countries and sports - bouldering, ‘trad’ (traditional) and sport climbing - all have a diverse ways of explaining the safety of and technical ability of each climb. You’ll hear about ‘V’ grades in bouldering (V0 - V8), and in roped climbing you might hear things like ‘6a+’ (the technical grading) or ‘Hard Diff’ (the adjectival grade). I won’t get into this - but there’s a whole thing in grades - whose ‘hard’ and whose ‘easy’ are we describing? It’s all very esoteric and a whole substack in itself. You’re told you need to participate in this language, and reframe your understanding of difficulty through this lens to be a climber.

Except, in the gift economy of climbing, you don’t actually need to. Grades didn’t factor much into my climbing at all. The women I climbed with taught me to focus more on my body and on movement itself - the feeling of my muscles, the touch of rock and plastic, listening to my body as my guide. Weaving my way up the wall, climbing becomes a dance; careful toes pointed, hips angled into the wall, high knees. I watch other women as they twist and pull, and mimic their lines too. Rarely do we discuss grades. What’s the point? What does it mean anyway?

My friend Emily asks how does it feel if you push your hand harder into that hold? Others call up, what do you think about that? What is that like?

Feel. Think. We are asking each other to speak from our bodies and share our experiences. This makes it clearer and easier to understand how routes might affect us, and where we might need additional support when we have a go. Exchanging knowledge like this - gifting each other our feelings and emotions - connects us much closer not just with each other, but with ourselves. I’m more confident when I can anticipate the emotions in my body before they occur and can see how others have processed similarly.

We celebrate instead smaller achievements. We don’t need, or even care, if we reach the top. I just wanted to get that move, someone would say, I just wanted to see how that might feel. We cheer that progress. The cheer instills confidence. We go for another move.

And we share knowledge. Pass it around like warm bread at the table. At one women’s weekend recently, I spent almost an hour working with another climber to learn from a board attached to a tree how to safely set up my top rope. Over and over we worked on knots, clips, anchors. Communicating through anecdotes and this time I did this to broaden our message. Reassuring smiles. Pointing out mistakes, correcting processes without judgement.

And we share time. My hands hurt, I call to my belayer below, can you take some slack so I can rest a sec? And so she does, hoisting me tightly and holding me suspended in space for as long as I need. My legs dangle into nothingness, my face a meter from the cool dappled limestone. I am level with great golden headed treetops here. Anxiety flooding my system subsides and I can reach up again to carry on. The gift of time and safety at the expense of my partner's comfort allows me to progress.

The belayer

Let’s turn our attention now to the belayer below me. I’ve long felt that the belayer is one of the most selfless positions in sport. It can be grueling on the neck and the shoulders looking upwards at your climber, palms gripped on rough rope, brow furrowed in concentration as you listen out for instructions or try to anticipate moves that might need extra slack. Your partner’s safety is paramount, and so crucial is the belayer’s role that it doesn’t just make or break a climb, it controls your continued existence on this planet. The trust required to bark instructions without guilt, communicate clearly without fear of reproach, feel each other on the end of the rope, estimate possible slips, hand and gear placements can take a while to build up. My favourite belayer is my friend Emily - she seems to intimately know, almost milliseconds before I do, what I will need. I’ve never felt safer with anyone else nearer the wall.

In our gift economy, the belayer offers safety and understanding of our personhood and shared wisdom of climbing. A good belayer will provide the very foundation - the rock bed, if you will - of progress, and their investment in you pays ample dividends forward.

The gear

Gear is rarely shared prolifically in climbing, mostly, because it is hard to know how it has been used. If you’re taking a fall, a cheap second hand harness with dubious origins might not be the item you’re willing to stake your life on. But we will share what we can. I could tell you about the bits of kit friends have gifted me over the years, but instead I’ll share with you the climbing trousers. In a weird Sisters-of-the-travelling-pants vibe, my friend passed me a pair of climbing trousers she no longer needed once. Made of thick denim to cope with the harsh demands of coarse rockface, these are expensive additions to a wardrobe, and one I’ve not previously invested in.

Maybe you could view this as a simple act. People give each other shit they don’t want all the time; in small British houses, space is always at a premium. But viewed instead from RWK’s gift economy, this is an investment into someone else (in this story - mine). It is an investment into community.

Those trousers went on to do me extremely well. With thicker fabric at the knees, I was able to protect more of my skin and climb for longer. I could build up new moves I wasn’t able to do before in flimsy leggings, and I took those trousers on many trips both to the climbing gym and beyond. Like a good uniform, they also solidified my place in the climbing community: everyone knows if you turn up to the gym in climbing trousers instead of leggings you’re serious2. I wear these trousers as a reminder of my friend’s investment in me, and look after them, hoping to gift them again to someone else in the future (if they’ll take them of course!).

In a similar vein, gear stuck in rocks is often sacrificed and collected by another climber at a later date when it has had time to weather. If it’s tagged, it is dutifully returned to its original owner; if not it is collected. A climber will usually always share with you when and where a specific bit of gear was found. I pulled this one out of a climb in Peak last season, they will say. It is a reminder that we are part of a network of others, and an acknowledgment of their presence before us.

The rock

And finally, we come to the crux (if you pardon the pun). The question I have been teasing myself with all along as I have written. In The Serviceberry, RWK uses the berries to teach us about the gift economy. I am not as poetic, but I do want to ask what can a rock teach us about the gift economy of climbing? And more importantly, because as we have seen the existing gift economies are not perfect, what can we learn about how to improve our gift economies?

I think my thoughts on this might fluctuate over time and I am not sure I have a full answe. But let me respond by telling you that the way we move and climb them together provides a shifting, altering connection to one another. The basis of rock climbing is communication and listening. Without either of those things, we’d never - as a species, as individuals - have managed to develop this weird and bizarre sport safely.

Robert McFarlane speaks of rocks as if they are rivers, and I agree. They have a fluidity that completely defies any kind of static definition. What is an easy grade to one person is almost impossible to objectively measure. How we continue to relate to the rocks must always be done through experience and feeling - and we must know ourselves before we are able to share that more broadly.

But to move away from the hippy answers, I think fundamentally and crucially, climbing relies on trust and continued investment in economies and communities that cannot be commercialised to survive. My trust in my friend Emily as The Very Best Belayer in The World ™ came from years of (mostly voicenoted) shared thoughts, shared knowledge, shared language, support and - I hope - love. No one would pay for that connection, nor could I ever package or sell the thumbprints she’s pressed into the plasticine of my life.

Rock doesn’t demand anything of us. It doesn’t owe anything to us. But to exist in it, to enjoy it, we need to create our connections. We need a gift economy.

Post script:

In August 2025, my friend Emily (The Very Best Belayer in The World ™) trialled an all-women’s climbing weekend in Yorkshire. There were six of us in total, with a range of experiences in climbing outdoors. We hired a woman instructor to support our learning, but the intention was to create a space that allowed us to progress using shared experiences without it being too formally led. We cooked together, ate together and even went swimming. Emily has some plans for more weekends in 2026 in Scotland and the Peak District and if you’re interested in hearing more, please drop an expression of interest at this link.

Lately, my fantasies circulate around a life lived as an aristocratic poet in 19th century. I’d wake whenever I pleased, drink copious amounts of coffee, spend obscene amounts of money constructing a vast Manor House and invite absolutely no one to dine with me. I’d then write about my miserable existence whilst living in fabulous opulence with an army of unseen people anticipating my every desire more or less a moment before I cared to desire it. Not one person would need anything from me, ever.

Anyway, I have nothing substantial to write on, so thought I’d experiment with a format that the wonderful and constantly inspiring executes so well in his Unplugged series - small musings about things currently capturing attention - but with less structure (so nothing like Alex’s work).

Film photography

Recently, my very lovely friend Abi gave me her half frame Kodak camera to use on a bike packing trip we went on in Scotland. Except for my childhood and at an occasional ‘quirky’ wedding, I’ve not used film before. I’m not a very good photographer as it is, and film has always felt beguilingly complex to my small mind., requiring a capacity for framing and a patience for creativity that I simply do not posses.

As it stands though, Abi is excellent at passing on her passion for hobbies, and I’m certain that at this point - many years into our friendship - I’m largely just a vestibule for her interests. I have no independent personality anymore, I am just an Abi mimic and I am ok with this. In a society that often belittles female friendships and hobbies, experiences, knowledge and passion passed down through women feels a rather radical act. Abi is really good at photography - and especially film - so she makes me feel like I love doing things for no other reason than it is exciting to do so.

Today I got the scans back from the past few months and they are, on the whole, terrible. But I love every single one of them in a way that I don’t love any of my near-40,000 iPhone photos. Each one is a tiny little story in blurry, blown-out miniature and feels undoubtedly and uniquely me.

I’ve been exploring ways I might experiment with film types and have been bogged down in ISOs, grain and different colour gradings. All of it feels deliciously new and exciting. There really is nothing I enjoy more than being a complete and utter newbie at something, just tentatively teetering on the precipice of obsession waiting to jump.

Couch to 5K

Back in January I broke my ankle (yes, this is rather becoming a catch phrase of mine), so for the past months my life has been dedicated to a structured and rigorous approach to strengthening my lower kinetic chain. I’ve not rushed back to running, despite it being one of my most favourite hobbies and sorely missing it; instead trying to develop a healthier relationship with my body, getting to know how it feels in circumstances I’d normally push through.

The Couch to 5K program - though normally 9 weeks in duration - has stretched and flexed as I’ve taken breaks and repeated runs. I’m on week 8 now, attempting to run 28 minutes continuously. It’s slower than the previous runs I would do, but I don’t care one bit. Just being able to run at all is miraculous enough, and I have a whole new appreciation for the body that’s managed to rebuild itself inch by inch. Do you know how hard running is? It’s actually insane. The fact that I used to run a casual 6 miles before starting work seems entirely alien and I must have been utterly insufferable to everyone around me.

I’ve been doing at least one or two runs a week for the past few months (all outside thankfully - that makes a huge difference to my brain) and I realised on my last session that this is the longest streak of running that I’ve been able to do in years. Prior even to my ankle break, my body had suffered such a compendium of injuries that it was rare to be pain free for this many weeks consecutively. Maybe all this time I did need a little break.

Triathlon

In July I did my very first triathlon - mostly because I am in my 30s and a medal was offered. It was an interesting experience. I hated the swim with an unholy passion and hope I never ever have to return to the filthy River Dee ever again. There is something in access to clean and safe water I would like to write about at some point when I have more than half a brain cell available to me, but until that point you’ll have to deal with a summary that triathlon really is a dumb fucking sport.

That is all.1

Cycling in the Mountains

Last Thursday I took a day off work and drove to Anglesey. The intention was to go to the beach, but just as I crossed the border the mist rolled off from the sea and I realised I wouldn’t have a particularly enjoyable time sitting alone on damp sand in deep fog. Not that I didn’t consider it; I am after all English, and any temperature above 15 degrees celsius is more or less beach weather to me - whether or not the beach is actually visible.

Instead I chose to go over to the mountains, determining that you couldn’t ever really see the top of them anyway. This turned out to be a good decision, and I trundled along the Lôn Las Ogwen for a few hours in relative solitude and just the steady clink of slate beneath my tyres for company. My god do I love the mountains. I particularly love the North Welsh mountains which feel remote and wild yet are entirely, incontrovertibly carved by human hands over centuries of mining and farming. Riding this route, I often find myself staring at the drystone walls and have wondered if there would be an appetite for a book dedicated entirely to the history of and the people who built these drystone walls.

I have done this route so many times - it’s only about 22 miles in total and almost totally off road - and have seen it in almost every season. The colours, the shapes, the sounds, the smells (sheep, metallic of slate, hot wetness of sunbaked fires) seem to shift relentlessly and I’ve never seen it look the same way twice.

If anyone has any book or poetry recommendations about the Ogwen valley, I would love to hear it. I’ve been looking into some of the oral history archives, though a lot of it isn’t categorised for easy searching yet.

Books I’ve finished

For the past few years I’ve endeavoured to finish 52 books a year to represent one per week. With exam revision and an uptick in writing commissions (thank you!) this goal has become all but impossible this year and I’ve instead had to carefully select reads in accordance with energy levels. I have tried with fiction, I really have, but I just hate it. The characters tend to bore me, I guess the ending within the first few pages and I ruin it for myself by overthinking the writing. Anyway - here are some of my favourite reads of 2025.

Cairngorm John - I’ve lately become such a fiend for mountain rescue stories, and this one has to be a staple for anyone interested in the outdoors. John Allen was the leader of and heavily involved with the Cairngorm Mountain Rescue for over 30 years, and charts the changes in the team from his joining it in the 1970s to recently. He writes respectfully about the rescues, and I spent the whole book entirely in awe of what these people do, day in and day out to keep us safe. Another good read is Hamish MacInnes ‘Call out’ which charts the period of Mountain Rescue before John Allen came on the scene from the 1950s-1970s (although in Glencoe). Much more gung-ho and a very typically 1970s read.

