Words by Rob Savin
The bakery in Callander was closing down for the evening. Pawel Cymbalista had been moving since before dawn, somewhere past seventy miles, running on gels and nut butter, and the smell hit him before he'd even registered what it was.
He slowed down. Looked through the window.
Then kept running.
It was an unsupported attempt. The rules are the rules. The moment you walk through that door, the clock stops meaning anything. He knew this. He ran on.
He's still thinking about it.
Pawel Cymbalista is not an obvious podcast guest for a walking holiday company. He's an ultrarunner from near Glasgow who works full time, has two kids, and treats fastest known times as a reasonable thing to pursue on a weekend when the weather looks right. He set the unsupported FKT on the Rob Roy Way in 2024, covering seventy-nine miles from Pitlochry to Drymen in a time that puts most people's best days on trail into uncomfortable perspective.
The Rob Roy Way runs through central Scotland between Drymen and Pitlochry — forest tracks, old railway lines, quiet roads, and long stretches alongside some of the most significant lochs in the country. Most people take eight or nine days. Pawel did it in one.
But the reason I wanted to talk to him wasn't really about the speed. It was about what happens when you move through a landscape that fast — what you catch, what you miss, and what stays with you. And it turned out the answers were less different from a walker's answers than you might expect.
The Viaduct He'd Been Watching From Traffic
He didn't come to the Rob Roy Way through any particular plan. Every winter he rests, and every spring he spreads a map out and looks at the gaps. There was an area east of Glasgow he hadn't properly explored. He found the route more or less by accident.
But there was also the viaduct. Years earlier, stuck in slow traffic on the road to Ben Ledi, he'd spotted it from the car — an old railway structure on the other side of the loch, running through the trees, unused. The kind of thing you notice and think you'll come back to. The Rob Roy Way goes straight across it.
That's often how these things start. Not with a plan, but with something glimpsed from a moving window.
· · ·
He started from Pitlochry before sunrise with his brother-in-law Ryan, who drove him there. He didn't sleep well the night before — or rather, he slept fine, which worried him later, because it usually means something's off. By the time he was well into the route he'd worked out what: he had a cold.
He kept going. The supported record was around eighteen hours. He figured even at eighty percent he could beat that by something.
He was more than eighty percent.
What You See When You're Moving Fast
There's a section above Aberfeldy — up through forest, following a river — where the path runs alongside cliffs and waterfalls. Pawel didn't know it was coming. He stopped to fill his flask and stood there for a moment, genuinely taken aback. He's been thinking about taking his family back.
"I would be lovely to just go there and walk. It was beautiful."
That's the thing about moving through a landscape quickly: you don't miss as much as you'd think. You notice differently. The waterfalls still stop you. The smell of a bakery still pulls at something. The view across Loch Tay to Ben Lawers — the mountain wrapped in cloud, the farmland steep and quiet on the near shore — doesn't require twelve hours of staring to land. It just lands.
He got lost briefly above Aberfeldy, paths branching left and right through the trees. He picked a direction and ran. It turned out to be right. He's not entirely sure why.
· · ·
The low point came alongside Loch Tay. He was tired, the loch road stretching out ahead of him, the landscape on his side quieter and less dramatic than the water and the mountains across it. He asked himself the question he always asks at that point: what will I tell my family when I get home? Why did I quit? He went through the possible answers. None of them were good enough. He ate something and carried on.
He describes himself as a steam train. Consistent rather than fast, steady through the middle miles, something left at the end. In a proper race he doesn't watch other runners. He has his own pace, his own tactics, and he tends to find that patience over long distances does more work than aggression at the start.
He's a stubborn man. He's made his peace with that.
Recognising the Roads
The moment he knew the record was his came just past Killin, when the terrain started to look familiar. Roads he'd driven. A turnoff he recognised. The sense of the city somewhere ahead, still distant but present.
"I know this place. I'm getting closer to home with every step."
There's something particular about that feeling on a long route — the moment the abstract distance becomes navigable in your own terms. For walkers it might come on day six. For Pawel it came somewhere around hour nine. The mechanism is the same.
From Callander south the forestry work was heavy, vans and workers everywhere, the peace of the upper route giving way to the business of the outskirts. He ran past a walker who'd been out four days. Told him he'd started that morning. The man laughed. Pawel told him he wasn't far off the end, and meant it kindly, and kept moving.
He finished. The bakery in Callander remained unvisited. He has no regrets about the FKT, and at least one lingering regret about the pastry.
If you ask him whether someone should walk the Rob Roy Way, he answers immediately. Don't think twice, he says. You'll have hard moments. You'll have a story at the end. That's the trade, and it's a fair one.
He'd go back to the viaduct section — Callander to Killin, the old railway line alongside the river coming out of the loch, the water loud below the bridges, the cliffs above it. Not to run it this time.
Just to hear it properly.
