I'VE EARNED THIS

Eight minutes into a fifteen-minute wait, Jess Day gave up on the spaghetti bolognese.

She had poured the water into the pouch and reached for a spoon almost at once. “It’s not magic,” she tells me, still half laughing at the person she was that night. The packet said wait. She read it, physically retched at the thought, and lasted about half the time. Then she shovelled in what was still dry pasta, and fell asleep with the pouch cradled in her hands.

This was the summit of the Old Man of Coniston, in almost complete darkness, on the first night of her first trail. She had pitched the tent on a slope of loose rock, in the worst spot available, after a full panic about getting it up at all.

How she got there is a lesson in what happens when you forget to eat. She hadn’t had much all day. She had reached the place she was supposed to stop, felt great, and kept going. She chose the mountain route. She walked past good places to camp, one after another, “like a horse with blinkers on”, because if she got to the top today there’d be no climb tomorrow. The sun dropped. The weather turned.

I asked what had taken her to that point, and she didn’t dress it up. Overwhelm, exhaustion, fear of being alone in a tent. Then the adrenaline wore off and the voice started. She was playing at being an adventurer. She was a fraud. The line she kept returning to was that if she was crying on night one, how would she ever get to Cape Wrath? It’s a precise kind of cruelty, reaching years ahead for ammunition.

She slept for about ten minutes. When she woke, the weather had settled and the summit was thick with fog, and the night before felt like a memory of somebody else. “I can get through scary things,” she thought. “I can do hard things.”

Cape Wrath was the point of all of it. Jess had realised she’d never done anything on her own, and she has a habit, she says, of setting a big, silly, seemingly impossible goal. This one was the hardest trail in the UK. So she worked backwards, breaking it into steps so small they were almost embarrassing. Google trails. Watch a video on navigation. Order a compass. Test-camp in the living room in front of the log burner. Then a first wild camp, then a first trail.

The Cumbria Way suited her because it went through the place she was living. Home turf. A good place to find out whether the new skills were real.

She remembers the first miles mostly as a pain in her face. She couldn’t stop smiling, and she gave a big goofy grin to everyone who walked past. She had been so afraid of becoming one of those people with a dream who never do the thing, and here she was. The rest of day one was less romantic. Farmland, stiles, gates, a rucksack she wasn’t used to, poles she’d never used, and the map out every two minutes. “Such a faff,” she says.

By Stake Pass her knee had gone. She was walking on ibuprofen and rubbing in gel every morning, and she climbed slowly, stopping every few steps for photographs. She says the slowness helped. She wasn’t doing what she does with friends on a hill, rushing the summit to keep up.

From the top she looked into Langstrath. No farms, no buildings, nobody. She wanted to camp there more than she has wanted anything on a trail, and she couldn’t, because she had promised her mum she’d check in every single day and there was no signal. So she walked out of the valley. She has been back since and camped in exactly that spot. It is, she says, one of her favourites.

It was around this time, she tells me, that the deodorant came up. She had decided to go lightweight and left it at home. She was on her own, after all, and no one was going to smell her. “I forgot to factor in I could smell myself.”

At Keswick the only campsite with space was one of the expensive ones, built for motorhomes. She put up her backpacking tent in front of a row of vehicles that probably cost more than a house. When a man tapped on the canvas, her first thought was that she had done something wrong. He had only watched her pitch and liked the tent. She chatted kit with him, bluffing, and when he offered to charge her phone she said no.

She sat in the tent for a while telling herself off. She did need her phone charging. Eventually she went back, sat down with him, his wife and their dog, and stayed an hour. They gave her food and a pint of lager. It was her first taste of what long-distance walkers call trail magic, and she says she thinks about it all the time.

I asked if any section had surprised her. I expected a fell.

It was the last day, into Carlisle. People had told her it was a nothing day, that she could skip it, and when she looked at the map she agreed. Industrial edges, a city. It ended up being one of her favourites. The pressure was off by then and she’d stopped living in her head.

At the city limits she felt herself shrink. She was sweaty and covered in mud, an outdoors person in a place with pavements, and she could feel people looking. Then she changed her mind.

"I’ve earned every bead of sweat and drop of mud on me."

She stood taller and walked in. As the monument came into view, music swelled, and she wondered whether she’d imagined it. A street musician was playing something like a gospel choir through a speaker.

She slapped the monument and sat down. The choir kept playing.

Jess Day

Jess Day is a long-distance hiker and wild camper. The Cumbria Way was her first trail, walked while she was living near Kendal, and she has completed longer routes since.

“I spent my first night crying. But it is so worth it. It is so worth it, I promise you.”