The Search by Paul Besley - Another Search and Rescue book, though this time about the relationship between dogs and dog handlers. Except it is so much more than that; it is about and his life too, and the challenges he has faced. It is beautifully written - and I mean seriously beautiful - reflective, a little funny, a little sad. It’s been one of my favourite reads all year. I listened to the audiobook version and for the first time in my life didn’t speed up Paul’s narration. I wanted to spend time with him, Scout, and his story and hearing it at a steady pace felt important.

If you would like to purchase either of the above books, please could I recommend you do so through Vertebrate Publishing. They are a great publisher investing in incredible people and stories and I would love to see them flourish rather than lining the pockets of the other giant online retailer that we won’t name.

The Postal Paths by Alan Cleaver - Part travelogue, part history, I genuinely believe Alan Cleaver wrote this book specifically for me. It weaves together every single one of my interests so perfectly that I kind of wish that I had thought to write it first. Alan charts the history of letter writing and the rural postal service, trying to find the stories and histories of the people who connected rural communities for centuries through the paths they walked. Uncovering the men and women who walked up to 20 miles a day delivering letters, news, companionship and healthcare to remote farms, cottages and villages was no mean feat and he expresses that he should have written it a few decades ago, as so many of these people have been lost to us. An incredible reminder of the power of the handwritten letter.

and finally, football.

Returning to where this supposedly short substack began, my friend Abi has recently introduced me to the incredible world of women’s football. I’ve never cared about football before - men’s or women’s - but recently found a deeper connection to it through Abi’s passion and interest. I now know all the rules and can write a pretty good critique of playing too; so much so that even my Dad sat down with me to watch for the Euros Final last week and we had a decent back and forth about the playing together.

Sports really does change the world, and it helps to see women on the pitch.

It’s early somewhere in Prestatyn, and we are in the kitchen of an airbnb I have rented to provide a stopover on a long 100 mile bike ride from Holyhead to Chester. It’s our first big overnight trip together. I have just woken and padded down the stairs quietly to make some coffee only to find my dad, fully dressed and inexplicably in his helmet, bustling about. 

‘Er, it’s a porridge pot,’ I say, slightly confused, ‘have you never seen them before?’

‘I saw them in Aldi the other day’ he says, ‘You pour hot water on them, and they make porridge that actually tastes like porridge’. He turns back to the kettle, shaking his head, utterly incredulous. ‘In a pot! I’m already on my second one!’ 

This interaction - my dad’s apparent first - with the humble porridge pot has served to underline many of our subsequent adventures. So pinnacle was his initial introduction to these little oat based conveniences that he mentions them at least once a week and is currently planning a camping trip, I am certain, purely as an excuse to eat them without arousing suspicion of his deep and complex addiction. Moments following this brief interchange, the beguiled expression on my face suddenly turns dour when I realise that the ‘second porridge pot’ he’s ‘already on’ happens to be my breakfast, and I silently rue the day I ever introduced them to him. 

I tell you this story because it’s a lovely segue (do you feel segued yet?) into a topic that I have wanted to discuss for some time (and even at one point wanted to write a book on, but sacked that off quite quickly when I realised how hard writing a book is). I didn’t know that my dad had lived a life sans porridge pot, and I also didn’t know my dad would be so enthralled with them when they serendipitously and momentously emerge with theatrical poignance into his life. There’s lots I don’t know about him. But the topic I’d like to discuss is the privilege of actually getting to know your parents as adults. And for us, that means by bike. 

The humble bike

Dad and I began riding together a few years ago. I’d been regularly cycling and enjoying it for some years prior, and though I can’t remember the exact event that spurred a decision, I do know he had to take a complete leap of faith to join. He’d not ridden a bike really since I was little and had held the back of my saddle as I took my first wobbly pedal strokes. He says now that he wasn’t sure if he’d enjoy it when he first began, but he knew if he wanted any chance of spending time with me, he needed to jump on board one of my hobbies. And that hobby so happened to be cycling. The lovely warm circularity of this image is not lost on me. 

Luckily he did enjoy it, and very quickly we realised we had a good thing going. We did a succession of rides across the North West of varying length and difficulty, all slowly and in our own time, and Dad’s confidence began to push us out into longer days in the saddle. We both live in Cheshire, and so gradually branched further into North Wales, and began taking on hills, and trips that required little bits of pre-planning; route design, logistics, additional coats, carrying additional food and water. 

We spent a lot of time on the phone, making decisions, planning things in and then riding together. We talked a lot, and being able to discuss cycling helped us get to know what we liked and didn’t like. 

On long rides, we often explored political issues or things that were going on in the news. We had to - we were often in each others’ company for hours and hours at a time with no-one else to distract us and there’s only so many times you can discuss ‘how are things at work?’. We learnt how very very different each other was, how we didn’t see eye to eye much at all but we were interested in finding that common ground. My dad would challenge but listen, and I would do the same. It rarely resulted in a change of opinion, but it made us understand how differing views evolved and were retained. Ultimately, on a bike, we learnt it’s best not to have a full blown argument when you’ve still got another 20 miles of hill riding and one of you is carrying all the food and the navigation device. It’s not a mistake you want to make twice. We learnt to agree to disagree, but also to find a respect in one another’s perspectives that made a conducive conversation much more accessible. With the wind in our faces, the big glorious views across a ridgeline, or the sharp twist of a lane rising sharply was always enough to temper a disagreement if one was ever to arise. And really how can you be angry with someone else out in the big wide world?

Role flip 

One of our first more ‘adventurous’ rides was a trip over to the Lon Las Ogwen in Eryri. It was a route I’d done the previous summer alone, and the photos I’d shared with him had captured my dad’s attention. He had repeatedly suggested he wanted to do it, and so one warm summer’s morning, we headed over to Bangor. Clinking boats in the harbour, big blue skies, we followed the slate trail up through dappled and hatched-lit woodland into the quarries and through to the broad bottom valley. Dad’s from this area originally, but the route had been inaccessible until recently, and so we were travelling through a familiar-made-unfamiliar landscape. Dad talked more than he ever had on that trip; pointing out land features and geology, of the history he knew and his memories of growing up on Anglesey. He took off his shoes and paddled his feet in the copper and duck-egg blue stoned Afon Cefin that gurgled and crashed its way alongside us - something I never imagined him doing. 

It was as if the backdrop of the mountains strung out a washing line on which to hang his thoughts upon, and I could finally begin patchworking bits of his real personality together. For the first time in my 30 years, this wasn’t just my dad riding alongside me, but Peter. A man with more colour and dimension that I’d ever noticed before, with real thoughts and feelings and interests beyond just being a parent. I hadn’t realised I’d been missing that. 

This shift in dynamics became most apparent when - as is often to happen in cycling - a mechanical hit us. Dad’s old bike had a load of issues with its rear wheel in later life, but this was the first of it happening. As an Engineer - and parent - Dad instantly took charge, but realised quickly he couldn’t do it and panicked. So I took over. It was the first time I’d taken charge in my life and it felt weird, but it was clear I had more knowledge of bikes and a calmer head. In many subsequent rides, I’ve continued to take on this role. I’ve learnt dad’s bike skills are shaky at best and he’s not the most calm when things go wrong - it’s my job to steady the ship. 

A return to the kitchen

I will take this moment to drag you back to the kitchen of our airbnb in Prestatyn, where my dad is still musing over the wonders of modern technology in his second (my) porridge pot. The trip we are on was borne out of a long standing dream for us - to ride from my Dad’s childhood home in Anglesey to his current home in Chester. It’s more than 100 miles - far more than either of us have ever tackled in a weekend) and we’re just beginning our second day on the coastal path.

The previous day had been a trip into my dad’s youth. We visited his school and my grandparent’s old home, the towns he knew, the paths he’d followed, the pubs he’d been sick at and the friend’s houses he’d visited. I didn’t know any of the stories he’d told me; he was plucking out happy little anecdotes from a small-town childhood spent amongst kind neighbours and community. Using names I wasn’t familiar with and locations I didn’t know. We hadn’t used my bike computer once to navigate; he had done it all from memory.. He’d been transported back in time, and here I was, chasing the young lad he’d been, across the island. We laid flowers on my grandparent’s grave on Church island and shared our lunch on the stone wall that overlooked the Menai Strait. Salt and seaweed stung our noses. 

Long days in the saddle suited us. Dad loves the challenge of a long ride (something else I didn’t know about him), and we can talk much more easily and freely as the legs turn beneath us. He relaxed into himself on that ride, spurred on by confidence in himself to get to the top of big hills without stopping and chasing the goal of chippy closing hours. We sat in silence at Prestatyn with bags of chips burning our hands, watching the nectarine sun bleed gold and pink into the sea. Our faces sunburnt, both exhausted and dusty.

On reaching Chester on the second day, dad raised a pint to our teamwork. The second day had been tougher, with a 10 mile climb over Halkyn Moors in the full faced heat of the day. He raised an ice cold beer to us - we’d reached the end as a team. Not as father and daughter but as two people working to their strengths to support one another. I’d spent the day morale boosting, managing fluids, navigation and dealing with peppered punctures, he’d kept going despite it hurting.

Parkrun 

After that ride, Dad’s confidence skyrocketed. He started joining me on a Saturday morning parkrun, where I learnt he is incredibly competitive and stubborn to a fault. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so determined and resilient; running doesn’t come naturally or easily to dad, but he was completely unwilling to give up until the very end. Heavy breathing, sweating and utterly miserable, he would pound every meter of that 5K, picking off various other runners every week until he could pass all of them. Neither of us had much breath to talk during those mornings, but just being able to run alongside each other and spur one another on was worth it. When I’m in a hole, even now, I think that if dad can make it to the end of a parkrun, then I can do anything. 

And now….

This weekend I have just come back from my dad’s first camping trip. In a summer heatwave, it turned out to be one of the most challenging rides we have ever done together. As in, I genuinely believe that at one point I almost killed him (it had been me that had planned the route - not my strong suit). I’d been wondering where his limit was, and I think we both found it - halfway up a hill in Shropshire about 10 miles from our campsite. He threw a temper tantrum, he refused to go on. Usually so mild mannered, I have never seen him so frustrated and annoyed, even when we smashed a very personal commemorative plate as a kid (we were throwing a ball in the house, despite being asked repeatedly not to).

But once again, he trusted me to get him through. And the next day we planned our route together - this time as a team - and it was heavenly. I learnt that even though I’m in my 30s, he still really likes to parent sometimes (and showed me how to properly read a map). 

So, on the privilege of getting to know your parents

I recognise not everyone has this opportunity - heck, even I don’t with my own mother whose relationship soured over a decade ago and we haven’t seen each other since. Growing up, my parents divorced and all I really wanted was to spend time with my dad, who offered stability and sanity in an otherwise chaotic and often frightening childhood. Dad had to parent a lot in my youth, and the role he played must have been conflicting and challenging - I think over the years he has struggled to move out of that mindset of ‘dad’. But cycling has offered us the opportunity to explore more about what makes us people, rather than the flat, one dimensional version of ‘father’ or ‘daughter’.

We don’t have the same political views or opinions and often descend into arguments. But we listen to one another. Learn from each other. On the bikes, we’re a team. So Dad - thanks for these years, I hope we have many more adventures together.

New: I am experimenting with a very unedited recording of me reading this piece to perhaps improve accessibility. I regularly send my friends 10 minute voice notes on similar subjects, so now you too can get that same experience! Set playback at at least 1.25 x if you’re used to listening to things; I’ve purposefully slowed my speech.

In April 2024 I stood in a hotel room in Warsaw, looking over the city beneath a clear, crayon blue sky and read an email from a cycling apparel brand asking me if I'd like to join as an ambassador to ‘help [them] build a community’. I sighed, deleted the email and locked my phone. I was in the Polish capital as part of a conference hosted by the United Nations and Habitat for Humanity to discuss the complex reintegration of refugees from Ukraine - something I knew very little about but was attending to learn more. I’d spent all week listening to humanitarians discuss how to support displaced people after earthquakes, floods, and conflict and how a community can make or break an individual’s resettlement.

There was an irony to receiving that email following that conference, magnified by my gazing over a city that, less than a century ago, had been razed to the ground and then painstakingly and communally rebuilt after WWII using collective memory and the literal fragments of brick dusted with the bones of their citizens.

Many months later, I was sat in a stuffy community hall meeting room discussing the painstaking process of trying to attract the minimum number of volunteers to safely put on an event, and decrying the lack of interest or uptake. Montane’s Spine event, I thought moodily, had a waiting list for volunteers, and we are barely even getting a handful. I later asked a runner friend if they would volunteer for a couple of hours. ‘What do I get out of it?’ he asked bluntly, ‘what’s the point of it?’

As different as these experiences were, both moments stirred the same realisation in me: the purpose, and definition, of community is shifting.

I realised that at some point along the way, we’ve started outsourc ing both the concept of and responsibility for community development to brands. Or, perhaps even worse than that, we’ve somehow permitted the redefinition of community to become some sort of marketing metric we can measure.

