Vertical Nasego climbs 1000m over 4.3 kilometres from the town centre to the skyline above, finishing just above Rifugio Nasego.

The elite startlist was packed with big names; past winners, world champions, World Cup winners, high flyers in this year’s rankings. The great and the good of mountain running, primed for a hard 35 to 40 minutes.

Through a convoluted and boring combination of procedural difficulties and nepotism, the elite startlist also featured me and Paul Tierney. Essentially, we had ridden in on the coat tails of Sarah McCormack, Paul’s better half and winner of the 2020 Trofeo Nasego, the 21k mountain race that takes place on the Sunday.

On the WMRA media team’s copy of the startlist there was a box for biographical information. Past results, current form, that kind of thing. Paul got his justified plaudits; legendary ultra-runner, Lakeland 100 winner, Wainwright’s record holder etc. Equally justifiably, the box next to my name was blank.

Dinner at the race hotel the evening before was an intimidating experience. Timothy Kirui fiddling with his phone. Andrea Mayr calming tucking in to her tiramisu. We occupied ourselves with reciprocal colourful language lessons with some of Sarah’s U.S. Malonno friends.

The elite runner pre-race strut around town

Race day arrived and me and Paul were mincing around Casto, picking up our bibs and jogging around. I was number 12, Paul was 13. Already, I was mildly embarrassed. I could see people glancing at my number, then up at my face, and looking non-plussed. Huh, haven’t seen that guy around before. He must be hot shit. How disappointed they will be, I thought.

As the clock ticked down to start time and the DJ continued assaulting Casto with the same ear-splitting beats that he’d been churning out since 8 in the morning, the race organiser, Alex Scolari, grabbed a microphone and called the runners to the starting pen.

As we filed dutifully past the final number check and into the road, he moved on to introducing the elite field, sounding more and more like the announcer at a darts match.

One by one the racing snakes came forward and were ushered to their place, chalk on the road laying them out in a grid like as if this was motorsport.

A proud father at the start-line with his two sons.

In the red corner…

Wearing number 15, from the Czech Repulbic, Ondřej Fejfar!!

Polite applause from spectators and Ondřej’s fellow runners, he gave a wave as he walked to the front.

From Slovenia, in bib number 14, David Vogrin!!!!

I stood aside to let David past and looked over at Paul. Wearing number 13. Surely Alex wouldn’t. . .

He did.

I couldn’t translate exactly what was said but I got the jist.

. . .ultrarunner. . .from UK. . .Ambleside A.C. . .Paaauuuul Tiiieeeerney!

The price of a free entry

Judging people’s facial expressions with masks on can be a tricky business, but I’m fairly certain Paul’s said that he wanted nothing more than to disappear.

Even then, I was so busy laughing at Paul’s reluctant walk forward that it didn’t even occur to me that I might be next. I didn’t hear what Alex said about me but presumably the accolades that he was listing for everyone else were notable by their absence.

Mortified, I shuffled forward and took my place beside Paul. As the rest of the elite field came forward I stood there, cringing, laughing, clapping, sheepishly scuffing my feet across my own personal semi-circle of chalk.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more out of place. I could feel the contemptuous stares of the runners lined up behind me. Runners I had zero chance of beating. Part of my excitement about running at Nasego was to see first hand all the noise and hype that surrounds a race at this level, especially in Italy where the history and culture surrounding mountain running is so strong. I hadn’t planned on being directly involved.

But for all that I felt like an enormous fraud, I was still having a bloody great time.

Then the gun went off and I lost ten places.

We never thought we’d get two uses of this picture of Paul Tierney on the website this week. Shall we shoot for a third? Photo: Marco Gulberti

Bawbag

Mercifully, there are a few hundred metres of road to allow runners to find something like their rightful place. Marco, most enthusiastically potty-mouthed of the U.S. Malonno contingent, appeared silently on my left. I slapped his shoulder and said something vaguely encouraging. He glanced over at me, cool and calm.

