Be Gentle, Relax, Enjoy

It is somewhere past two in the morning on the fourth day and Scott Williams is checking his phone. Not for messages. He wants to know how far he has come since the last aid station, because it feels like a long way and the lights of the next one have been visible above him for an hour.

Eight kilometres. That is what the map said when he studied it months earlier: eight kilometres, 700 metres of climbing, a short sharp stage between two checkpoints. He has run 250 kilometres to get here. He has climbed the height of Everest twice over. He is, at this precise moment, lying on a wet root with his knee throbbing and his elbow bleeding, and the app tells him he has been out here four hours.

"I was checking it going, is this only eight kilometres? How can this be so hard?"

He had stepped out of the aid station at Evolène fed and warm. Raclette, boiled potatoes, a glass of red wine by the fire, good music playing. Then bog. Bog, at 2,000 metres, on a north-facing slope in the Alps, which is not a thing anyone had warned him about. He nearly lost a shoe in it. Above the bog came switchbacks of roots and rock, greased with rain, and each time he put a foot down it slid out from under him.

"My foot would slip out, my knee would go bang. My foot would slip out, my elbow would go down. I felt like I was getting beaten up by Mike Tyson."

People were cheering him on. He told them where to go.

Scott is Australian, 52, and has lived most of his adult life in cities. He tells me he was scared of forests for a long time. Trail running came late, as an antidote to tarmac, and then it kept going: 50 kilometres, 100 kilometres, 100 miles. In 2021 he ran the Swiss Peaks 100 and met runners who were 260 kilometres into the 360 and about to do his whole race as their final leg. He assumed they were a different species. Then they talked to him, and they weren't.

"I'm a human. They're a human. We're both out here."

He asked his wife Emma what she thought about entering. She said he was going to do it anyway. He failed in 2022, at Evolène, the same aid station. He came back in 2024.

The race ran from Oberwald at the top of the Valais, west along the Swiss-Italian border until it hit France, then north to Lake Geneva. 380 kilometres. Around 30,000 metres of climbing. A cut-off of 156 hours, which is six and a half days.

When I ask whether he felt any tension between racing and actually being in the mountains, the answer comes back before I've finished the question. No. He says he'd paid good money to be out there for 156 hours and he wanted to get his money's worth.

He is joking, but only partly. Two years earlier he'd raced it, and it had broken him. This time he had a mantra, three words he repeated for the whole week. Be gentle. Relax. Enjoy.

"You don't sit there for three hours and enjoy the sunrise, because you are in a race and the time is clicking along. But at the same time, no sense of rush."

The beauty and the beating

There is a section about 130 kilometres in, the climb to the Augstbordpass, that he describes as if he is still standing in it. A glacial bowl, an almost perfect horseshoe, boulders from pebble-sized to the size of buses, the course marked by flags taped to the rocks. Half past six in the morning, rain misting, one other runner in sight, a Belgian called Charles, the two of them keeping half an eye on each other without a word exchanged.

He was 800 metres from the top of a 2,000-metre climb. Three days left. And he kept turning round, because behind him the sun was coming up over the Alps and the sky was changing every few seconds.

"Every time I looked around, just tears in my eyes. I didn't feel like I'm me anymore. I'm just part of the rocks."

What strikes me, listening to him, is that the beauty and the beating are told in the same voice. He does not rank them. The Augstbordpass is not the reward for Evolène. They are both just what happened.

The chocolate bar

He ran the first 204 kilometres with no crew at all. This was deliberate. In 2022 he had three mates at every aid station from the start, and he realised afterwards that he hadn't needed them when he was fresh. He needed them when the wheels came off. So the crew was staged: Emma first, at 204, a hug and a kiss regardless of what state he arrived in. Then a friend the next day. Then another. Then his son. Enough people that each of them could sleep, because supporting a runner in the Alps means driving 150 kilometres of mountain road at night to meet someone who has covered 30.

Back on the roots above Evolène, none of them had arrived yet. What got him up was smaller than that.

He sat down. He turned round to face the valley, where the mist was rolling down, and gave it a few minutes. He ate a chocolate bar. He worked out that if he could reach the next aid station there was only one more stage before Emma. Then he got onto his hands and knees and crawled.

"I'm not standing up again. I'm over this. Other people were running past me. That's good for you, that's nice, but I'm crawling."

He crawled the rest of the roots. Bouillon, water, food at the top. Then off he went.

Just get out there

Near the end of our conversation I ask what he'd say to someone who likes the sound of all this but could never do it. He doesn't want anyone to do it. He wants people to get outside somewhere that challenges them a bit and give themselves enough time to notice things. A three-kilometre walk in the local woods counts. He says the noticing gets richer the longer you stay out, and that on multi-day hikes something shifts around the fifth day.

I think about him at Evolène, on all fours in the dark, being overtaken. Two hundred and fifty kilometres in, and a chocolate bar was enough.

That might be a three-kilometre hike into the local woods. That might be your 380-kilometre race. Just get out there.

Scott Williams

Scott Williams is a trail runner and author of Swimming Through Rocks. He finished the Swiss Peaks 360 in 2024 on his second attempt, at the age of 52.