One Pole, Seven Days

The pole goes in first.

Lisa Herbert has unclipped it to jump a swollen beck somewhere above Rosthwaite, the stepping stones already an inch under, and as she pushes off it leaves her hand, hits the water and is gone downstream. She lands on the far bank, gathers herself, and does the obvious thing. She steps off the path to go after it.

The bog takes her leg to the thigh.

"We used to get a little A5 book called Reader's Digest in South Africa," she tells me, "and it used to have these terrible stories about people who made terrible life mistakes." She is laughing as she says it. She wasn't at the time. The pole kept stopping in the current for five seconds and then shooting off again, stopping and shooting off, and she had a very clear picture of herself reaching for it, going in, and becoming one of those stories.

She let it go. She had roughly five days and a lot of Lake District still to cover, and she did it with one pole, swapping it hand to hand on the descents.

It is day two of seven. Day one had gone almost suspiciously well. Good weather, a bouncy bed at the hotel in Rosthwaite, her bag waiting for her in the room. "I could make a career out of this," she'd thought.

Then she'd looked at the forecast. It said 26 millimetres, then 11 millimetres, and Lisa is honest about what that meant to her. "One's more than the other. I don't know how much that lands on me." A friend on the phone said 26 was quite a lot, but it'd probably clear. She put on waterproof trousers and a jacket and went.

It did not clear. Above the reservoir at Haweswater the mist closed in front and behind, the wind was strong enough that she didn't dare take her phone out to plug in the battery pack, and there was a drop somewhere off to the left that she could sense rather than see. She was following a dot on a screen. She had passed both the bailout options Kirsty had given her, and she says she'd have refused them anyway. At about three o'clock she rang the hotel to cancel her dinner reservation, because there was no version of the afternoon in which she made it by six.

She had a packet of wraps and a packet of tuna in her vest. She always does.

Would she melt?

Lisa is 55 and describes herself, more than once in our conversation, as an armadillo. A waddler. She is from South Africa, she has run Comrades, and she did the Coast to Coast this spring as time on legs for a 100-mile race in July. Last year's edition of that race gave her 33 hours of Scottish rain and a pair of shoes she threw away at a checkpoint. Day two on the Coast to Coast was, in her own framing, a test. Would she melt?

She didn't. She had K-taped every toe, her arches and her ankles, worn two pairs of socks, and hadn't changed her feet in twelve hours. No skin came off. This is the detail she comes back to, not the mountain. The mountain was survived. The feet were proof.

I ask whether, at any point that afternoon, she'd have taken a lift back to her desk if I could have magicked one up. "Not once. No matter how wet I was." Then, in case I'd missed it: "I laugh in the face of your bailout routes."

Fifteen minutes each

She ran it alone, and I want to be careful about how I put the next part, because she was careful herself. Lisa has been widowed for three years. Her husband hated supporting her at races and did it anyway, every time, waiting at the finish or walking back out to find her in the dark. Since he died she has had to learn to do these things without someone there, and she has cancelled trips when the bravery ran out. She doesn't apologise for that. "As an adult, you don't have to eat the crust. You can just eat the pizza."

What she does with the solitude is specific. A Comrades veteran once told her that when it gets hard, you give fifteen minutes each to the people who matter to you, and think about how they've shaped you. So she does. On day one her head is a basket of wool that's come undone. By day three the colours are back in their balls. By day four she's planning again, solving things. On the last day she is, in her phrase, every robin and every lamb.

"There wasn't one single day when I wished I had somebody with me."

There is a lot of Lisa in a sentence like that, and I don't think it's an accident that the same person who talks like this also learned to use the timer on her phone camera the week before she left. Her son got fed up of her not having any photos of herself and said, just press the button. She'd never taken a selfie in her life. So on the beach at St Bees, before anything else, she took her selfies. Then she started running.

The girl who's running

The people she met are the stories she tells now. A retired policeman in a 350-year-old inn who'd been carrying a tent and a billy for ten days and hadn't camped once, because his kids had bought him the kit and kept asking about it. Two days later she walked into the Lion Inn and he was there, announcing her to the bar as the girl who's running. He had the tent up that night. An Australian couple somewhere north of eighty who stayed up with him putting the world right, and looked, next morning, like they'd done it thoroughly. A woman who spent twenty minutes making sure Lisa understood that the man she was walking with was her partner, not her husband, and then talked about her husband.

Lisa doesn't keep in touch with any of them. That's the point. "You choose what to tell them about yourself and you never see them again." She saw perhaps five to seven people a day. She never once wished for company.

The bench at Littlebeck

On the last day, in the woods at Littlebeck, she stopped. This is worth recording because Lisa is an eating-on-the-move person and had been for six days. A café there made her a ham sandwich with something on it she couldn't identify and couldn't stop thinking about. She sat on a bench, in a wood she describes as the kind of place a fairy would live, and she ate it.

"I'd never done that before," she says.

Then she got up and ran the rest of the way to the sea.

I laugh in the face of your bailout routes.

Lisa Herbert

Lisa Herbert is a 55-year-old ultrarunner originally from South Africa. She ran the Coast to Coast solo in seven days as training for a 100-mile race.