Closer to nature?

Lakeland 100

As I climbed up the slow steady rise out of the valley from Boot a startled vole scurried out of the pool of light from my headtorch into the dark rough grass of the fell. You're certainly closer to nature in races like the Lakeland 100 – when was the last time you saw a vole? Or a badger, like the one that trotted nonchalently ahead of me for a while along the footpath from Blencathra. Normally badgers are stiff, bristly boards occasionally encountered lifeless by the side of busy roads. It comes as a revelation to see instead a warm-blooded animal snuffling about the country at night.

If you believe in living life to the full, it would be hard to find anything more full-on than running across 103 miles of fell and footpath through a soggy night and through a grey dawn. Though what life is filled with during a race like the Lakeland 100 is perhaps harder to quantify. Often, it's not fun-filled. Dragging your shivering, sodden self from the bog that has half-swallowed you; being lured foolishly from the path by distant homely lights and having to clamber through a felled forest and wade a river to get back on track; the anger and frustration that well up when the mists come down on a high col and you are unsure of the correct path to take – and shortly find you have taken the wrong one; the long periods when, simply, you are cold, and tired, and hurting, and no end is in sight. None of these are fun.

Yet the joys of life are heightened too in these races. The sense of comradeship with a fellow runner who has run with you through the night is something you might never feel for the office mate you have sat next to for years. A cup of cheap, luke-warm coffee in a styrofoam cup thrust into your hand in some scruffy outbuilding by a checkpoint marshall is a sweeter nectar than the finest expresso served in a swanky bar.

To me what matters more than those though is the joy of being in wild places, of experiencing the wilder corners of our country in fair weather and in foul. Wading through damp bracken might not seem fun at the time - but the memories will be far fonder than memories of a weekend watching the cricket. And when the clouds do part and the beauty of the mountains around is revealed, blisters and fatigue can be for a moment forgotten.

Of course the competition makes a race too. I can understand why the road runner runs. But for me I would swap the tarmac for the fell and the bog and the forest and the rocky trail any day. Give me the wet and the wilderness.