Words: Rob Savin
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It's dinner time at the Saunders overnight camp and I've followed a smell across the field to Barney. He has the veg biryani and the rajma on the go, a Patak's garlic and coriander naan warming beside them, and his one permitted luxury open in the grass: a Tupperware holding an entire pot of mango chutney. He carried it round the course today. "These things are very light," he says, waving at the dehydrated curries. He doesn't mean the chutney.
The Saunders Lakeland Mountain Marathon is two days of racing through the fells with everything on your back: tent, stove, food, whatever you can't bear to leave behind. You navigate between checkpoints, camp overnight in a valley with everyone else, then do it all again. I was racing too, in the Harter Fell class, which is why I can report with some authority that today's hills were steep and unrelenting. I live in Holmfirth. Holmfirth is hilly. It didn't help.
Next to Barney, a man is stirring honey roasted peanuts and cashews into super noodles. This is his third course. There's a fourth planned.
Janie and Charlie did about 30k on the Carrock course and are now on the cider. They took direct lines today. "We were mavericks in our route choice," Janie says. "No one else went where we went." They didn't see another soul for an hour, which means either genius or the opposite. They came away with the second-fastest time on that split, so genius it is.
The word around camp is contouring. Everyone mentions the contouring. I ask Janie and Charlie how they found it. "Made our ankles sore."
But there's a reason they've done three of these now. "You can go on a path anytime," Janie says. "Only on the Saunders can you discover new places where you've never been before. That traversing path we were on today was amazing. It was like we were in the Alps."
Jo and Christine are first-timers. Christine is an outdoor instructor who teaches navigation for a living, lives in the Lakes, and had somehow never done a Saunders. Jo fixed that. Between Christmas and New Year, doom-scrolling on Facebook after a hard year, she saw that early bird entries were closing. She couldn't get childcare for three children, so her husband was out. She asked Christine instead.
Their navigation today was spot on. All type 1 fun, no type 2. When I ask Jo what being out here gives her, she doesn't need long. "Perspective. The fact that we are here and we can do this, it's a real privilege. When the clouds lift and you get those views, it's like, life is good. I'm here and I'm doing it."
Phil and Rebecca have done this together since Rebecca was 14, the youngest you're allowed to be. Ten years now. There's no chocolate in their packs this year; they worked out it would melt, and replaced it with dry things Rebecca describes as nowhere near as good.
Phil fell over once today. His shoes have graphene in them, and he'd spent a good part of the day telling Rebecca how well graphene grips wet rock, roughly ten seconds before it didn't. A colleague of his at work invented the stuff. "I'll be having words with him on Monday morning."
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Chris came up from London with five others. His seventh Saunders. Seven hours out there today, above 750 metres in cloud, wind and rain, the six of them keeping each other going with fruit pastilles and jelly babies produced halfway up a hill. Going up one of those hills they set themselves the task of describing this event in one word. The word was relentless. Nothing in London prepares you for it, Chris says. That's rather the point. They're away at seven tomorrow to make the two o'clock train home from Oxenholme.
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Mandy and Helen are in their tent, a bijou set up at the edge of the field. I ask how the day's been. "Vile. Windy. Wet. Tussocky."
Helen is on her way to 30 Saunders. She did them every year with her husband David, married 29 years, every year but the last. David died of motor neurone disease last summer, nearly twelve months ago now. Before he went, he told Helen to get out and partner Mandy. He also made her promise to put some of him on the start line and the finish line of every mountain marathon she did.
"So if you started after us, you'd walked on him."
When they first got together, David promised her silk underwear and dirty weekends away. He bought the silk underwear once. The dirty weekends turned out to be fifty or sixty mountain marathons. "It's where I feel most connected with him," Helen says. "It's just what we do."
I ask why she keeps coming back when she's just told me the day was vile. She describes the routine she and David ran for thirty years: get in the car, eat the peanuts, drink the Lucozade, put Everybody Hurts on the stereo, and by the time the rose-coloured spectacles are on, you're entered for next year.
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Across the field the stoves are going out and the rain has started again. The London six will be up before anyone else. Somewhere in the dark, Barney still has most of a pot of mango chutney to get through.