And do you know what, I don’t think brands should be in charge of that.

In the outdoors industry

Many moons ago, when I was but a mere tentatively concerned netizen, still moulding my views, I was often bombarded with requests to join brands, and regaled with the promise of extra kit and gear in exchange for ‘contributing to the community’.

I was, of course, flattered. I hopped on calls with brands, keen to discuss their community development endeavours - I was wide eyed in my naivety and the prospect of ‘building a community’ at the time was still novel and progressive. Pushing the brand with a series of questions though, the calls often ended depressingly - what they really meant by community was more likes on social media and a bigger audience to sell their stuff to. They’d happily put on a few events, they said, but they needed to understand the return on investment. ‘That’s where you come in,’ they’d say.

Every brand conversation I have had subsequently followed the same script. Every brand wants, or has, a community - in some cases that looks like shop based group runs, shop rides or brand events - and they integrate ‘outreach’ into their marketing contingent on their balance sheet. Community now means clicks, likes, sales. It means getting the right people to wear your gear. Or at least be seen in it.

A few years ago there was a spike in brand-run community challenges, such as Rapha’s Festive 500 (ride 500km over the Christmas break - I know, lol). At the time, I was on my soap box about how inaccessible these events are to (mainly) women, and spoke to a marketing friend. ‘Why are these all about bloody long distances?’ I grumbled. He shrugged, ‘the further you have to cycle, the more stuff you’ve got to carry, and the more gear we can sell you to carry it’. It all made sense.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is, or at least one of the problems is - to my mind anyway - that these ‘communities’ are steadily edging grassroots communities out. Brands have comparably large budgets and influence, able to reach broader audiences than smaller volunteer led initiatives. Brands are sexier, cooler, more exciting. You might end up in their social media promo, you could get free socks if you join their event; wearing their gear is a visible pledge of allegiance to a specific cause for minimal effort. Small, local organisations that rely on the generosity of time from residents have struggled comparatively to compete.

It all becomes transactional. We all have competing demands for our time and attention now, and we should be forgiven for living in a society that requires so much from us. But in a world where you don’t have the headspace for messy social interactions, isn’t it convenient how easily community can be bought and sold, can be clicked and received through the letterbox? You are part of a community if you continue to buy and continue to engage in content; you are a consumer first, an active participant second. Brands can facilitate that, and social media lubricates your pathway into it - share your political perspectives, favourite music and carefully curate every facet of your personality and the people you choose to engage with. Tribalism can now be purchased.

Please don’t get me wrong though, people can and do genuinely gain something valuable from these groups, and there are some brands that are endeavouring to do good with that. For some people, this might be the only accessible way to gain the social connectedness we are all intimately craving. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, nor am I suggesting that these should be eliminated entirely - but crucially they should be part of a healthy and varied fabric of groups and events with broader societal objectives than just ‘sell more shit’.

Brand run communities are a bit like planting mint into your garden; it looks cool, smells nice and it seems quite versatile, until you look away for five minutes and suddenly it’s overrun all your beds, is already strangling out any other plant that even considers putting down roots and you’ve just realised you really can’t think of anything else to use it for but mint tea. Brands should be part of the garden, not the whole bloody thing.

And while we are on deceptively deep roots, I’m concerned about what that reliance on a brand ends up doing for people who want to enter your sport, or your group. Take Rapha for example (apologies to Rapha for being picked on so frequently, but it is rather easy to do so), who recently announced their latest ambassadorship composed entirely of men, and three only women (two of whom weren’t able to attend the photo shoot).

My question to you asks what you think that does to a ‘community’? If the brand runs both the community side and the commercial side, how are you supposed to see yourself reflected?

If brands in the cycling world control the ‘vibe’ of cycling, manufacture clothing for a specific type of person to wear, and also create the parameters of the community, who has a real choice to join? Do you feel welcomed as a woman when you cannot find gear to fit you and the promotional material all feature lithe men? Or are you once more reminded that this is not the place for you?

What’s worse is that as smaller organisations are squeezed out and competition is reduced, brands homogenise. They no longer need to work as hard to compete, nor do they need to take any risks with their branding. They have a broader market share, and so this ‘face’ of the sport normalises.

On social media, I and others complained viscerally about this choice. But upon reflection I realised my concerns missed the point - because I was still expecting brands to uphold the complexity or ‘truth’ of community I experienced daily. But the ‘truth’ of this community is not as aspirational, nor as marketable, as a white man.

Capitalism eventually eats itself

Capitalism, by very definition, is designed to extract wealth out of the economy. In case you’ve never taken a business class, a business’ sole objective - its raison d'être- is to make money for its shareholders. Nothing more, nothing less. Businesses spruce things up, add fancy missions and fun values with quirky titles, but all of them are arbitrary in the face of their bottom line. It is the reason shareholders didn’t utter a peep when Elon Musk did his disgusting salute, but piped up in the sudden wake of a halved share price: if eating dogs and cats suddenly became fashionable in the UK, you can bet businesses would have them on our plate by Monday, no questions asked. Cycling, running, swimming and rock climbing brands are ultimately no different.

When a business can no longer compete and it can no longer meet shareholder expectations, it collapses, and takes with it everything it has suckered up, leaving nothing behind. We cannot willingly hand the keys of community over to corporations, no matter how shiny or cutesy they look. They must operate within a woven fabric of opportunities and options.

After the Tik Tok ban, I saw the hairline cracks in people beginning to realise that you cannot build communities on land you do not own, especially when that land is subject to shifting sand.

Community, when it is real and genuine, is highly resilient and is based wholly on reciprocity, which often means doing things you might not want to do to help others out. It isn’t tangible, but reliant on messy, complex and nuanced networks that tie a vast swathe of people together through shared knowledge and support. These people may be much older or younger than you, they might be richer or poorer and you might have pockets or groups that bind to you through different threads of interest, experience and locality. It’s messy and difficult and inherently unmarketable.

But community is the thing that keeps us stitched together, and I’m not sure we should trust that to anyone whose goal is to sell us socks.

Do you?

Leave a comment

To caveat this entire piece - I am aware that there are a multiplicity of nuanced perspectives to this argument but to include all of them would take all day and likely never arrive at a solid point. So please, as my substack suggests, take these half formed thoughts and feel free to muddy them further with your own.

This is an injury a long time in the making. As a runner, you’re always partially expecting a broken bone or severe sprain to yeet you into bed rest for a few months, and so when the sword of Damocles fell - finally and heavily - onto my head, I felt ready for it. It was like paying a debt I’d been dodging for a few years, resigning myself to parting with cash I had, with prophetic awareness, always assumed I’d need to pay.

And so I did pay up. Not exactly in the most dramatic of ways, I literally fell into a pothole while out running with my running club. It was actually more embarrassing than it was painful, the tears stinging the back of my eyes as I felt that ominous pop more from the fact that I’d landed flat on my face in front of other adults than from any pain. It’s funny how the body will shield you from agony until you’re safe; I was fully able to walk the kilometre or so back to my car with only minor support from our wonderful run leader Lauren, who despite my protestations, refused to leave me in the dark and cut her run short to ensure I got back safely. It’s wild that I could walk at that point because it ended up taking about 5 weeks before I was able to put any weight on that foot again and still, 10 weeks after the injury, I am struggling with push off. The flood of pain, the bloom of dull ache only crept through my body once I was sitting at home in the comfort of my living room. My body kept me going until it knew it was ok to fully feel the effects of the fall.

Anyway, the past 10 weeks since I did that very boring run-of-the-mill injury has been a bit of a whirlwind of self-discovery for me. Whenever I've had injuries in the past, I’ve dealt with them very badly, and initially I was totally expecting to have another catastrophic meltdown at my curtailed freedom. However, as I steadily emailed to withdraw from events, voicenoted friends and clicked ‘cancel’ on various trips I’d planned, I actually began to feel an enormous sense of relief. For the first time in a long time I made a decision to view this situation with the frustrating positivity I’d always been suspicious of in others, and it ended up working out.

So why am I glad I broke my ankle?

I got the best night’s sleep of my life

Like many of us out there, I am not a restful person. I do not enjoy sitting still, I do not enjoy relaxing, I do not enjoy having little to do, and I will often reply to the question ‘how are you’ with ‘busy’, as if that is a legitimate emotional state. Sleep is often depriortisied in my life, though I know academically its benefits. One rule for thee, another for me, am I right?

For the first few weeks following my injury, I moved into a makeshift spare bed so that I could wriggle and elevate my ankle to my heart’s content without disturbing my partner who is the lightest sleeper in the world. Despite the mattress’ possible origins as a literal concrete slab, my body put me into the deepest and most restful sleep of my life. I was regularly getting 10 - 11 hours of sleep a night, undisturbed, and waking up actually feeling refreshed. I’ve always been a 7 hour girl myself, enjoying rising early to greet the birds and the sun, alone and quiet.

As my ankle has improved and I have more movement, I am more inclined to sleep in, go to bed earlier, and replace a workout with a lazy morning spent in bed. I’m better at reading the signals for tiredness now, understanding that they are nuanced and important to listen to - fatigue isn’t one dimensional, but should always be taken seriously.

It reset me too. Amongst other shifts in my life (namely, having time to address a persistent b12 deficiency), the perpetual bone-tiredness I’ve always been dogged by my whole life has improved massively.

I’m forgiving my body for being human

Like a lot of women my age who grew up with their newly fledged eyes wide open to the absolute mess that was heroin-chic late 90s and early 2000s culture, I have a long and complicated relationship with my body image. I won’t go into the myriad of issues that I have experienced with my body because it would be both duller than watching paint dry and would take about thirty years just to finish reading.

Much of my propensity for running and cycling has ultimately been underpinned by a deep-seated fear of gaining weight. I’m extraordinarily ashamed to admit this because I am vocal and adamant that there are much more interesting aspects to any person than how much they weigh, and do truly believe that - for anyone, of course, except myself. The fact that I can still fit into clothes I bought when I was 14 at the age of 32 has been less about aesthetics and more about a carefully controlled power exercise I’ve meticulously maintained. Putting on weight has always felt like a deviation from that dictatorial regime, and it is scary.

Through immobility though I have put on weight. Friends and family keep telling me that it isn’t noticeable, as if it were a problem even if it was, but for the first time ever, I don’t care. I have more energy now, and eating well without worrying about the implications, prioritising rest and actually not moving for a bit has meant that I can see genuine improvements in pain and swelling quickly - sometimes day to day. In older injuries, it could take months before anything changed or improved. I’d be punishing my body for its injury, pushing through in the pursuit of ‘strengthening it’ when all I was really doing was abusing myself for the ‘weakness’ in it.

My body knows how to heal, I can see that. It’s going to take a wiggly way to get there, but if that means that my jeans don’t fit, then fine. That does seem a rather small price to pay.

I don’t need to keep exercising to reduce my anxiety

I realised a few years ago that my outdoor pursuits were probably becoming unhealthy when I had a full blown meltdown that I couldn’t get out for a bike ride due to a missing shoe. It was such a ridiculous overreaction, such a dramatic espousal of fear of not adhering to a strict routine that I immediately knew I was in trouble. I did nothing about it, of course.

Suddenly removing the coping mechanism I’d relied heavily on - right at the moment when my work absolutely exploded in my face - felt massive. Now every day was like having a bike ride cancelled for a missing shoe.

A friend of mine voicenoted me a couple of weeks in. She had a very serious operation on her brain a few years ago that left her unable to do any kind of physical movement for about a year. A far more complex recovery than I could ever even contemplate, she offered me her own advice; ‘enjoy it,’ she said, ‘how often in your life do you have the permission to stop and say no to things, focus on yourself with no pressure? Give yourself a bloody break’.

And do you know what? It turns out you can reduce sources of stress so much more effectively when you are sleeping better, eating well and aren’t exhausted from an intensive workout before working on seven thousand out-of-work projects. I’ve always believed I react badly to stress and don’t have the coping mechanisms to address it - but I do. I also have the support network too, I just hadn’t realised because I’ve never had the time to notice them.

I have other hobbies

When I first hurt my ankle, my coach said to me ‘maybe you can focus on some of your other hobbies for a bit.’ Eek, I thought, what other hobbies? Over the years, I’d shed almost anything else that didn’t involve the outdoors or fitness. I had become one of those awful people who believe movement is a personality trait.

Slightly abnormally, I didn’t rush to fill my time. Acknowledging I have a problem with being ‘busy’ to reduce the voices in my head, I actually spent some time being bored. What freedom being bored is! I don’t think we get enough time with boredom, and it certainly doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Through boredom, I could finally decide what I wanted to spend my time doing. I picked up my books again, began writing here on substack, and started to learn how to cook - properly this time. I’ve had three months of solid vegetables in my tummy every single day. Previously my kitchen was used more as a storage facility, my diet consisted mainly of the foods I ate as a teenager: chips, pizza, crisps (I am writing this while eating crisps, old habits die hard).