“Bawbag,” he said, and cruised on up the road. I almost fell over I was laughing so hard.

Vertical Nasego is a race of two halves. The first half picks its way up from Casto, on and off the hairpinning road that rises out of town, linking up still smaller towns and groups of houses.

Dusty trail, concrete steps, at one point I’m sure we ran through someone’s back garden. Sunday’s Trofeo Nasego was doing triple duty as a World Cup race, the Brescia district champs and the Italian long distance nationals; green, white and red tricolour streamers were taught across the road the whole way up, big bunches of them stretching between buildings, telegraph poles and lampposts.

It was hot. Full sun, reflecting off the tarmac; my legs felt fine but I genuinely feared that my head might explode.

Marco was just one hairpin ahead as we ran through Famea, where Trofeo Nasego would finish and where the previous evening the local mayor had cut a ribbon to inaugurate a new roundabout featuring a statue of the race’s logo. Really, you don’t get this kind of thing at Arrochar Alps.

All change in the second half

Leaving the last buildings behind, we ran briefly through the woods before popping out onto the open hill side and beginning the race’s steep second half.

Away from the main walking trails, the race route is narrow, clinging to the side of the hill and zig-zagging up between spectacular rocky bluffs. It all felt a bit precarious. Go skidding off the downhill side of the trail and you might not stop for a while.

Fear for life and limb aside though, the Brescia Prealps are lovely. Steep, wooded hills with impressive limestone crags. The Basque Country with a spoonful of Dolomites stirred in. Blue sky, green hills, an intermitten line of light grey in between, it really is gorgeous.

In the late stages of a vertical kilometre you don’t really see much of that. Eyes full of sweat, I stared at the ground in front of my feet. More than once I failed to see a corner coming and stumbled off into the long grass.

Marshalls and spectators said all the approriate encouraging things, but the effusive thanks I’d been dishing out in the race’s early stages had given way to spittle-loaded grunts.

Ally investigating his favourite bit of dry Italian grass, rather than the spectacular view. Photo: Marco Gulberti

Teaching the local runners the best words

I looked ahead. Marco was closer. Definitely. But was I closing in or was the gradient doing it for me? At 25 minutes per kilometre a 50 metres gap is bigger than it looks. I was desperate to catch him. The dream of breezing by in the finishing straight and calling him a filthy a******e spurred me on.

The last pitch to the crest of the ridge was hideously steep, what trail there was just one faint set of footprints wide. I moved out to pass a guy in a green vest, hands pulling at the grass, frantic to get around him and back on the path. Slotting back into line, I genuinely thought I might vomit into the heels of the next guy’s shoes. I passed him too (when you blow up in a VK you really blow up) but Marco wasn’t getting any closer.

The finish line of an uphill race, particularly one as steep as Nasego, is an interesting place. At a 10k, runners hit the line with some momentum. Here, as soon as the effort level drop, so do you.

With the finishing arch perched right on the crest of a ridge only a few metres wide, exhausted runners were literally crawling to get out of the way of those behind.

With Marco 12 seconds ahead and my closest persuer 11 seconds behind, I crossed the line with sufficent reserves to remain upright just a moment longer. I staggered on for a few metres and slumped on the ground next to Marco. I called him a filthy a******e. He looked over at me, smiling.

“Well done, you fat c***.”

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I’m standing by Ryvoan bothy in the rain. The sleeves of my second best waterproof, hastily thrown on over my vest, cling to my arms and shoulders, limiting their movement. The fabric of my early 2000s hand-me-down split shorts are similarly stuck. They’ve worked their way inwards as I ran downhill and stayed there, exposing an even more scandalous than usual quantity of thigh.

I’m prevaricating. The next morning I’ll be getting on a train in Aviemore to begin my 3 day journey to Courmayeur. This is my last training run in Scotland before Tor des Geants.