One of my biggest concerns was that so many of my friends and social groups revolved around physical activity. Would any of them still want to spend time with me without my ability to keep up? How much would I miss as they progressed onwards? The funny thing about friends though is that they do quite like you for the person you are. Who knew? As they began to rally around with coffee meet ups and theatre trips, invitations to little social events, I realised that ok, we have other things we can talk about besides our sports. I’m returning now to my hobbies - cycling is one of the first, thankfully to ease back into my life - but I am slower and have to be more careful. It turns out that’s perfect for helping my friends - runners mainly - who were nervous about cycling begin the sport themselves. The shift in focus from me to them feels incredible, I realise I do really love sharing my knowledge and experiences. Would I have ‘wasted’ the opportunity for a training session in my time poor schedule before? Probably not. But actually shared experiences like this are far more interesting and fulfilling than me just trying to meet an anxiety for exercise.

Perhaps most valuably though, I really, really enjoyed spending time with my partner. We have very different hobbies - I like the outside and he likes the inside - and for the past few years I’ve allowed my independence to take me wandering off in lots of solo directions. I’m incredibly grateful he’s supported me to do so, but, having this period situated 24/7 in each others’ pockets in a way we haven’t ever been in our 16 year relationship has reminded me that I love his company. He is funny and clever and great fun to be around, and I like working with him to solve problems. I’m not going spare being at home, as so many people have asked, because the person I have at home is brilliant. I’ve just been too busy previously to notice.

Finally – I am patient

Am I a patient person? I don’t know. I know I can be patient, this experience has taught me that.

For the first time ever, ever, I am not viewing my body as a problem to be solved or controlled. Of all the injuries I have had, why this one in particular has been so transformational, I am not sure, but it has been. I am allowing my body to heal in the way I know it best, I am trying to work with it rather than against it. After all, we’re lifelong friends, this old flesh bag and I.

I have this theory that if you don’t give your body what it needs it will force it out of you one way or another. Constantly pushing yourself at work and refusing to slow down and you’ll end up with a cold. Breaking my ankle has forced me into realising that I wasn’t treating myself the way I needed to; so thanks universe and your cruel tricks. You were right.

I ask, only because it’s International Women’s Day, and I want to talk about it. 

I’m going to start with a conversation I had very recently with my dad. We were on the phone, and we’d already covered the myriad of topics we normally cover when we got on to women’s sport. We started talking about football, which is a weird thing for us to discuss, because neither of us really care for football - my dad being more of a rugby guy, and me being more of a go-outside-and-look-at-the-clouds kinda gal - however the rise of women’s football has clearly been on his mind recently. ‘In the ‘70s when I was growing up,’ he said musingly, ‘you never saw any girls playing football. I wonder why it’s so much more popular now’. 

I didn’t have anything to respond to this really, and we moved on to other things. But in the words of Ida Corr on Fedde Le Grande’s sensational 2006 hit, I thought ‘let me think about it’. The answer is surprisingly easy to uncover with a bit of googling, and  it turns out the reason my dad never saw any little girls playing football when he was growing up was because - and are you ready for this drumroll please - between 1921 and 1971, women and girls were banned by the FA from playing football. Tah-dah! Were you surprised? 

Women obviously weren’t outright banned from playing football entirely - the FA (as far as I’m aware) isn’t some ball-based police checking in on women’s feet and their contact with circular objects - but the ban formally restricted usage of FA-owned and licensed pitches which pushed teams and clubs into unsafer, or smaller areas for practices and matches. Though women remained motivated to continue playing, the ban stymied sponsorship and eventually, throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s popularity dwindled to near extinction.

The reason for the ban was formally cited as a concern for women’s frail little bodies: ‘the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged’ it said. 

This is, and apologies for my frankness, a steaming pile of hot, saucy, bullshit. While it’s likely that a few pervasive myths were still circulating about exercise damaging women’s reproductive health, as any one who has been on the internet in the modern era, we all know that those who outright ban access to something unfairly without the consultation of that group based on ‘health concerns’ care almost diddly squat about the health of those individuals.

Indeed, it’s almost entirely certain that the ban was predicated on the massive growth in popularity women’s football garnered following the second world war, which began to pull in crowds far exceeding that appearing at men’s matches. We know that’s enough for a fragile male ego to impose a ban or two, but to make matters worse, many of these matches were (clutches pearls to throat) raising money for local charities or the women’s clubs, which was a direct attack on the FA. That money, they believed, should be in their pockets not the charity’s or heaven forbid women’s. So they withdrew all funding and demonised women’s attempts to play the sport for 50 whole years - the ramifications of which are still being felt today, nearly 50 years later.

Isn’t it all so fun? 

This is just one place I could have started with this topic. I could also have talked about how women were banned from running any further than 200m in the Olympics until 1960 and were unable to run the marathon until 1973 (my dad was ten years old!). The UCI did not formally even recognise women’s cycling as an official sport until 1958 with the first road race being permitted in 1984. I could have talked about how women are still not allowed to complete the full distance of the Tour de France, only able to ride 8 out of the 21 stages, or how in Tennis Grand Slams women are only permitted a best-of-three set rather than the best-of-five that men are allowed. I could talk about how golf courses are often shorter for women, despite ample evidence they can - and do - play the same distance. Maybe I could have begun with the consistent censoring of Serena Williams’ body as she continues to push back on arbitrary rules.

In an earlier substack I touched on the brief history of women’s cycling and rational dress. Cycling, for all of its faults, has been symbolic of a wider commitment to social justice for almost all of its existence. The increased mobility it gave women, the excuse to change their attire and move their bodies had been previously unimaginable, and some women (particularly the suffragettes)  quickly adopted it as their modus operandi. The lady cyclist or ‘new woman’ as she was invariably called (this was largely not a positive connotation) straddled a new segment in society that was struggling to adapt to a more mobile shape of womanhood. In 1887, a cyclist named Minnie, said that ‘one needs nerves of iron’ to enter the city of Oxford in ‘rational dress’ for cycling. ‘The shouts and yells of children deafen one, the women shriek with laughter or…hiss…and all sorts of remarks are shouted at me’. It sounds like a challenging world in which to take a stand. Some cafes even outright banned women and their cycles, stating that their bloomers were too indecent for their clientele, and it was almost certain that Minnie came across one or two of these in ‘bigoted’ Oxford. 

Slandered, berated, abused, and in some cases imprisoned for their commitment and desire for freedom, women have continually proven themselves resilient in the face of setbacks. I read a substack the other week with an interview with Bethan Taylor-Swaine, which discussed viewing women’s participation in sport almost as a microcosm of society itself. I’m incredibly attached to this image - when women throughout history fought for access to a pitch or a pool or a track, they were making a much grander statement about womanhood and our position in it than initially illustrated. With so much prevention from sport based on our frail bodies, the narrative that we somehow need protecting from harm proved enduring. Even now we still see the same arguments flare in the ‘trans debate’ whipped up by the media. Womanhood needs protecting, not just physically from a deceitful unknown predator, but also from an erosion of definition. Women’s bodies are debated, regulated and torn to shreds; what we are capable and what we are not capable must be defined and outlined and must retain order. Those who fall outside of those definition are not women, are other, are feared.

Time and time again I see arguments claiming to protect women’s sport further marginalising and minimising what it means to be a woman by exerting a rigid and formal definition, which is - unfortunately - almost exclusively developed and guarded by men. 

It isn’t all doom and gloom, though. We are seeing the gap closing on male and female 100m and 200m times, with the 100m only one second slower in female races. I once had a huge internet argument with a (you guessed it) man, who said I was ridiculous to think a ‘female’ would ever be able to match or overtake a man. While I am sure until fairly recently a lot of scientists would agree with you, we are witnessing progression that far surpasses expectations for women’s bodies and potential and I think we should remain optimistic. In the cycling world, women athletes are fighting for equal pay and representation, racking up medals at races and drawing in bigger viewerships. More women than ever have joined climbing following the 2020 Tokyo olympics and in ultra distance racing we’re seeing women toppling men’s records. 

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And so, my unfinished thoughts peter out to some extent here, perhaps just as I am beginning. But I have - like Dorothy Pilley - just got to my crux. I want to embolden you all to use your bodies in radical action. To remind yourself, daily, that your very movement is radical - because it’s your body that is sought to be controlled when others want to control society. Your movement and freedom curtailed; your body is the very site of resistance to conformity and refusal to remain coloured in neat tidy lines.

That only 50 years after women were once again allowed to play football, that your engagement in sport, movement, happiness and existence is an activist stance. That we should be visible in our celebrations both of ourselves and one another, building networks of sharing knowledge, transferals of experience and supportive kindness. 

Happy IWD 2025 x

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Jules blazes into the room in the recognisable uniform of a fell runner; bright waterproofs, shorts, lugged-trainers and a beanie hat. The lights flare yellow and then blue, and a recording of lakeland rain washes over the audience as she describes her blood and bones as mud puddles and stones. The audience recoils slightly behind me, I can feel that they’re nervous this will be one of those awful artsy shows where someone will overshare, or force them into audience participation. They’re regretting their £15 ticket already. But as Jules goes on, as the music picks up and she moves through her work, they begin laughing, leaning forward. The wriggling, nervous fidgeting stops. We settled into the Dreamtime Fellrunner. 

Dreamtime Fellrunner is one of those things that if I described it to you I don’t think you’d want to go and watch it. I heard as much too from other runners in the interval mingling at the bar: ‘I had no idea what to expect,’ one man says as he swills the dregs of beer in his plastic cup, ‘I can’t believe she can talk like that about running. It’s beautiful.’

The piece is 60 minutes of vulnerable and humorous poetry, where Jules Carter, a fell runner from Keswick, explores everything that has built the story and experience of fell running for her: the history of the sport, the place of the lakes, the people, her body, the pain, the weather, the ableism, misogyny, her own self doubt. It moves rapidly and quickly, her poetry enrapturing and not at all obtuse. There is stage light work and a sprinkling of music. Jules ropes in local running clubs to provide the audience participation we were all dreading, which is funny and a great way of bringing local communities into a moving, flowing piece. Many of us recognise the runners on stage; we’ve run with them, seen them at races and the community events we’re part of. It draws us in. Jules blurs the line between poetry and theatre and her sport. There is no start, there is no end in either. It’s all about how you experience them, and it’s the first time I've ever seen quite such a creative reconstruction of that idea.

Broadly, I am a bit nervous about one-person theatre pieces. I am also nervous about art pieces that try to bring sport and artistry together. In both cases they can come across too contrived or overly vulnerable that it makes it a challenging watch. This, however, was neither. 

Jules is still touring, so I won’t spoil it for anyone who wants to go and see it, but I will pick out some of the themes that resonated with me. It’s an art piece that I think will stay with me for a long time.

The poetry of movement

‘A poem is only a poem if you can feel it,’ Jules says. This is the crux of this theatre piece. It’s an experiment in drawing the two together and getting you to feel it too, by imposing your own experiences on her words.  She describes her process of running and writing as one in the same: both are created outdoors and utilising her body to build them. At one point she re-enacts the process of physically picking up words as if they’re stones on her path up the fell, turning each one over, considering their placement, their shape, their sound and how they feel in her hands. ‘Do not cast words out into nothingness’, she calls, before holding an odd-shaped word ‘fear’ and questioning where it sits in her body. 

Oh. My. God. 

These are themes that I have been rankling with for years. Running, cycling, climbing, and swimming all provide a creative outlet for me in ways sitting in front of a notebook or at a desk with a blank page can’t offer. It’s a partial reason why recording my sessions on strava has always been a bit redundant. Ok, I can tell you my mileage and distance and speed, but what does that say about me? Do you know anything more about how I've felt or thought or what I’ve seen based on those metrics? No. I’ve spent my life writing documents about my achievements, how I have met targets, how I am going to approach goals - when I leave the office and step out into the wide expanse of the evening air, I don’t want any of that. 

Jules says she can start a run and end it with a fully formed poem in her mind. My mind doesn’t work like that, not during running anyway, where my whirring, clicking brain finally, joyfully, sinks into a white haze of quietness. Occasionally, I’ve finished a run slightly disoriented; where Jules would have stanzas and iambic pentameter, I instead feel like I’ve been wrenched from the belly button back into reality. It takes a moment for life to slide back into place. 

For me, cycling is my most creative act. I don’t know what it is about the rhythmic movement of the pedal strokes, but it is in a saddle that I can finally churn my thoughts into the silky butter and i’ll be able to articulate the things I want to say. Occasionally little seeds of things I want to write will land in my palm, and I’ll be able to grow them over time; at other moments I’ll be tasting words and sentences on the tip of my tongue as I cycle through green, and gold and bronze. Frozen fingers, and cold nosed, clear breathed, dew soaked hedges and frothing elderflower, and I’ll want to pull words to describe it all. 