So far I’ve done 5 laps of Meall a’ Bhuachaille and, as the weather goes to shit, I’m on the fence about a sixth.

A local hill for local people

Glenmore’s Corbett has been my go-to local hill since I moved to Strathspey seven years ago. While I lived at Glenmore Lodge I was up it most days. Fast and slow, summer and winter, day and night. I’ve been up there in nothing but shoes, shorts and factor 30 and I’ve been up there in goggles, mittens and thigh deep snow.

Easy, moderate, hard; short, medium, long; sprints, drills and god knows what else, all on Meall a’ Bhuachaille’s trails.

Taking the Strava CR from Robbie Simpson in 2016 remains one of my proudest moments. (The fact that he probably did it on an easy day in flip-flops, jeans and a Victorian dive helmet is neither here nor there.)

I don’t know exactly how many times I’ve been up there. I mull it over every once in a while and add another hundred to my estimate. It’s around 500 now. Add a little padding for runs where I haven’t actually been to the top and I think I’ve probably done quarter of a million metres of climbing on this hill.

These are the mountains Ally is training for, not the ones he’s talking about right now. Photo: Pierre Lucianaz

Lap it up

The size of that number is due in large part to my habit of doing what I was doing on that soggy day a few weeks ago; running lap after lap after lap. It’s been a staple of my ultra training diet for the last few years. I did 10 laps with a 10 kilo bag while training for Euforia in 2017.

On the massage table 2 days later is felt like my hip flexors had been replaced with balls of barbed wire. The following February I set my personal best, 13 times up and down in the snow in the build-up to Barkley, a 5,000m day, starting and ending in the dark.

The why is straightforward; it’s a very efficient way of accumlating climbing. I run from Glenmore to the summit, a little over 400m. Then down to Ryvoan bothy where I turn around and run back up, a little under 400m. No farting around on the flatter trails near the bottom.

Steep as you like it

It might seem perverse with the Cairngorms proper only a stones throw away. But magical mystical mountains though they are, inspiration for a thousand knock-off Nan Shepherds, the Cairngorms are mellow, rounded hills. You’d have to work your arse off if you wanted to average 600m per hour out there. On Meall a’ Bhuachaille, those sorts of numbers come easy. Training for a race like the Tor, they’re numbers that matter.

The rhythm of 30 minutes up, 15 minute down also makes it much easier to eat a lot. Bar at the bottom, gel at the top, drinks and sweets in between. Eating by the watch, but without the watch. A hundred grams of carbs to go with the 600m. Training for a race like Tor, those numbers matter too.

I pace around a bit by the bothy. A few steps towards the low path back to Glenmore, a few back towards the hill. Present Ally wants a cup of tea. Future Ally wants strong hiking legs.

Present Ally thinks that in the grand scheme of things there’s no real difference between 5 laps and 6. What’s 400m in an entire training block? Future Ally thinks the difference is mostly symbolic, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

All hill reps are made easier by the attention of a good hound.

Far from boring

More than once people on Strava have commented on the mental toughness that must be required to slog up and down the same hill all day. I’ve never found that to be true.

Whether that says something about the hill, that its varied, technical nature keeps you engaged, or about me, that I just don’t have much going on between the ears, is something I don’t want to think about too hard. But I’ve never got bored. Tired, yes. Fed up, yes. But not bored.

Meall a’ Bhuachaille is a popular hill. Accessible, achievable, picturesque, it’s rare that I have it to myself. And therefore inevitable that I will run past the same people over and over and over again. Some find it funny, some are incredulous, others appear to think that I’m deliberately undermining their efforts. A few manage to maintain a steady level of indifference. I like them the most.

Not that I’m in any position to complain about lack of variety, but I hear the same comments over and over. We’ve just seen your brother was almost funny the first time I heard it.

There’s a similarly predictable range of questions, from completely misunderstanding (Why?) to relatively insightful (How many are you doing?). Those who are really clued up will add on How many metres is that?