Because how can movement be anything other than art? How can we possibly have this impossible body, that can move and reflect and conjure language and words and build connections and see a spectrum of colour and light and for that experience to not be art? How can we weave through a landscape that has been shaped by movement much larger and more inconceivable by us, honed by consequence and the choice of other’s stories and not feel our own melded to it in some strange way? How can that be anything other than poetry? 

Body

Her body as a vehicle for artistry and running, it is inevitable that Jules would bring this to the fore.  Jules has a slight spinal deformity that gives her a hunch and she describes in detail the pain it causes in running, her awkward mechanics and how taunts from other children and adults in her life shaped her perspective. ‘If I am going to be in pain,’ she says as she leaps up boxes, ‘then let it be for a purpose’. Her purpose, of course, is not to be ‘the right shape’, but instead to experience the world through her feet and her hands and her movement. ‘Pain’, then, becomes part of the rich tapestry of her life that she, herself, has not just carded the wool for, but hand picked, embroidered, considered. Pain is not the tapestry, but the complex weave of the thread, amongst thousands of other threads. 

To hear Jules talk about her body was liberating for a mind like mine that has spent nearly 25 years hating her own. ‘Running doesn’t care for your body type,’ she says. And she’s right. It’s not even that profound of a wording, she is literally objectively correct. Every week I diligently turn up to park run at my local forest, surrounded by 500 others with every conceivable body type under the sun, jostling for a place and position. I am over taken by men and women older and younger than me, bigger and smaller than me, taller and shorter than me, and in some cases, more or less limbs than me. Hating my body and the way I move has got me absolutely nowhere. It has neither improved my experience of, nor my ability to contribute to a sport I have loved since I was 15 years old. And this feeling, these reflections, continue to tumble in my mind as Jules speaks. 

The history of running

The legend that he was, of course Jules brings up her brief friendship with Joss Naylor. I wrote a substack on some of his words a while back if you recall, and was pleased that my encapsulation of him wasn’t completely off. In the Q and A section, an audience member asked about her relationship with him and what he was really like. ‘He had a kind word for everyone,’ she said, ‘he was much more interested in you, had time for everyone and believed if you had any kind of influence at all, you have a duty to use it to make the world better for others.’ Personally, if something of a similar sentiment can truthfully be said about me after I die, then I’ve fully succeeded in my life. No questions asked. It certainly beats an awful funeral I went to last summer, where the only good thing the eulogist could come up with about the person was that they ‘paid their debts on time’. 

The mother mountain

Over the years I’ve become more and more fascinated by the stories of older women, who exist in a very specific context - often ignored and marginalised. I don’t have a mum - or at least, I have a biological mum but not a mother I suppose - and so I’ve found that I have begun to seek out the experiences of women who have cut and weeded the paths so that I can more freely saunter my way down them. 

Jules speaks of her ‘mother mountains’ who guide her way, not quite knowing that she herself is becoming mother mountain to others. 

Damn Jules, thanks for giving me the words I have been trying to find.

To find out more about Jules and where you can watch this piece, please go to > https://www.mindfell.co.uk/events

In that article, I talked broadly about the (limited) science and research surrounding women’s cycling, and the fact that what is currently available is usually confused, conflicted or aimed primarily at elite athletes. I did a survey on regular cyclists in order to add colour to my research and to put into perspective the reality of what people were experiencing.

What I didn’t do - because that wasn’t what was commissioned - was talk extensively about the survey results and the women’s voices who bravely and openly shared with me the detail of their experiences. Of all the bits of research I read, nothing was more starkly underlined that the industry needs change than the responses I got to that survey, and I truly believe that they deserve much more words, time and space than I gave to them. So, if you don’t mind, this is what this substack will be all about.

Now, after releasing this article to the world, beyond all the lovely and overwhelmingly positive feedback, three threaded narratives worked their way to the surface: the first from (mainly) men who told me that things were drastically improving and that women actually were being accommodate in all sorts of research and product design (‘you can see so many more options for women now!’). The insinuation of this was clear: you’re making a big deal out of nothing, love, pipe down. The second thread came from women who told me that despite spending huge amounts of money on saddles, physios, bib shorts, they were still unable to find anything to pacify their pain and felt validated by the experiences of the women in the article; and finally (and most unsurprisingly) from men who told me that they too are suffering and how dare I ignore that fact.

The confused nature of these perspectives shows how personal pain and comfort is on the bike and how nuanced discussions can - and probably should - be. Contrary to the latter point, my current perspective on the matter is that we should be doing more research into women’s comfort because greater variation on the market is just as useful to men’s experiences on a bike as it is to women’s. The differences, after all, between men and women are much smaller than they are between men and men and women and women physiologically and If they had actually read the article rather than just the headline, they would have known that.

Anyway. Onwards with the women!

I started with a survey, expecting (and hoping for) about 50 responses. What I actually got was 278 responses in less than 24 hours and many more women and non-binary folks who wanted to talk but not necessarily share their experiences ‘publicly’.

All 278 respondents (with the exception of two) described experiencing saddle soreness within their riding, and often with multiple symptoms. The rich, complex stories they shared were, in some cases, utterly harrowing.

So, who are the women?

The women who responded to my survey were generally experienced riders with more than 7 years of cycling behind them. I had hoped that I’d be able to attract beginners, or even those who had left the sport, but it’s challenging when you use an algorithmic social media to disseminate surveys! Women varied in ages mostly between 26 to 55, though I had a handful of responses from 56 - 75 and 18 -25.

What was both impressive and pleasing was that the bulk of the respondents were riding between 20 and 50 + miles a week, with most falling into the 50+ miles category. I shared this briefly with a friend who works in the cycling industry just after I closed the survey. He was interested. ‘I knew women were cycling those distances,’ he said, ‘despite the industry making you feel that it isn’t very common’. Too right.

Those distances make sense though when you realise that 64% of the respondents are cycling for active travel and commuting, utilising bikes for travel to work and for movement around towns and cities. Active travel and commuting was often paired with road cycling (77%), which was another popular category, or gravel cycling (49%), which to me suggests a good deal of cycling both out of necessity and for fitness and adventure in free time. Indoor cycling, track cycling and mountain biking all ranked the least popular forms of riding, though still had decent representation of about 20% each. These were usually selected in tandem with other forms of riding, which perhaps illustrates how creatively women make cycling work for them.

I additionally left an open category to allow respondents to self identify their riding, which in hindsight did make the data a bit noisy, though illustrated a kaleidoscope of cycling activities that I felt really coloured in the patchwork of experiences we have on bikes. Cycle touring, bike packing, family riding, utility cycling, cyclocross, courier cycling, ultra distance and cycling with kids all appeared frequently in various forms, and stood out as different ways that women are continuously engaging in riding. I am incredibly curious to know whether men would respond with such varied activities, and also slightly saddened that we don’t hear and see more from this rich tapestry of stories.

Despite the fact that we’re rarely featured in cycling publications or marketing, women are indeed spending serious hours riding bikes.

So, what pain are women experiencing?

When I first embarked on this bit of research, I rather selfishly thought I’d had the worst of all the saddle sore symptoms. If you read the article, you’ll hear about the lovely hard lump that weeped a milky substance (my editor kindly dubbed this ‘one hell of an opener’), and I genuinely believed that this was one of the more complex symptoms of bike riding.

How very wrong I was.

For context, I added a 1-10 scale for severity of discomfort, and in hindsight this was stupid. Pain is so incredibly subjective - and especially so for women, who are societally told they have ‘high thresholds for pain’- that I got a pretty even spread between 4 and 8. Which really doesn’t mean much.

The detail then came from understanding the types of pain women were in. Most women selected between three and five symptoms, with the most common selections being ‘numbness’ ‘chafing’ and ‘bruised sit bones’, followed by ‘general pain even after dismounting’, ‘ingrown hairs’ and ‘swelling’. I let women self-describe their symptoms and received a whole swathe of information: ‘labial tears’, ‘vulval sores’, ‘clitoris swelling’ were the most common additions.

I shared some of the stories in the article, but was constrained by what I could include. Here are a few more:

• ‘Did a 5 riding day tour… and by the 2nd day of riding I could barely sit on my seat and was taking 4 ibuprofen every hour for the pain and couldn’t pee without pain for the next two weeks’.

• ‘I’ve had to quit events because I can’t sit on the saddle any longer and then can’t even pedal’.

• ‘Numbness has become a normal part of my riding’.

• ‘I had ingrown hair (not unusual) … It became infected, and months later formed a cyst. Eventually I had the hair follicle removed by a plastic surgeon as the cyst capsule would become irritated and fill with fluid on long rides for years afterward and then into a grape sized hard lump’.

• ‘My whole vulva swelled up and I had chafing in the creases between my butt/leg - it was incredibly painful to walk or sit’

• ‘During multi-day trips for road cycling significant swelling around my right side made it exceptionally painful to ride but ended up doing it regardless as I didn't want to ruin the holiday’.

• ‘We call it the puffy fanny in my circle!’

• ‘I developed an oozing split along my bikini line’.

I could, very easily, go on.

Many of these women described resigning themselves to pain and discomfort, not wanting to ‘ruin’ trips and holidays, or to ‘cause a fuss’ and feeling - crucially - that ‘it wasn’t a big deal’. This latter perspective utterly confused me, until I asked women how they were managing their pain and whether they’d considered a bike fit. ‘It feels like something serious cyclists do’, one person responded. ‘I’m not a good enough cyclist’ another answered, and ‘I don’t do enough distance to justify the expense’. All respondents that expressed this sentiment completed between 20 and 50 miles per week, which would equate to well over 1,000 miles per year. I personally feel that more than justifies someone as a ‘serious cyclist’ in need of comfort. But, as we know, a bike fit is an expensive luxury, not open to all. ‘I can’t find a bike fitter’, one woman claimed, while another said ‘it’s just too expensive’.

Overall women described debilitating pain, much of which required extended periods of time off the bike, or necessitating medical intervention. Saddle pain wasn’t just an annoying part of cycling, it is an active part that generally inhibits women from riding freely. ‘I don’t see a problem,’ one woman wrote, ‘it is painful, but I get on with it’. And unfortunately ‘getting on with it’ seems to be the main way that women are managing their symptoms without any real direction of how best to cope.

So who are women speaking to?

I’m a story driven gal, and I’m deeply fascinated with how and who people are talking to about their pain and discomfort. I know how embarrassed I was about booking a GP appointment for my own lump under the skin.

34% of women answered that they would speak to other women, which was the highest percentage of selections. 15% of women said they wouldn’t speak to anyone else except their partners or medical professionals, while 10% said they wouldn’t speak to anyone at all - which was the most worrying.

One woman described telling an ex partner who ‘freaked out’ and she dumped him a few months later when he failed to take her seriously. Others expressed frustration in sharing symptoms with ‘non-cyclist friends who just shrug it off’. Interestingly, a handful of people claimed that they were hesitant about sharing the full extent of their pain with a bike fitter, despite knowing that they were the best people to help.

Embarrassment, lack of words to be able to fully discuss the problem, in tandem with the genuine fear of being ignored or dismissed silences women into reducing and trivialising their experiences. It is, therefore, much better to just ‘get on with things’. Besides, isn’t cycling supposed to be hard? Aren’t you meant to suffer? And if there is one thing we all know women can do well - it is suffering. Ask any woman about medical treatments they’ve experienced or doctor’s appointments where they’ve been told to take a paracetamol despite crippling, undiminished pain, and you’ll know that women are expected to be good at suffering (although don’t get it twisted, women are still so much weaker than men, aren’t they?).

I am worried that the point that women don’t speak out overwhelmingly puts the onus on women alone to raise awareness of their plight and instead absolves the industry of asking the right questions - which I think they should be asking. The fact that I received 278 responses in 24 hours from complete strangers full of rich data suggests that women do want to voice their concerns, and with the right questions you’ll get useful data. The problem is knowing what to do with those answers. ‘The industry needs to understand the problems it is trying to solve,’ Jenni Gwiazdowski had said.

How are women solving their discomfort?

As alluded to throughout my article… not well. Bib shorts, changing saddles and a bike fit were all selected as the most effective choices, but their effectiveness ranged drastically. For every woman that described bib shorts changing their life, another decried the poor quality craftsmanship and lack of comfort. For bike touring and multi day riding, women cite having to pack multiple bib shorts, ensure they are taking sufficient rest and keeping to extremely high standards of hygiene. I’m not saying that men don’t have to do this, but the fact that some women say that they are forced to make ‘quick changes’ so as to ‘not holding up’ male partners leads me to believe that they don’t quite face the same challenges.

Further, amongst the answers were the range of experiences from women in bigger bodies, menopausal or post pregnancy changes that had altered their experience of accessing good quality advice and products. Most damningly, when asked whether they believed there was enough support or guidance available for women to manage their discomfort, 80% responded ‘no’.

Overall,

So much more needs to be written on this subject and to change in the industry if we truly want to keep women in cycling for longer. And I sure as heck do!

Saddles most referenced as preferred:

• Selle Italia Split Saddle

• ISM Saddle

• The Specialised Power Saddle

Bibshorts most referenced as preferred

• Rapha Core bib shorts

• Endura

• Assoss

There’s a video clip of fell runner Joss Naylor being interviewed by the Guardian about some of his life long achievements in the short documentary King of the Fells, released shortly after his death in 2024 that I can’t stop thinking about.

Blink and you’ll miss it, but right at the very end of the 16 minute film, we see Joss, alone in a room, a frayed cap and jumper, still mildly uncomfortable and much older than the sprightly footage from the 70s and 80s we see earlier in the film. He’s mid sentence as the camera focuses on his face, lined, hollow and with paper-thin skin.

‘It’s just something you do. No it weren’t no big shaker, owt like that you know. No. It’s one of them things that you know, you has to do, and you go along and you do your best and you don’t tell anybody about these things unless they want to know.’ 

The interviewer asks, ‘so you let other people talk about them?’

‘Aye, aye,’ Joss answers, ‘it’s better that way int it? Aye.’

‘That’s very modest,’ 

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ he says softly and with the smallest laughs, ‘it’s that the less said about it the better, int it’. 

I must have watched this clip a hundred times, infatuated by this small glimmer of wisdom in an aged fell runner and farmer. I’m certain that this approach is what kept Joss running all those distances for 50 years, and I am equally certain that many people still assume that he’s speaking these words somewhat falsely. How can you possibly achieve all of the countless things that Joss Naylor has completed and have no inclination to speak of it? 

‘The less said about it the better’.

In some ways, his sentiment is somewhat marred by the fact that he has spent - whether reluctantly or not - many years talking about his achievements. But that, surely, is just because people have asked? Regardless, there are other sportsmen and women who have echoed a similar sentiment over the years and haven’t spoken much about it. Beryl Burton for one, who to this day is still considered one of the strongest female cyclists of the 20th century and whose records still stand, rather famously eschewed sponsors in favour of remaining an amateur and working full time on a rhubarb farm. Her daughter Denise Burton-Cole remembered that she would never ‘brag’ but would just be ‘pleased and proud’ of her own achievements. After (usually) winning and toppling records, she would return to work the next morning as if nothing had happened. That’s pretty fuckin rad. 

But why is it rad? This quality of ‘saying owt’ and getting on with, I have long admired in others. To be able to completely reject external validation and rely entirely on your own internal sense of accomplishment seems testament to a wonderfully resilient mental framework in my books. Where can someone get a sense of self-assuredness like that in today’s modern age of availability, comparison and perpetual betterment (eurgh)? After recently breaking my ankle, I received a text from a very well meaning friend who said that while I was convalescing, I could ‘focus on myself’ and  take up a few courses or hobbies to get better at X or Y. Good god woman, I wanted to cry, I’m regrowing a bone all by myself, isn’t that enough self improvement for one day? The idea of spending my sudden free time working on improving, hustling, becoming a better version of myself to unveil to the world literally fills me with meteoric dread.

Anyway, I digress. 

I have made some movement towards this stoic attitude. Many years ago I consciously uncoupled myself from Strava, realising that I had accidentally fallen into a vicious loop of stat one-upmanship with myself that was doing a rather good job at ironically making me much slower and weaker. It turned out that I was quite good at punishing myself for any and all transgressions from the impossibly high standards I had cultivated - entirely arbitrarily I might add. This was a helpful move. It allowed me to focus on much more interesting aspects of the running and cycling that I was doing. When the pressure of everyone I knew ‘seeing’ (and in my head ‘judging’) my stats on whatever ride or run disappeared, and when I could choose who to share that information with myself - personally and privately - I realised I altered the kind of trips I wanted to partake in. 

Later, this led to a commitment that I would never never, ever share (unless it was specifically relevant) the distance or speeds of any of my rides or runs on social media. And I have maintained that commitment. Not that I do anything particularly spectacular or worthy of note anyway, but I began to feel that there were so many more interesting stories to tell about my adventures that have absolutely nothing to do with how far or how fast I went. And personally, even in world record attempts or in huge feats of athletic ability, it’s not those stats we care about is it? Not really. We want to know how that athlete felt, or is feeling, or what they saw, or thought. That’s why I was watching a short film on Joss Naylor in the first place.

I wonder whether some of this was reflected in Joss’s thoughts. In 1975, he managed to summit 72 peaks in the Lake District in 23 hours and 20 minutes, covering 38,000 feet of elevation and over 100 miles of technical terrain. Despite repeated attempts, this record stood until 1988, and is still considered an incredible performance of endurance. In interviews of the 1970s, he makes it clear that his running was guided by an interest in his own body and a love for being out in the hills - what would saying more have done to improve his record other than to satisfy the interests of others? He was clear that his experiences were his own.

And in some ways I recognise this in myself. Following a big trip or a huge achievement, I often find that I jealously guard that experience for some time. Sharing it, even with close friends, feels thorny and unwieldy, and I enjoy languishing in my thoughts until I can get a pair of gloves on and grip the body of them tightly. I can see why Joss and Beryl and any others might not have wanted to share. Your time outside with your body feels extraordinarily personal, because it is. 

Nowadays, we’re all too connected to each other.  The social media companies and oligarchs that make money off your data have made you feel that the right to complete privacy is an exclusive luxury that you don’t have and can’t afford. We’re all a brand now. We have to keep selling our adventures, our thoughts in exchange for likes, views, kudos. We sell facets of our time outdoors, shrinking and aesthetically cleansing ourselves into molds of relatability, trying to one-up others in celebrations of success. ‘The less said about it the better’ feels almost radical in its intent to refuse to repackage your precious time alone with your body, outdoors, seeking adventure. 

And yet, herein lies a tension I keep wrestling with, as there usually is whenever I think too much about something, as I am a woman. The age-old conundrum. I am constantly torn by an infatuation with quietly getting on with my life and a societal pull to very openly share my experiences as a woman who takes part in sports still heavily dominated by men. Even now, in 2025, cycling has so few women cyclists that I want to provide myself as a stepping stone into riding for others, if I can. Equally, as a self professed back-of-the-pack runner, the more I talk about how I’m regularly coming in last place in races and events but still really enjoying it, surely serves a much more important purpose than saying nothing? But am I the right person to be talking about my experiences? Who else will talk about them if I don’t? Who does my silence benefit, and what does it say about the sports I love and want to see flourish?

I partially wonder whether some of the interest for Joss in ‘saying nothing’ was the intrigue of hearing other people tell his story, either through words about him, or in the runners who later tried to take on the challenges he had succeeded in. Afterall, humans are just a complex web of stories we tell about ourselves and others, and I don’t doubt that wouldn’t have been lost on Joss. In a lot of ways, the story of Joss Naylor both is  - and isn’t - fell running. What fell running became has been shaped by him, and what it could have become has also been shaped by others in his footsteps. 

Or maybe, just maybe, by the age of 88 when the interview was conducted, after a lifetime of running hard up hills, he was just absolutely over his own shit, and didn’t want to talk about it anymore. 

All I know is that I keep thinking about the wisdom of shutting up, and I’m still working on it.

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This is a 268-mile foot race, starting in Edale in the Peak District, and snaking its way up along the Pennines to Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish Borders. Considered one of, if not the, most brutal race in the UK, this event sees approximately 170 people cast out twice a year (once in summer and once in winter, and there’s no telling which is harder) into some of the remotest and harshest conditions this country can offer. They have 5 days to get to Kirk Yetholm, with only 5 checkpoints from which to resupply or rest. The clock doesn’t stop, and if you don’t keep pace, you’re timed out.

For those well versed in the ultra endurance world, the Spine Race is very very famous, perhaps considered the pinnacle of British ultra running events. There’s nothing else really quite like it on the racing circuit, nothing that quite challenges runners precisely in the same way, nor that attracts such reverence for those who have attempted and completed it. The race was developed in 2012 by two polar adventurers who wanted recreate the punishing conditions of arctic exploration closer to home - they wanted something very few people could complete. Over the years the event has grown in popularity, though it’s still considered quite fringe - even in the running world.

In 2019, athlete Jasmine Parris raised the profile for the spine, bringing it to the public’s imagination when she managed not only to beat the overall record and finish in 82 hours and 12 minutes, but to continue to breastfeed her child at each checkpoint. The news that circulated her achievement I applauded, pleased and proud that women’s athleticism was finally - if not only fleetingly - being recognised, although I couldn’t help but think how odd it was that societally we were so shocked a woman could continue to persevere as if women collectively haven’t been forced to work, walk, and continue to provide for their children under privation since the dawn of time. Anyway.

Volunteering

Over the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to volunteer at one of only five checkpoints along the route, Hebden Hey, and have folded myself into the whirling, sleep-deprived community that blooms from the little scout hut twice a year (once in summer and once in winter). On paper, it really shouldn’t be the highlight of my year; but it is. I give up one of my very precious 52 weekends (plus a day of annual leave to recover) and head over to a little village in Yorkshire to begin cooking, cleaning, sorting, organising, planning, helping, filling bottles, carrying drop bags, and reassuring 170 runners. I trade sleep for camaraderie and boy do I love it.

I love the flurry of activity, the dizzying, sweltering busyness of it all. I love being in charge. I love being so bone-tired that I can barely think straight and having to bargain with each of my muscles in turn just to remain standing up. I love having to make decisions when my brain feels strained and fugged, trusting in my thoughts to flit here or there and make a plan easy enough to relay to another volunteer with blood-shot eyes and as dog-dead as I am. 

As soon as those be-backpacked people, in brightly coloured waterproofs come wearily down the slippery stone steps in a clatter of poles and sodden, steaming fabric, my heart swells. We welcome them in, help with defrosting their shoe laces, get them food and water and tea, make sure they’re happy. Most want to chat; others sit in glassy-eyed silence amongst the militant order of their drop bag. A few enter the checkpoint wild-eyed and traumatised, desperate to leave and never ever walk another step again. These runners have just trekked over 60 miles, perhaps almost totally alone,  and this is the first bit of respite they’re experiencing; the human brain is strange when it is finally exposed to safety and warmth, and there’s no telling how the runners will react when it comes to it.  The Pennines are unforgiving; exposed, brutal, steep and remote. In the winter you’re faced with deep snow and ice and blizzard conditions, while in the summer you’ll encounter dry river banks, blazing hot sunshine and intermittent thunderstorms. There are limited places for resupply, and you have to carry everything you’ll need in backpacks weighing up to 20kg. No clock stops when you rest and there’s the possibility of a real bed at only at a few of the checkpoints, over a hundred miles and several very stabby hills apart.

As a volunteer, your job starts at about midday on Saturday and will continue until 6am on Monday. You’ll begin by preparing the food, organising drop bags and getting the centre clean and tidy, before welcoming the front runners at about 4pm. They’ll have raced the first 60 miles at a whopping speed, and will look almost as fresh as when they first set off.

Runners will steadily emerge out of the dark, guided by a volunteer off the hills at any point day or night - with much of the crush occurring between midnight and 3am. That wicked little period is the funnest part. Everything descends into pure chaos, and as volunteers you run solely on heart pumping adrenaline. There’s a churn of people, and you must manage bed places, food, kit, space, shower and electricity access, safety checks, tea and coffee quickly and efficiently. Most of the runners don’t even come in with a brain cell, they’re starry-eyed and confused, so instructions must be issued multiple times before they’re fully understood. 

On the Spine they do their best to get you to bed, but there’s always something. Too much going on, too wired, I never quite slip into the folds of sleep. I rest lightly on the top of consciousness, half my brain alert and convinced I can hear someone shouting my name. The runners come in from the cold and tell us stories of hallucinations on previous attempts or recces in the cheviots; men sat hunched on the edges of the tracks that turn out to be rocks, elephants moving in tandem across the horizon, monkeys with bright blue eyes sat blankly in the trees, children waving from burnt out caravans. My hallucinations aren’t anywhere near as exciting. Auditory ghosts occur to me, both when I am awake and asleep. Calls of my name with a worried, desperate edge. Immy! Quick! Please! Just far enough and faint enough to make me strain to hear it again. Did someone call? Am I needed? I’m sure I heard something. 

I like the stories of the runner’s hallucinations the best. I can’t fathom them, this illogical thing the brain does when it thinks you’re dying. I read once that hallucinations and dreams are similar. During rest, your brain is sorting and organising lots of little scenarios and telling stories to figure out how it might act or what it could do if that particular thing eventually happened - like a computer modelling every combination of letters and numbers to find a correct password. A hallucination then is where the brain knows something to be wrong, so it rifles through all of those stories trying to find a reason for the wrongness or what to do about it; but it’s stressed and depleted, so it’s just wildly throwing things this way and that, like a crazed scientist in a lab, hair stuck right on end. Whether this theory has a grain of truth in it, I don’t know, but I find the thought comforting - especially when runners start talking of seeing women in hoodies with long dark hair on the track - and runners are always happy to share their retellings. 