Some less experienced walkers, perhaps a little out of their depth, decide that I am clearly an authority. How far is it to the top?, Which way is it to Glenmore? and once, at the summit on a beautiful clear day, Excuse me mate. . .how do we get down?

Some of the sights Ally will be getting next week. Maybe not this man’s bum in particular, but the rocks. Photo: Stefano Jeantet

Off to the big hills

It will take me about 4 days to run Tor des Geants. Or I hope it will. Ninety six hours in the mountains with no bad weather. It seems unlikely.

I turn around with a sigh, one hand hauling my poles from their quiver, the other ferreting through my race vest pockets for any remaining food. It is my forty second ascent in 6 weeks of Tor training. One per day. I like that.

The post Into the big hills appeared first on Fast Running.

Russell McKechnie, Highland Hill Runners OG and El Presidente, drags his heel through the dust of a quarry access road somewhere not too far north of the Cromarty Firth.

“Right, this is the start line. It’s also the finish. That’s the first hill you can see through the trees. After that, descend to the bealach, climb Beinn Tharsuinn and get back here however you like.”

He’s addressing a sparse crowd of about a dozen runners, almost all of them wearing their Highland Hill Runners vests. Which feels a bit unneccesary, seeing as the race is for club members only.

Back on a start-line and any start-line will do

Closed doors notwithstanding, there is a sense of occasion. The start/finish is in an anonymous lay-by on the B9176 to Bonar Bridge, the hill itself a rouded heathery lump, of interest to only the most bloody-minded of baggers. But it’s a race and I haven’t done one of those in 16 months.

“It’s a sunny day so there’ll be no problems with navigation,” says Russell. “You’ve already passed the biggest test anyway. There’s four Beinn Tharsuinn’s in Scotland and you’ve come to the right one. Ok then. . .go.”

From the start there are four of us at the front. Me, Jack, Dan and Andrew, running more or less side by side across the track with Rua, Jack’s shorthaired pointer, scooting around our legs. No-one’s going particularly hard. In fact, after so long without racing, it definitely feels like we’re a little unsure what the etiquette is. 

Early polite sparring

The first few kilometres are chatty. We all get our excuses in. Everyone mentions the heat. Jack tells an anecdote about the time Rua’s fear of cattlegrids cost him the win at the winter version of this race. The Dan starts to press on and I make the calculated decision to let him go. (i.e. I can’t keep up.) 

We’ve been instructed to take the path that passes just to the right of the quarry. The quarry which, to everyone’s surprise, is working on a Saturday.

Four different runners take four different lines, each one’s route choice determined by a combination of their assessment of the fastest looking terrain and their fear of being blown up or worse, shouted at, by the quarry staff.

The heather deepens. We stop kidding ourselves and start to walk. I’m half focussed on the battle with my fellow runners, half on the battle between liberally applied factor 30 and my rapidly increasing sweat rate. 

The hunter and the hunted

Andrew is chasing Dan, I’m chasing Andrew, Jack is chasing me. Rua is somewhere in between, the frequency of her appearances a useful weather vane for the gap behind. Nothing much changes, the gaps expanding and contracting as the course undulates but overall staying more or less the same, apart from behind where Jack has started to drop away; by the time we reach the top of Beinn Tharsuinn Rua is all but absent. 

The descent back to the quarry is heathery and pathless, aside from a faint, occasional trod that might be man-made but could equally have been created by sheep. Me and Andrew have the advantage of following, smoothing out the kinks in Dan’s lines and gaining a handful of metres.

Where they keep right, I break off left, picturing the map and calculating that this would save precious metres of distance and climbing. My track record with route choice gambles is, putting it lightly, mixed. With my competitors out of site I sail elegantly over the peat hags; I’m a genius and I’m going to win. My leg disappears down a hidden hole and I fall on my face; I’m a moron and I’m losing minutes.