But when you volunteer on races, especially ultra endurance ones like these, you aren’t short of stories. People become transparent, jelly like, opening up little windows to their hearts. They’ll trade confidences to build trust because you have no other choice but to. You’re working together, after all. Trust is at the heart of it. These other volunteers will see you at 3:30am when your emotions are laid like bare sinews in meat; just as you will see those runners in the shadow-world of moments as they realise they’ve only travelled 60 miles, and that they have 208 more to go. 208 miles by foot is unfathomable. You cannot propel yourself 208 miles without words, narrative, conversing. Stories, whether true or half true, are your most precious commodity here. And people are generous. 

So, within the space of a few hours you’ve bonded with your other volunteers so deeply that you’re able to predict their movements, catch their attention with a glance, share with them your deepest darkest secrets as if you’re talking about what’s for dinner. Words that have eluded you for years will flow easily here. There’s something wrong with all of you really, deep down, to be here at this time of night, helping these crazy folks. Something is always a little bit broken, and you’ll recognise that in your fellow volunteers. But that’s ok. 

You’ll pick out your favourite runners too, building your kin;  people you may exchange only ten words with, or share half a smile as you hand them a steaming cup of tea. You won’t know why you like this person more than the others, you just do, and you’ll allow your gut to tell you things about these strangers; you’ll listen. Once you’re home in a few hours time, you’ll look them up on the internet and continue to watch their little dot trek steadily up the country. Or not. Not many people make it to the end. But you refresh the screen over and over, willing them to keep going, knowing they can’t hear you but hoping they feel it. Like some little god, benevolent, omnipresent, but unable to interfere. 

We humans thrive in community. I’m sure there are plenty of people, who could tell you in more scientific terms than I could, why we are drawn to these events - whether as competitors or as volunteers. To be part of something so purposeful and working to help others succeed feels so primal. While I struggle in work with motivation or ambition, I am hyper engaged here. I feel strident, empowered, confident in my decisions and actions in a way I almost never am in my day to day life. Each moment feels impactful. Important. I feel like I am good at something: I can keep people safe and on their feet, buoyed by the community around me, encouraged by the safety and respect that comes with working closely with others. 

I know none of those I send off into the freezing black night will remember who I am or what I did to help them. I don’t mind though. It isn’t about that. 

As they begin to leave the checkpoint, I watch as many of them band together in small pods. Humans love connection. They thrive in groups - just as I am thriving here in this group-  they long for words passed between them, smiles, the familiarity of hands and footsteps in tandem beside them. The easy comfort of another human face. Very often the last words you hear from each competitor, zipping up their coats, is them calling back to the room to someone they’ve just met, ‘i’ll wait for you’ or ‘see you in a minute, I’m just outside’. People willing to slow down, to change their strategies, to lose their place in the rankings just to spend a few miles with another person. This always chokes me up. It’s a small fizzle of magic. 

The endurance of the Spine is the heart of it, and I mean that in every sense of the sentence. 

But I do have some other thoughts…

Despite my love of the Spine and the community of volunteers that sit around it, I am still not totally sure I approve of ultra endurance races. Running and walking 268 miles, pushing yourself to every possible human limit and spending thousands of pounds for the pleasure of doing so, still doesn’t quite fall into place in the way I feel it should. The elites forego sleep and food in an effort to reach Kirk Yetholm first, forcing both their mental and physical boundaries much further than it may be safe to do so. Ask any ultra runner - indeed, any marathon runner - and they’ll tell you of the many nights, weeks and even months it can take to put your body back together following such an exertion. Is that safe? Even if we can do it, should we be doing it? Are we simply achieving success by pure luck? As the records topple year on year (last year we saw Jack Scott take a further 10 hours off the record to finish in 72 hours 55 minutes), I worry about how suffering is valorised. 

My very first year at the Spine, for instance,  one of the male leaders proudly disclosed that he had about 15 minutes sleep in 90 or so hours he took on the course. Another talked about some of the risks with food and fuel he chose (that I won’t repeat) in order to push ahead in front of another competitor. My discomfort, I suppose, sits with the fetishisation of privation that seems to exist across social media following these events, and the constant refrain I hear expounded t in interviews echoing long after the Spine has come to a close: if I can do it, anyone can…. But can anyone just do it? It is no secret that it is those who can push through intense pain, minimise sleep and ignore their bodies that will cross the line first. Is that something anyone can do? Is that something we should be competing for?

And what about equal access? 

Ultra running still does not achieve much in the way of equal access. You only have to glance at the start line to see the huge imbalance in the number of women toeing the line, deterred perhaps by the high fees to enter, the huge training commitment (you don’t just rock up and smash out 268 miles), and the perhaps the perceived safety risks of having your tracker publicly available on the internet for the entire world to follow you exact location. Over the years I have seen increasing  numbers of women on the start line, but even now in 2025, we are still vastly underrepresented. The numerous blockers that exist for women - who share the vast proportion of caring duties still in the UK - cannot be underestimated when it comes to access to sporting events. Make no mistake, it isn’t transwomen that make sport inaccessible (as so many news articles are wont to suggest).  But this is an entirely different substack, and one that I’d genuinely like to give justice to at a later date. 

One huge challenge I’ve noticed that restricts access to this event though comes from the mandatory kit list. The Spine is notorious for a huge kit requirement all competitors must acquire in order to compete. This mandatory kit - which for 2025 sits at a whopping 31 items of varying required standards - is inspected at every single checkpoint, and you cannot continue if you are unable to present an item to a volunteer. The list is there to keep competitors safe - out in such harsh and remote conditions mostly alone, it is sensible to ask individuals to be as self-sufficient as possible - but athletes have continuously spoken out about the unfairness of the requirement. Such huge amounts of kit carried on your back means much higher weights, and thus inevitably favours those who can afford uber-lightweight items which are often priced at a greater selling point. Ultimately, this tends to disproportionately impact women - both financially and physically.

Women, with generally smaller frames and muscle mass than men, and with a lower centre of gravity, will hold backpacks and weight very differently. If my backpack is weighed in at 20kg for instance (the maximum allowed weight), it represents approximately 35% of my overall body mass, while representing only 25% of my male partner’s weight. I would therefore be at a much greater disadvantage - and higher risk of injury - than my male partner would be carrying the same weight. To reduce that weight, I need to pay more: find smaller and lighter items to carry with me. 

There’s a million other little niggly reasons the Spine does not sit well with me - lack of diversity in runners is another, for instance. But for all of that, I am a human, capable of holding a multiplicity of contradicting opinions in both hands and offering them up as the only logical version of myself, and this is it. 

As I watch the little dots wiggle up the country, many with the names of people I know personally, I am sad not to have volunteered this year. I love this race and the community around it - I can’t wait to see how everyone does. 

Further information

Tracker link for 2025: https://live.opentracking.co.uk/spinerace25/

To volunteer: If you want to volunteer you’ll need to get in there early! There’s a waitlist. There’s lots of roles though if checkpoints aren’t your thing.

I’d recommend volunteering on local races too as grassroots communities are always looking for support!

Films: Amazon has two brilliant films about the spine race that captures the spirit of it. One filmed in 2015, the other in 2022. Many of the people you see in both films are still volunteering and racing year in, year out.

Dog-eared, tatty, and totally unassuming in it’s small yellowed pages, The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (1983 edition) wouldn’t necessarily strike you as the coolest book in the world, but from the second I fished it out of it’s little wooden dungeon, I knew I’d found a gem. I knew the name ‘Celia Fiennes’ from older and easier research, but hadn’t come across a physical copy of her writing. I walked quickly to the counter, paid in cash, and set off as quickly as I could. Eager to get my grubby mitts on the content, I sat down at the edge of the river, the blazing sun on my back, and began to read.

Do you know who Celia Fiennes is? No? Well, please, let me introduce her.

You’ll almost certainly know who her great-great-great-great-great-great (times whatever) nephew is. The eminent British explorer Sir Ranuph Fiennes, who has spent the past few years on the speaking circuit and promoted by a very grand picture of him looking into the distance ensconced in a fluffy hood, took his adventurous spirit from his relative and became a household name. But before Ranulph there was Celia, and I do think she deserves a bit of a light thrust on her in her own right.

Celia Fiennes was born in 1662 in Wiltshire, the daughter of a Parliamentarian Politician who came very close to getting his head chopped off in the English Civil War because he disagreed with the chopping off of heads (it’s confusing and this isn’t about him). She was one of the first women to document and publish writing on her travels across England, Scotland and Wales between 1685-1698, which she conducted side saddle and alone, offering her commentary on a nation that had undergone a huge amount of change and violence in the preceding years. Celia’s journeys, when published in 1702, accounted for around 13 years worth of travelling, featuring most of her twenties and early thirties.

She never married, and thanks to her status, held numerous business ventures, amassed a small fortune that she was able to utilise and direct herself. When she died in 1741 at the age of 78, her comprehensive Will detailed extensive jewellery, property, books, linens and monetary gifts all earned in her own name. She was, for all intents and purposes, a bit of a powerhouse, and her writing on travel in the 17th century is illuminating. So coming across this book of her travels, which isn’t in print any more, was pretty flipping cool.

In particular, and what is most poignantly and strikingly interesting about Celia is that she was writing in a turbulent era of English history, just after the English Civil War - as a woman. AS. A. WOMAN. Talking about her TRAVELS. IN HER OWN WORDS, on interests and affairs SHE WAS INTERESTED IN. Across A WAR TORN BRITAIN. That she undertook ALONE (except for two maidservants which doesn’t seem to count because no one really cares about poor people). FOR MANY YEARS. To hear this voice, especially now, 345 years later, is astonishing. We need to bear in mind that it wasn’t until 1696 (approximately half way through her travels) that a MAN was even able to publish any of his writings without first consulting the church or state; even then, he’d have to take a huge financial and legal risk in case someone tried to sue him for libel or worse, sedition (inciting people to rebel against the state). Which someone could, and often did, on very little evidence. Prior to this, people would circulate handwritten news in letter form to friends, family or groups with mutual interest - which is where we get the word ‘newsletters’ from, and they haven’t really changed that much in that time. Anyway, I digress.

Though Celia was a wealthy, well connected woman, largely protected by her position in society, it’s still a rather radical act to be travelling alone (again, with maid servants but we don’t care about them because they are poor), writing and then later publishing her work. Especially with her family connections to earlier rebellion. This was a period where travelling for pleasure was virtually unheard of for men, let alone for women, and writing about it was considered pretty bonkers.

At the beginning of her stories, she begins with a little notice, telling the reader that these works are ‘soe not likely to fall into the hands of any but my near relations’. It’s an interesting little message, akin to a ‘CONFIDENTIAL KEEP OUT’ sign, but it seems almost a pretension. Throughout her writings, she goes to great lengths to explain various aunts and uncles and cousins, how they’re related and why they’re important etc etc - all of whom, you’d imagine, would have all known each other at least in the abstract, and wouldn’t have needed such detailed footnotes. I don’t think Celia really wanted people to ‘keep out’ at all; she knew she had some cool stories to tell and was waiting for the right time to get them out there. And this spark, this little wink-wink-nudge-nudge continues throughout her travels with cheeky little criticisms, asides and snarky comments that I can’t help but find slightly endearing. Celia has a tenacity, dynamism and adventurous streak that I am certain countless women have encompassed over the years, yet rarely do we have a chance to witness - first hand, in their own words.

Reading through this work, you begin to see Celia as she is. She loves visiting spas and great gardens designed and managed by her contemporary ladies of similar rank, able to criticise and analyse the choices and designs implemented. She is well versed in architecture, the production of resources, business, fishing and takes an interest in discoveries of salt in Cheshire, and new technology in mineral and metal mining.

Celia dislikes hills (same, babe, same), because they are laborious and ‘ruin her view’, and barely seems to bat an eyelid when she encounters poor weather, indecent lodgings, highwaymen, or several incidents of almost-drowning when her navigation goes awry. All of these events are met with barely a sentence or two, nonchalantly recounted and skated over, before giving way to detailed descriptions on the salmon she is eating (note: she really likes salmon), the ridiculousness of the ‘Papists’ (note: she really hates papists), the productivity of the markets, the crude buildings of the peasants or the hangings and tapestries she observes in the churches. The writer John Hilary notes that between 1650 and the late 1800s, the UK was in the middle of a little ice age, which at certain points killed off almost all the livestock and large numbers of the human population, froze over the entirety of the Thames and literally cracked oak trees in half, decimating huge swathes of forests. Do we hear anything about that from Celia? About what it might be like to live and travel through two feet of snow for miles on end, or to hear about the savagery of the ice and snow destroying towns and villages? Absolutely not. We hear not a sausage about it. But we do learn that she thinks the Catholics are responsible for the great fire of London (damn you papists) and that a mayor of some village or another was particularly interested in windows. Often in history, it’s more interesting to consider what isn’t discussed than what is. After all, anyone reading through the stuff I have written over the years is unlikely to see anything from me about Covid, because I literally cannot be bothered to talk about it. Maybe it was just too traumatising or too close for her to have assumed anyone would care about reading it. Or maybe it genuinely didn’t affect her, coseted as she likely was, in warm clothes and access to quality heating and good food.