Marginal… non-gains

My breathing is getting ragged as I clamber out of a burn and Dan and Andrew come back into view. My gamble has made. . .bugger all difference.

Back on the track for the run to the finish, I feel well out of my element. In the hot sun, trying to run 3 minutes whatever per kilometre and pull back the two in front who are tantalisingly close. Andrew is a little more well done than I am, making no attempt to up the pace as I ooze raspily by, but Dan is infuriatingly constant. Twenty two seconds over 70 minutes sounds kinda close, but it wasn’t.

We stagger to a halt back in the roadside dustbowl, exchanging well dones and hand, fist and elbow bumps of varying degrees of covid safety, before staggering off to write our times on the clipboard that Russell has left under his car.

Milling around afterwards, I realise that just as much as the physical anguish, I’ve missed the social aspect of racing. Sitting in the river, talking inconsequential bollocks with other runners and enjoying the warmth of the sun, both of which you were cursing just fifteen minutes earlier.

Highland Hill Runners won the team prize.

If you enjoyed this article and want to hear about a whole summer of record breaking runs then we highly recommend Ally’s book Broken. 

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It’s easy to assume that every hill runner in the Highlands has incredible terrain right on their doorstep. As if we’ve all moved in together in Hamish MacInnes’ house in Glencoe. I wish that was true.

I’ve spent most of the last year in Grantown-on-Spey, 30 odd kilometres downstream of Aviemore. We’re still in the Cairngorms National Park, but it’s hardly the place to come for a mountain running training camp.

From the door I can leave town to the north and enter some of the worst landscape that Scotland has to offer. Heather, heather and more heather blankets the land, some scorched, some not.

Peculiarly sandy estate tracks snake their way through the emptiness, joining up the small estate buildings. I know I’m lucky to have hours of off road running so close by, but this is not an uplifting place to spend your time. In any sense. Not flat, but hardly hilly, I’ve been spending hours running laps of the same hills, trying to cram in metres.

One slithery quad track offers a 12 minutes round trip at a steady effort. There’s a hundred metre climb on farm roads in nearby Glenbeg. I grind around in circles, telling myself that it will turn me into Beth Pascall. Unlike George At-One-With-Nature Foster, I’m not averse to podcasts.

On your bike

Just a 15 minute bike ride away, oozing across Grantown’s southern skyline, the Cromdales look like a more enticing prospect. A gently undulating ridge with a few eye-catching cairns, they look like they should offer pleasant, grassy running. They don’t. All they offer is interminable, infuriating bog.

Running up there last May, when the sun had been baking the earth non stop for 6 weeks, I still found myself foundering shin deep in gloopy, gritty shite. It is a cursed place. The laws of physics are suspended; water refuses to flow downhill, the crest of the ridge remaining sodden year round, despite sitting hundreds of metres above the glens on either side.

The only kind thing you’ll hear people say about the Cromdales is that they make a decent ski tour. To paraphrase, don’t bother going there unless you can multiply the surface area of the soles of your feet many fold.

As if to rub salt in the wound, the Cromdales offer excellent views of much better hills. The slightly more interesting Ben Rinnes to the east, Ben Wyvis to the north, the Cairngorms proper to the south. Some days that reminder that there’s a better world out there makes it easier to keep slogging away. Some days it makes it harder.

Photo: Possibly taken by Munro botherer Donnie Campbell

A pilgrim goes the extra mile

Yesterday I made the pilgrimage to Glenmore, epicentre of Speyside hill running, home to my beloved Meall a’ Bhuachaille and, funny enough, the place I was living when I was running my best. I met Donnie Campbell, who’s been up all the Munros but has never run on the World’s Best Hill, and gave him a comprehensive tour.

Descending for the third time to Ryvoan Bothy with a view to heading right towards Creag a’ Chalamain and the Lairig Ghru for a change of scenery, the sun on the plateau caught our eye and we hung a left instead, taking an impromtu trip out to Bynack Mor.