When I first took the book home, I was most keen to riffle through and find her depictions of the places that are most familiar to me. I wanted to know what this enterprising and unique woman made of my home town as it was in the 17th century, as she rode side-saddle and curious in through the city walls. I am from Chester, and so I started there, in about 1697. She is very pleasant about the city (tah hun), illustrating the beauty of our cathedral (Norman for the most part, thank you very much), its construction and complimenting the ‘rows’ for which Chester is famous for. She describes their operation (shops and dwellings), but is disappointed to find there is ‘no light’ in the galleries, and thinks it would do better to be without them, even though they provide ample storage opportunities in the undercrofts. I’m glad we ignored her town planning advice on that one; the rows, dating in some cases from the 13th century, have been one of our most persistent tourist traps and I think they are lovely. Celia likes the river Dee, and is complimentary about our castle (yes! A castle!) and discusses a dock that can fit 200 boats, of which is no longer there.

Of Cheshire the county, she is pleased about the quality of the cheese, and explains that it is achieved by a unique custom of keeping small numbers of cows and multiple villages collaborating to mix the best produced milk together. I cannot verify if this is true, but if Celia says it is, then it is.

As she descends into North Wales from Chester, she navigates many of the mud and sand flats, using two guides to help her traverse along the dangerous tidal marsh land. I know this area well, which is now paved with a beautiful smooth greenway that I would cycle almost every week when I worked in Chester, and could do the whole 17 mile loop in about an hour. For Celia, this same journey took a number of days of challenging progress, where at one point her horse ‘could barely stand’ as they waded through a channel her guide had seemingly misjudged. She notes how quickly this landscape is susceptible to change, sharing how the carriages and wagons that rumble past her are ‘used to the ebb’, though noting that many have been swallowed in the past by those who come ‘not one year later’ to find the sand shifted and huge ‘ditches’ and ‘pools’ opened up by fast flowing ‘tydes’. Nowadays, I come to this spot to watch waders on the mud flats, sandpipers and oyster catchers weave in and out of those shifting sand banks, safely elevated on tarmac a few meters above the tidal bed.

Celia travels on to Wales through Flintshire, which she says is filled with poorly thatched tumble-down buildings made of timber, and occupied by ‘barefoote and bare leg’d, a nasty sort of people’ (showing her classic distaste for those in poverty), with inadequate mutton ‘no bigger than a lambe’ but ‘very good salmon’ (I told you she was into salmon). She is pretty pissed that Flintshire is called Flintshire, claiming it is ‘improperly named’ as the region ‘has noe flints in all the country’. She takes a great interest in the quarrying and coal mining of the region, from which she has a financial interest, and is curious about the technology being developed there. It’s clear to her that North Wales is of no more interest than for the resources it can produce, and learning about its people, customs and history are almost entirely worthless to her. Unfortunately, I know English people who still seem to share a similar sentiment - and one I vehemently disagree with. We hear nothing of the beauty of North Wales, for she does not bother going any further than Penmaenmawr, before heading back to England and getting on a ship to ‘Leverpoole’ (Liverpool).

Liverpool, conversely, is well commended by Celia, who describes it as a place of ‘a great many Dessenters’ which she seems to tacitly approve of. She is ferried across to Liverpool with her horse on a ‘a boat carrying 100 people’, and we do get a little bit of nature writing here - she begins to describe the vivid green of the water (remind me to write a substack about the history of the colours green and blue because it is FASCINATING), as she explains the danger of the river Mersey, which is almost sea-like, and only suitable for those experienced with its tides and narrowness. This little mini journey almost serves to isolate Liverpool from the rest of the country, it is different and unique, and you have to be a bit special to live and visit there. You see her relishing in this narrative, pleased to have gained access to this city, and it is no surprise. Liverpool was a roundhead (the people supporting the parliamentarians) stronghold, and guarded against Royalist attacks in 1643 - only 50 years prior to her visit. Celia, whose family were well-known Parliamentarians, would likely have recognised and felt comfortable in this community, some of whom may have fought during the siege, or at least held living memory of the trenches dug along modern day Lime Street.

Of the city then, it is no surprise that she is abnormally praiseful, bestowing her finest compliment that it is ‘neat’ and ‘fine’ with ‘well dressed’ and ‘good fashion’ residents; a ‘London in miniature as much as I ever saw a thing’. Hilariously, she states Liverpool is ‘small’, with only 24 streets, but ‘wealthy’. I think it’s grown a bit since then.

Later, Celia describes her routes through Prescot, Mosel (now known as Knowsley) and Wiggon (Wigan) which she enjoys very much, describing a ‘pretty’ town with very good coal, and then dedicates a chunk of text to the visiting of a ‘burning well’ between Warrington and Wigan. Having googled this - because I’ve never ever come across a burning well, and I feel like having lived within 30 mins of Warrington for the past few years it’s likely something I would have come across if it still existed - it turns out it was a phenomenon found on the Lancashire coalfields in the 17th century. Apparently, cold water from a small spring appeared to boil, and when lit with a flame, it would burn with that cool blue flambe-flame that Brandy ignites with (think Christmas pudding), yet when the water was removed it wouldn’t ignite - because generally water doesn’t ignite. Lots of people thought it was cool too, and in 1667 (only 20ish years before Celia began her journey) the science behind it was uncovered, and they realised it was to do with the gas from the coal mining etc etc. Anyway, it’s a health and safety hazard now, so it doesn’t exist any more it turns out, much to my chagrin.

Celia’s journey continues north through Preston and Lancaster (a ‘very good’ town) and after miles of ‘steepe and stoney hills’ (sorry babe), she reaches ‘Kendall’ in the Lake District, which she doesn’t seem that bothered by. It’s built of stone, she says, and they have a good trading market on the cross, with a river that has good salmon (again with the salmon), but that it is full of rocks. She rates the cotton produced there though, which is nice.

Her journey into the Lake District is interesting, precisely because her tone changes and the shape of her description becomes somewhat more reflective. She begins by chasing the fish across the lakes (once more - the woman is obsessed with salmon), finding the best stock and dishes served at inns. Celia seems to fall in love with ‘Lake Wiandermer’ or ‘the Great Lake’, and goes to great lengths to explain the glassy placidness of the lake waters as she takes a small boat out into it. The hills here are ‘perfect rocks’, and the ‘springs bubble up’ and descend with the ‘greate raines’ over the fells into the water ‘so cleer’ that she can pick the ‘samphire weeds’ from beneath her oars. She takes care to describe exactly the recipe of the ‘oat Clap bread’ the locals make that she enjoys, and how the ‘rich fertile summer corn’ is managed by the ‘girls and women’ carting their produce back and forth in a sort of crude wheelbarrow.

She spends days riding up and down the fells to get a ‘glimpse’ of the ‘great waters’, seemingly in awe of the ‘good deal of marble rocks’, the woods and peat cutting she comes across. One day when she decides to walk, she sees a small hamlet of ‘sad little huts’ that she took for houses of ‘cow fodder’ but was shocked to find young children and adults huddled among the buildings. Celia has no sympathy for their desperate conditions though. Despite being ‘8 miles from the market’ by her reckoning (having just walked that way herself), that the poor villagers lack food and live in ‘cold…unplaistered dwelling’ just ‘shews something of their laziness’. Zero sympathy or acknowledgement of the plight of these poor individuals; zero fucks given by Celia. She leaves her judgement at that, goes on to talk about the FANTASTIC shodding her horse got in the village over and never troubles herself to think about these poor people ever, ever again. The poor, morally responsible for their conditions? The poor rendered in poverty by virtue of their laziness? Where have I heard that sentiment before? History, once again, proving that humans haven’t had an original thought, ever.

Celia’s travels continue onwards for a number of years. She goes up to Scotland and then back down to the south via Manchester, which I could talk more about but I’ve already written a lot of words, and I am beginning to get a headache. She talks about the spas she visits and throws some absolute shade at some of them, describing their waters as ‘cow turd’ and ‘steel shavings’ - which I assume on the latter is bad. If you’d like to read more yourself, a different edition of the book is available online - although note that it has been edited slightly different to the 1983 edition I have.

My final thoughts on this substack lie in a paragraph she opens on a ‘note to her reader’ which says :

‘Now thus much without vanity may be asserted of the subject,. that if all persons, both Ladies, much more Gentlemen, would spend some of their tyme in Journeys to visit their native Land, and be curious to Inform themselves and make observations of the pleasant prospects, good buildings, different produces and manufactures of each place, with the variety of sports and recreations they are adapt to, would be a souveraign remedy to cure or preserve ffrom these Epidemick diseases of vapours, should I add Laziness?’

To translate: our girl Celia is telling us that if everyone, both Ladies but of course (much more importantly) Gentlemen were to spend just a bit of time travelling across Britain, getting to know the people and places and hobbies of those who occupy the villages, towns and cities they pass through, it would be an absolutely brilliant remedy for your poor mental health - which she says is currently an epidemic - and be even better for the awful laziness sweeping the young people. Crucially though, the ‘Epidemick diseases of vapours’ references a more gendered association of mental distress - fainting, flushing, hysteria, mania, mood swings and ‘unmanly weeping’ - usually attributed to a condition we’d perhaps recognise as PMS - and Celia is advocating expressly for more women to get out and do some travelling. I think she’s entirely correct. She goes on to say that learning about the locality of England will ‘cure the evil itch of over valuing foreign parts’, which is to say, that we can seek some real bloody beauty in this country if we look for it.

Celia showed what it was possible to do if you had all the money, time, energy, freedom, privilege and lack of fucks to give. And I think that’s a pretty cool thing to read about from the 1690s.

The last of the light has dipped below the horizon in 2024; my partner and I whiled away some of this years’ remaining hours walking across the old golf course to the brow of the hill. This is our back garden; we know the mud slicked tracks and trees as we know the contents of our kitchen and so we walk quickly, hopping the stretches of clagged clay suckering our boots and the fallen branches littering our path. The sky is heavy and grey; to the north almost purple in pregnant storm clouds, and to the west lighter, bone white and with a silver mist from the fringes of rain as it moves across the Cheshire plain beyond. The wind has picked up, it punctures through our conversation in whistles and shrieks, so we quicken our pace, keen not to get caught in a rolling shower and in hot anticipation of the log fire we know to be smouldering at the pub a few miles away. Small birds, dowdy brown, red breasted, buff under bellies in their fat winter feathers, tumble between the lower branches of creaking trees like cake crumbs brushed into the wind, following our tramping through the undergrowth. Their little eyes keen and curious, cocked heads. 

As we reach the lookout of the hill, we stop to trace the Clwydian range with our fingers. Despite the cloud and the threatening rain, they’re visible, ghost-like and blue along the horizon. Blue, of course, pastel blue no matter what the season, an afterthought in watercolours. I wonder as I stand here, arm outstretched and fingers tapping the top of what I know to be Moel Famau and Moel Arthur in the distance, what the connection between these two ridgelines have been over millennia. How many have stood on this hill, as I am now, and looked across to the blue smudge on the horizon? What stories, long forgotten to the soil, were told of their first spring swelled emergence from the gloom? What worlds were those hills the edge of? Did the people watch, with fear or interest, the tiny twinkling pyres of those they’d never met in the foothills of the Clwydians? What words did they use to describe them?

We walk onwards, questions unanswered but following the line of the sandstone ramparts. I read somewhere once that these walls had long confused researchers as they had been built with a technique not thought to exist for hundreds more years. These sandstone blocks are now shin height and are worn smooth, carpeted in Silky Wall-Feather Moss. You’d never guess their age if you didn’t know - this hill was ancient even when humans were taking their first tentative steps out of the savannah - having been built to defend an iron age promontory fort. This settlement, which was active for over two centuries, has haunted this landscape  for over 2,000 years since. I run my hand over the stones as we walk. Archeologists say they found slingshots here, small round pebbles used as resistance against incoming tribes from North Wales. 

Mudstone, sandstone, the soft cliffs here are stained red in summer and glow gold in winter, a shifting, animate light I’m still learning to read despite seven christmases spent in its company. From the Clywdians this hill is one of three, reduced to small rises in the undulating green-brown fabric of the Cheshire Plain, hardly worth a notice on the wide landscape, your eyes drawn instead to the silvered river Mersey that twists and scintillates against a grey sky like a polished floor. I wonder if, in the summer when the sky is clear and the sun high and hot, whether the top of the hill glitters like it does when you’re standing beneath the canopy of trees. 

Hands rubbed warm, we enter through the doors of the pub, finally. It’s started to rain now, fat droplets thrumming against the small wood-framed windows, and we’re hit by the murmured laughing, alcohol soaked table tops, woodsmoke and the soft clinking of glasses. We find a spot, cosy in the dim lighting, pull our scarves and hats from our heads and necks and sit laughing at our good fortune to get in before the rain hit.