I won’t bore you with the details, but it was glorious.

A long grind up to the plateau, then kicking steps through the snow at the base of the ridge, as best you can in running shoes, then clambering up through the boulders feeling like Hermann Buhl. We paused briefly to take in the view. Oh look, you can see the Cromdales from here.

And back down to home

And then down again, skipping across the rocks, hopping on and off the snow, glissading down the last 100 metres to the platea, before the open-strided joy of the long grind reversed, legs going faster and faster, gliding over the drainage ditches, trying not to think about how much skin you’ll lose if you catch a toe.

The kind of fast running that feels completely effortless until you stop at the bottom and realise you’re a little bit buggered.

It’s a long jog out from Bynack Stables to the cars at the Hayfield but it didn’t drag. The power of company and the feeling, for the first time in months, that I’d actually been somewhere.

It was a wonderful reminder that hill running can be fun. Not the type-2 in-hindsight fun that ultra wankers are so proud of, but actual fun. The kind of fun that children have in playparks.

It’s possible, maybe likely, probably inevitable, that much of what I write on here this year will be moaning about the extended athletic decline that I feel I’ve been in for the last couple of years.

Days like yesterday leave me feeling uncharacteristically optimistic. Not that I’ll turn things around and become a superstar, just that even if all I ever have to show for my running is a series of impressively gutsy death march ultra finishes, there will still be enough days like yesterday to make the hours in the Cromdales worthwhile.

The post Hill running can be fun appeared first on Fast Running.

Ally Beaven is a friend to Fast Running and has written for us before, on topics based around the fells, hills, mountains and fastest known times. Author of celebrated book Broken, about the summer of records last year, if you haven’t had the chance to read it yet, it’s highly recommended.

Normally found on the mountains of his base in Aviemore, Beaven also travels overseas to events like the super tough Tor 130, sister race o the iconic Tor des Geants in the Aosta valley, Italy and the Berlin marathon… on roller skates (hence the 2:12 marathon PB).

Hopefully he has some races and long, sunny uphill tempos to tell us about in 2021.

Profile

Name: Ally Beaven

Age: 32

Hometown: Speyside.

Club: Highland Hill Runners

Main discipline: When I run hill races I’m an ultrarunner, when I run ultras I’m a hill runner.

Other disciplines: I’d been really looking forward to the cross country season. Getting the legs run off me by a variety of vets last winter was a real joy.

Work: Part time barman, one time writer.

Goals or targets for 2021: Train better than I did last year (this pretty much means more). I’ve also recently become aware that it’s a few years since I did Something Interesting, I’m like to put that right. Exatly how I’m not yet sure, probably something really long and obscure.

Past Running highlights: I’m quite proud of being the most short-lived holder of the Cairngorm 4000s record.

This is a picture of Dan Lawson and James Stewart, but Ally ran on the section preceding with the Dan the night before so it could be Ally for all anyone else knows.  Photo: Dave MacFarlane

Interesting or fun fact: I’d mention my marathon PB but Robbie doesn’t like it when I bring that up. [Too late, I already did – Robbie]

I run because: There’s nowhere near my house that’s good for rollerblading. [Surely the A9 is perfect? – Robbie]

Favourites

Favourite training session: Staring out the window at the snow, ice and slush, I have a real yearning for a long, sunny uphill tempo.

Least favourite training session: Long, flat and fast. I’d claim that my training history and race goals put me at a disadvantage with these kinds of sessions but really I think I’m just a wimp.

Favourite pre-race food: Porridge.

Favourite post-race food: Pizza

Favourite running shoes: Altras. I don’t really have much choice, my feet are almost as wide as they are long.

Brands or organisations that support me: Haha.

Ally’s book Broken really is a good read, so if you’d like to support a young writer in our sport, please do consider buying a copy. Maybe as a belated Valentine’s present for that special someone?

The post Fast10: Ally Beaven appeared first on Fast Running.